About
I am a Senior Backend Software Engineer with seventeen years of extensive experience.
My bread-and-butter is high-traffic web application backends, typically cloud. Having worked on them for most of my career - primarily in Python and Go - for more than a decade in a variety of environments has enabled me to apply hard-earned lessons and design extremely high scale, high reliability and observability systems with a great deal of flexibility.
I also enjoy leveraging my deep systems programming experience rooted in C on POSIX systems - primarily Linux - to deliver high-value cost-saving optimizations. This particularly shines in higher-level language projects like Python, where moving performance-critical hotpaths to highly-optimized native code delivers big wins that pay dividends.
This breadth of knowledge of how things tie together from the kernel to the edge is particularly helpful in designing, building, and optimizing powerful development environments, CI/CD systems, productivity, and observability tools for large, multi-team enterprise codebases. Some of the biggest wins of my career are summed up as "developers don't have to wait anymore, and they can finally fix problems themselves."
Professional Experience
Senior Software Engineer, Bitbucket Cloud Atlassian | August 2019 – Present
My skillset grew from mid-level to true senior at Atlassian, where I've worked on various aspects of Bitbucket.org for several years. Being exposed to both the highest-traffic and highest-developer-count system of my career has taught me invaluable lessons in how to improve large legacy codebases, how to scale them, what the scaling and reliability problems are, and how to align teams towards a common goal.
Mid-Level Software Engineer, Bitbucket Data Privacy and Security Team, Aug 2019 - Nov 2022
- Project Lead, Python 2 to 3 Migration: I led a three-engineer team to port Bitbucket's primary Python monolith and supporting dependencies from the end-of-life'd Python 2 to 3. Along the way, we addressed a wide array of issues over 14,000 failing unit tests, dozens of complex integration and end-to-end tests, and hundreds of dependencies. The project completed in six months without incident, ensuring data privacy for users and enabling future modernizations and optimizations for the product.
- Security Vulnerability Triage: As a core member of a five-person security team, I started my time at Atlassian systematically addressing every reported security issue and vulnerability - both internal and external - in the Bitbucket.org product. This resulted in Bitbucket's first-ever perfect internal security scorecard.
- Credential Scanning System: I designed and led a junior developer through the implementation of a real-time system to scan all public repository pushes for accidentally exposed credentials, particularly AWS keys. The system successfully detects and reports potential breaches directly to Amazon, running on a simple, cost-effective-but-highly-scalable EC2 cluster.
- OSWE Certification: As my first security-oriented role, I took Offensive Security's Advanced Web Attacks and Exploitations course and earned my OSWE (Offensive Security Web Expert) certification. This greatly enhanced my ability to spot, triage, and resolve security issues in complex web applications.
Senior Software Engineer, Bitbucket DevSpeed Team, Nov 2022 - Mar 2024
- CI/CD Reliability and Performance: As the team's senior engineer, I worked with five engineers to elevate the success rate and speed of the product's CI/CD pipeline. Bitbucket went from a single weekly deployment with a great deal of errors along the way to up to four per day. Additionally, we reduced the average build validation time for developer's pull requests from 45-60 minutes to 15-25 minutes, significantly improving developer velocity.
- Ported Cloud Development Environment to Local Machines: I led the redesign of the internal development environment from a costly, problematic remote setup to a more robust local solution. This eliminated $450k in annual hosting costs, the need for Bitbucket to maintain a dedicated team to maintain the development environment, and provided developers with a more reliable tool that ran right on their machine.
Senior Software Engineer, Bitbucket Cloud Kodak (PR) Team, Mar 2024 - Mar 2025
- Service Bus Design and Implementation: As part of a project to decompose Bitbucket's primary monolith, I designed "Bitbus", an SNS-based Bus system that enabled the newly-decomposed services to communicate with one another - and maintain feature-parity with the monolith. This system was critical in breaking apart tightly-coupled logic and moving the product towards a microservice architecture.
