Resume

Summary

I’m a focused, self-taught engineering leader with excellent communication skills and strong backend engineering experience. I’m a true technologist that’s heavily motivated to solve interesting problems, build correct and well tested systems, and be a positive and helpful multiplier for those around me. My primary area of expertise is the technical design and implementation of reliable and performant backend services.

Experience

Staff Engineer @ Stripe

April 2021 - May 2023

As a staff engineer I was a technical lead for Stripe’s tax organization, responsible for the design and successful launch of Stripe’s US sales tax reporting and filing product. I was also simultaneously the technical lead for the TaxJar engineering team as it continued to support TaxJar’s API, data ingest, and reporting systems during and after the Stripe acquisition.

My technical input at Stripe extended beyond my immediate projects: I was brought in as a trusted adviser to multiple Stripe teams and was frequently involved in technical decisions across the entire Stripe Tax organization.

Outside of my day-to-day technical responsibilities I was a leader in TaxJar’s integration into Stripe’s technical and process ecosystem, advising and mentoring TaxJar’s engineers during the transition to new teams and responsibilities.

Senior Software Engineer @ TaxJar

October 2016 - April 2021

• Acted as the technical lead for the 75+ person engineering organization, mentoring and advising multiple teams across all of TaxJar’s products
• Executed a full in-flight rewrite of TaxJar’s high-traffic tax calculations API with zero downtime, decreasing p90 response times from 150ms to <20ms while simultaneously improving API reliability by 4x
• Designed and built TaxJar’s internal sales tax filing management tool, the backbone of the TaxJar AutoFile product
• Established and maintained the engineering organization’s process for technical documentation, code review, and operational postmortem
• Set up and managed a simple, fault-tolerant AWS infrastructure for TaxJar’s Ruby and Elixir applications

Web Engineer @ RT Creative Group

September 2011 - September 2016

Worked remotely as part of the RT Creative team on the full-stack implementation of a multi-tenant ecommerce platform. The platform supports digital and physical product purchasing, product and asset management, customer relationship management, and an API for third-party integration.

Technologies

• Extensive experience with building backend services with Ruby/Rails and Elixir/Phoenix; at home with SQL; comfortable with Java.
• Deep understanding of Linux internals (day-to-day administration, containers, networking); familiar with configuration management (Puppet) and AWS-based cloud deployment and operation.
• Fluent in Ruby, Elixir, JavaScript, PHP, Go, Java; comfortable in many other languages, including C, Lua, Clojure, Haskell, and ColdFusion.
• Practical experience with git (and GitHub), remote work (Slack, Basecamp, JIRA), test-driven development, and behavior-driven development.

Education

• Associate of Science, Collin County Community College (May 2009)