Tyler Rockwood

Work Experience

Redpanda Data

Core Tech Lead | April, 2023 - Current

• Brought inline data transforms powered by WebAssembly to life.
• Spoke about my work at webinars and conferences.
• Became a Recognized Contributor in the Bytecode Alliance for my contributions to Wasmtime, a WebAssembly runtime.

Shortwave

Founding Engineer | January, 2020 - April, 2023

• Fought for the design of Shortwave's initial architecture and infrastructure. Moved us to an event based architecture with an actor based concurrency model for each account.
• Built locally latency compensated user actions that were then reconciled with the server. This greatly improved traction of our app and made user actions feel instantaneous. Involved creating a complete local in-memory representation of the synchronized server state that allowed the client to overlay it's own temporary actions until the server acknowledged the request.
• Developed a browser engine to normalize non-marketing emails into a canonical structure that allowed us to render messages faster, and remove undesired styling.
• Implemented the pipeline for sanitizing HTML emails - our biggest attack vector for security issues. Also implemented a solution to automatically make emails dark mode.
• Owned the company's developer experience, ensuring that local development was hermetic, required little setup and mirrored production as much as possible using Bazel. New engineers where able to get a local version of the product up and running on their first day of work.
• Created the solution behind removing redundant quoted history from emails. Doing this well was key to Shortwave's UI, which was trying to make email more conversational like a chat application. Supported multiple languages.
• Developed the latest search experience from the UX to the ElasticSearch integration. Created a small query language lexer, parser, etc. Included a suggestion/autocomplete engine and syntax highlighting. Was compatible with Gmail's search language for customers migrating to our product. Got buy in from leadership on the project and swiftly implemented a robust, well tested and designed solution.
  As part of this project I also improved our query performance by 4x by tuning ElasticSearch. I overhauled the migration tooling and simplified the indexing schema stored in Postgres to cut the number of manual steps of migrating to a new index by 50%.

Google Inc

Cloud Firestore | April, 2018 - January, 2020

• Added three new classes of queries to Cloud Firestore.
  • Queries on array containment which involved rewriting the indexer to be simpler, more flexible and more performant to support inverted indexes required for fast index based lookup.
  • Added support for Collection Group queries, which allowed for more flexible schemas. This required introducing the first breaking change to the Firestore Security Rules engine allowing developers to write security rules for these queries.
  • Extended the Firestore query planner to support disjuntive queries (IN queries) - a feature that had been on the roadmap for 10 years. Also laid the groundwork for not equals queries (!=) and not in (NOT IN) queries.
• As part of working in Cloud Firestore - I also dove into work on the Security Rules compiler + runtime. These rules are related to CEL and during the process of other work found holes in the spec and prototyped the initial support of variables within the language.
• Rewrote the legacy Cloud Datastore query planner to use new infrastructure. Derisked using anonymization techniques and computing the new query plans in a shadow mode, reporting differences.
• Created the Firestore's Reverse Query Matcher (RQM). Cloud Firestore allows for subscribing to queries and being notified of changes to the result set. This requires a matcher that, given a written document in the database, can efficently compute the set of listeners that need to be notified.
  This is an inversion of the traditional query planner for databases. Used novel data structures and techniques to make a 100x improvement on the previous solution. The underlying implementation was based upon the same principles as the query planner, which allowed RQM to be extended easily as the planner gained support for new queries. For each new query that I implemented, I extended the reverse query engine in conjunction with the query planner.
• Created a document on the query semantics of Cloud Firestore, describing the principles behind the query planner with detailed visuals of all the scans and plans that the system performed. This document became a key onboarding document for all new engineers on the Cloud Firestore team and helped spread knowledge that used to only be held by a small subset of the team.

Firebase Emulator Suite | April, 2017 - January, 2020

• Created the initial version of the Realtime Database emulator for other internal teams, which eventually became an official product and suite of tools for Firebase. The emulator was a stripped down version of the production server, which allowed for a low maintenance cost.
• Mentored and oversaw the development of the Cloud Firestore local emulator. This included teaching several other engineers the details of Cloud Firestore's consistency & transactional model, how the system was architectured overall, and the query semantics. Performed detailed code reviews to ensure that the emulator was as similar to production as possible.

Firebase Realtime Database (RTDB) | July, 2016 - January, 2020

• Pioneered a new underlying storage layer for the RTDB based on a clustered key/value store. Helped secure and mentor new team members to work on this system, which eventually became a large focus for the whole RTDB team.
• Enabled 10x performance improvements to RTDB storage billing infrastructure by reverse engineering MongoDB's WiredTiger database engine storage format. Also allowed us to calculate storage bills for our largest customers, which was infeasible in the old infrastructure.
• Did a great deal of performance tuning - Reduced GC, memory allocations, and added instrumentation + tooling for heap dumps.

Internships

Groupon

Search Engine Optimization Team | June, 2015 - August 2015

• Improved page performance by 5% – 10% for www.groupon.com/local pages
• Architected the rendering system for a new version of the Dublin SEO team’s CMS platform
• Traveled to Dublin, Ireland for two weeks for the initial release and to hand the project off

Rockwell Collins

Test Engineering | June 2014 - August 2014

• Designed, developed and tested an Image Processing Library to be used on all testing stations
• Image Processing Library developed to handle plugins and uses many advanced algorithms
• Developed drivers and a code generator that saved engineers 2 days of coding

Education

Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology

Double Major in Computer Science & Software Engineering | September, 2012 - May 2016

John T. Royse Award winner (Outstanding graduate), President of Phi Gamma Delta, President of Fellowship of Christian Athletes, 2 sport varsity athlete.