- Monolith Decomposition - Pull Requests: I led a major milestone of the monolith decomposition effort, leveraging both Bitbus and my uniquely strong knowledge of system programming to port the ability to CRUD+merge pull requests from the legacy Python monolith to a modern, type-annotated monolith - overcoming many challenges along the way.
Senior Software Engineer, Bitbucket Cloud Foundations (Git Backend + Dev Tooling) Team, April 2025 - Present
- CI/CD System Refactor: I designed and managed a small team in a comprehensive refactor of Bitbucket's CI/CD systems, significantly improving both developer velocity and time-to-ship. This effort boosted deployment success rates from 46% to over 90%, re-enabled multiple, continuous deploys per day, and reduced developer branch build times from 30 to just 12 minutes.
- Local Development Environment Rewrite: I led the design and personally implemented a complete rewrite of Bitbucket.org's local development environment, shrinking new developer bootstrap times from 25-60 minutes to 8-12, and reduced the inner dev loop cycle time from 1-2 minutes to 5-7 seconds. This rewrite further greatly enhanced both the reliability and developer confidence in the system, and resulted directly in a complete turnaround of developer satisfaction scores within the Bitbucket product group.
- Sharding Initiative: I am currently contributing to the design and implementation of a large-scale sharding initiative to address the scaling limitations of the current Bitbucket monolith. This included gathering requirements from stakeholders and translating it into designs and tickets, and developing a simplified single-process runtime that facilitates much easier sharding with less bespoke needs - and improves the overall reliability and reproducibility of the system.
Senior Software Systems Developer, Evolving Startup Team Corvisa / Shoretel / Mitel, Jul 2015- Jul 2019
This is where my skillset fully bloomed and found focus in the backend of distributed web applications. I began as a contractor, and after a successful delivery, I was brought on as a full-time engineer at a startup, Corvisa. This startup was acquired by competitor Shoretel, which was itself then acquired by its competitor, Mitel.
Through both the lens of startups and multiple acquisitions, my role here was fast paced and extremely fluid - exposing me to many wildly different areas of the stack.
Corvisa, Contractor + FT Software Engineer, July 2015-Feb 2016
- Stratus Real-Time Status Platform: As a contractor, I designed and built the user-facing front end for Stratus, a real-time status platform for the startup's SIP/CPaaS/Call-center offerings. The system provided accurate, customer-specific outage reporting and automatically generated notifications for affected users, which was crucial for managing a multi-data center, cloud-based product. Stratus was implemented in Angular 1.0, integrating with a Perl-based backend on top of Postgres, and handled real-time per-tenant status dashboard delivery and notifications.
Shoretel (acquired Corvisa), Senior Software Engineer, Summit CPaaS Team, Feb 2016 - Sept 2017
- Codebox IDE Integration: Solo-led the integration of Codebox, a newly-acquired web-based IDE, into the core platform. This enabled users to edit, debug, and publish the Lua code the company's CPaaS platform ran during calls directly from a browser - without needing to open a terminal or have knowledge of git. This involved setting up hosting infrastructure, updating the acquired startup product's code to integrate with our session system, overhauling their container hypervisor application, and adding in observability tools.
Mitel (acquired Shoretel), Senior Software Systems Developer, Skunkworks R&D, Sept 2017 - July 2019
- Developer/automation-friendly email system: To support Mitel's growing R&D group, I ported our original startup's Mailr tool to AWS and added SAML support. This enabled both developers and their automations to trivially get a public-facing email address, observe the raw received mails, and programmatically perform CRUD for test automation.
- High-Throughput Legacy File Conversion System: As part of an AI initiative, Mitel wanted to leverage its millions of voicemails to assist in building a model. However, its millions of voicemails were in an undocumented, proprietary binary format from a long-forgotten acquired startup. I was able to dig up the original code, reverse engineer the file format itself, build a golang-based converter to modern file formats, and a task processing wrapper to automatically convert millions of these cheaply and efficiently.
