Resume

Experience

Hinge, New York, NY

Senior Staff Engineer, 2020 to 2023

Hired as a Staff Engineer and later promoted to Senior Staff Engineer at a well-known dating app while serving as a technical and cultural backbone for the Backend Engineering team as it grew from eight engineers to more than 50. Architected robust, secure, and easily maintainable systems with a Domain Driven Design while mentoring junior engineers across multiple teams and building a thriving engineering culture that empowered developers to execute at their full potential.

  • Re-architected Hinge’s entire authorization system from the ground up, achieving seamless support for many tens of millions of users with no downtime and ~1ms latency across 200+ services. This new system became the technical foundation not only for all Trust and Safety operations across the backend application, data science, and community support and moderation, but also across the entire backend infrastructure and engineering teams.
  • Created a service generator tool to streamline the process of spinning up new “Hinge style” services of any type and configuration with a single command, replacing a time-consuming manual copy-and-paste process with one capable of producing runnable code within seconds.
  • Bootstrapped the on-call process and rotation for Trust and Safety engineering, including a transition to full-cycle ownership of data and services and onboarding of new engineers to the on-call rotation.
  • Created a multi-function Slack bot with a plugin system to support various internal functions, including shared resource reservations, processing Friends + Family perks, retrieving graphs from Grafana and Prometheus, sending templated messages, and providing a glanceable view of Github pull requests and events.
  • Architected the distributed data deletion infrastructure for all live production data in accordance with Match Group’s Data Lifecycle Policy, ensuring global regulatory compliance for user data.
  • Worked to grow Hinge from an app struggling to support a massively growing userbase with unreliable startup code into one that could stably grow to tens of millions of monthly users with reliable and maintainable systems.
  • Collaborated closely with colleagues and stakeholders across various roles, including Data Engineering, Data Science, web frontend, mobile client, legal, and community management and moderation to build an industry-leading Trust and Safety organization.
  • Organized and guided Hinge’s compliance with the Europe Union’s Digital Services Act across five parallel projects and more than a dozen engineers working together toward a common goal.
  • Introduced and socialized a Request for Comments (RFC) process for an engineering organization of over 100 engineers, replacing multiple overlapping forms of technical planning and comment-gathering processes.
  • Built Match Group’s first in-app appeals system for banned users, greatly simplifying requests from both user and moderation perspectives for thousands of daily appeals.
  • Co-championed Hinge’s LGBTQIA+ ERG and helped grow it in size and scope as the company expanded from ~65 employees to over 200.
  • Worked with Go, Postgres, Redis, Kubernetes, gRPC/protobuf, Kafka, Redshift, and AWS.

Bitly, Inc., New York, NY

Application Engineer, Back End, 2017 to 2020

Worked on a cross-functional engineering team to build and maintain both RESTful and asynchronous applications in a highly scalable microservice architecture with a goal of near-100% test coverage that served billions of requests per month under a tight SLA.

  • Served as the most senior engineer on the Integrations Team, responsible for growing and maintaining the private and public API, as well as external integrations in and out of Bitly infrastructure.
  • Was the most senior engineer on a project to build Bitly’s self-service product, including payment processing, from the ground up.
  • Worked within a sharded MySQL database environment containing billions of encoded links, growing at a rate of 300 million each month.
  • Led cross-team project to launch Bitly’s first containerized application leveraging Docker and Kubernetes in Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
  • Built webhooks feature capable of serving hundreds of billions of requests per month.
  • Built an internal API request search tool on top of Google BigQuery for querying billions of records.
  • Worked with Go, NSQ, MySQL, REST, and GCP.

Tumblr, Inc., New York, NY

API Engineer, 2014 to 2017

Drove the development of Tumblr’s APIs and backend application to increase revenue and create a better experience for millions of users and API developers.