- IoT + CPaaS Platform Prototyping: Implemented core components of a prototype platform for integrating LoRa IoT devices with Mitel's phone systems, enabling real-world events (e.g., a temperature change) to trigger actions in the phone system, and vice versa.
Early Career July 2012 - July 2015
My early career was spent trying things out, looking for the right niche that called to me - as well as overcoming the gaps between an MIS and Software Engineer / Computer Science degree through aggressive self-teaching.
RedPrairie Software / JDA Software, Software Engineer, July 2012 - July 2013
- Database Migration Tool: Developed a Java Swing-based application to merge multiple warehouse databases or lift a single warehouse database into a centralized traceability database.
U.S. Bancorp Fund Services, Technical Analyst, Nov 2013 - May 2014
- Database Reporting and Analysis Tools: Developed and maintained reporting queries in Oracle PL/SQL, and custom interactive reporting tools in Visual Basic 6 for the investment management system, Eagle.
More Than Rewards, Application Developer, May 2014 - July 2015
- Cloud POS Integration System: Developed a system to extract critical sales data from a new cloud-based POS product by navigating its web UI, solving a business-critical data extraction problem and preventing a major revenue stream loss.
- SMS Marketing System: Revamped an existing SMS marketing tool and created a custom, in-house system on top of TCP to manage and throttle outbound texts on top of raw SIM interfaces. This initiative allowed the company to move to a sustainable model by avoiding major carrier fees (e.g., Twilio's).
Internships March 2008 - June 2012
My college years were spent exploring the different aspects of the MIS world. I quickly discovered "internships" were often more than little Summer project affairs in the Mid-west, and I was learning so much in them I deliberately slowed down my studies (adding another year) so I could learn in both the classroom and the actual field.
Direct Supply, Reporting Services Intern, March 2008 - Sept 2010
- Database Reporting: Created and maintained a variety of database reports for the company's drop-shipping and sales operations in Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services.
- SQL Development: Wrote and optimized stored procedures and queries in Microsoft SQL Server to power essential business reports.
von Briesen & Roper, s.c., IT Intern, Oct 2010 - June 2012
- Custom Reporting System: Developed a Microsoft Access and SQL Server Reporting Services solution for a large client. This system managed thousands of legal cases and provided lawyers and the client with essential aggregate reporting.
- Technical Support: Provided direct technical support to over 250 staff members for a wide range of hardware, software, and networking issues.
Technical Focus Areas
Python
As an expert-level Python developer, the language is the go-to, primary tool in my toolbelt. My work on the massive-scale Bitbucket Cloud enabled me to deeply understand the language's internals and implement optimizations that considerably improve the compute and memory needs of critical paths.
Go
As an experienced Go developer, its unique and powerful abstraction over concurrency, combined with native execution, has enabled me to build and maintain extremely high-throughput data-processing systems. My unique and deeper knowledge of systems programming and Go proper has enabled me to serve as a mentor and direction-setter for how Go is written for entire teams.
C & POSIX
My expertise in C and POSIX programming is largely self-taught, stemming from early experiences hacking on games like Doom and Quake. This foundational knowledge proved invaluable at Atlassian, where I actively contribute to our specialized Git fork. I primarily leverage C to add advanced features, such as developing new, more performant storage backends for Git's internal database, and to optimize critical hot paths within Bitbucket Cloud's Python monolith.
Git
My work on Bitbucket Cloud has provided me with unique insights into not only how to use Git effectively but also how to optimize it for extreme scale. I've contributed to adding significant performance enhancements to Git itself, particularly concerning how its database is stored and accessed, which has been crucial in accommodating the demands of extremely large monorepos.
Containerization + Orchestration
As an extremely early Docker adopter, I gained hyper-familiarity with the technology and operating containers at scale. Since Corvisa's entire platform was built on it in 2013, I've leveraged this from-the-start knowledge to build and maintain systems using various container orchestration technologies, from Mesos+Marathon to Fargate and Kubernetes.
Education
Milwaukee School of Engineering
B.S. in Management Information Systems | Graduated 2012