  • Worked on API Core Team to build and maintain both private and public REST APIs authenticated via OAuth and used by hundreds of millions of users to access over 300 million blogs and nearly 150 billion posts.
  • Collaborated with product managers and engineers on multiple product engineering teams to provide the API framework for feature and application development on iOS, Android, and web.
  • Created Github bot to ensure code quality and standards compliance prior to merging pull requests.
  • Built Slack bots using Node.js.
  • Built out new ad products and analytics tools for advertisers as a member of the Ads Team.
  • Worked on Growth and Marketing Engineering Team to improve pre-onboarding experience for new users, subscription push notifications, and Answer Time feature.
  • Designed the backend framework for dynamic user setting management.
  • Built framework used by engineers for managing application and version-specific feature gates for first-party mobile applications.
  • Worked with PHP, PHPUnit, MySQL, REST, OAuth, Redis, Memcached.

MyTransHealth, New York, NY

CTO / Co-founder, 2014 to 2016

Co-founded a non-profit startup with a core team of four providing health care provider search tools for the transgender community in six cities with hundreds of vetted health care provider listings.

  • Built PHP application from the ground up on top of the Symfony framework, Doctrine ORM, and MySQL while leveraging Elasticsearch for document indexing and search.
  • Managed a volunteer team of two frontend engineers, one mobile engineer, and one devops engineer, as well as one frontend contractor.
  • Ran a successful Kickstarter campaign which was fully funded within three days and concluded at 160% of funding goal.
  • Implemented Gearman for job queueing and asynchronous task management, including emailing and image uploading to Amazon AWS.
  • Created RESTful API to be consumed by web and mobile clients.
  • Developed Slack bot using Node.js for application admin management.
  • Handled product and project management responsibilities, coordinated social media accounts and campaigns, and planned product launch logistics.

SaaShr / A Kronos Company, Branchburg, NJ

Software Engineer, 2008 to 2014

One of the first 15 employees at a small workforce management software startup which was acquired by Kronos in 2012. Worked with an in-house Java framework and Microsoft SQL Server on multiple areas of a secure, cloud-based payroll, time & attendance, and HR software solution used by over 13,500 companies and more than 700,000 end-users worldwide.

  • Was an integral member on a team of five developers working to further advance the product in a modified scrum environment with release cycles ranging from six to ten weeks.
  • Led ground-up development and maintenance of a flexible and scalable tax calculation module capable of calculating over 10,000 payroll taxes.
  • Created and managed implementation of the Symmetry Tax Engine API to assist in tax calculation.
  • Integrated Google Maps API and Symmetry Payroll Point SOAP requests to parse location and address data to generate location codes based on the GNIS database.
  • Worked directly with support, business development, and product management teams throughout the development process from requirements phase to production release.
  • Developed and maintained the functional testing system for payroll calculation.

ELCRo, Piscataway, NJ

Founder, 2005 to 2013

Created and developed web application to run crucial on- and off-air functions for a college radio station with a potential listener base of one million.

  • Built out features to log all on-air DJ activity 24 hours a day, as well as provide music library databasing for 20,000 albums and DJ management for over 100 active DJs.
  • Developed interface to receive and log data from WideOrbit Automation for Radio software.
  • Created API to allow public website to access data from log to display to visitors.

Additional Projects

RLC-WVPH FM Piscataway, Piscataway, NJ

2001 to 2010

  • Member of Executive Staff for five years and DJ for nine years.
  • Head Music Director: Supervised a department of twelve members, was responsible for shaping the sound of the station, and maintained relationships with record promoters and labels.
  • IT Director: Maintained radio station’s workstations, servers, email system, and digital media storage, in addition to developing the ELCRo software.
  • Tech Director: Responsible for maintenance on broadcast equipment and assisted in building of new transmitter site.
  • 2005 winner of RLC Outstanding Leadership Award.

ZEN Promotions, New Brunswick, NJ

Founder, 2002 to 2003

  • Founded and ran small live music venue.
  • Responsible for booking musical acts, scheduling, and promotions for more than 50 concerts featuring over 160 bands and acts from around the world.

Education

Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ

Bachelor of Arts in Sociology