Work Experience

Redpanda Data

Principle Software Engineer | July, 2024 - Current

• Driving the vision and early execution of the Agentic Data Plane.
  • Aligned teams on shared observability foundations for the ADP.
  • Designed and built fine-grained authorization primitives for the ADP.
• Accelerated and aided the team in building and launching Cloud Topics.
  • Built an LSM tree based KV store for metadata management that integrated with Raft consensus and object storage (patent filed).
  • Drove a 10x improvement in write throughput through a targeted optimization.
  • Championed data-driven performance work and overhauled the benchmarking setup.
• Built strategic connectors for Redpanda Connect.
  • Snowflake connector
  • Iceberg connector
  • CDC connectors
  • FFI plugins
  • Dynamic gRPC plugins
• Unblocked Iceberg Topics.
  • Wrote the product spec and UX for schema management, iterated with the product team, and reviewed the implementation.
  • Built a Seastar native Parquet writer.

OpenAI

Member of Technical Staff | May, 2024 - July, 2024

• Worked on the search engine team that powered ChatGPT web search.

Redpanda Data

Core Tech Lead | April, 2023 - May, 2024

• 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

• Championed Shortwave's core architecture: an event-driven system with a per-account actor concurrency model.
• Implemented optimistic UI for all user actions, giving the app an instantaneous feel. Built a local in-memory replica of server state that the client could temporarily overlay until the server confirmed each operation.
• Built a custom browser engine to normalize emails into a canonical structure, improving render speed and stripping unwanted styling.
• Owned HTML email sanitization — the app's primary security attack surface. Also built automatic dark mode support for emails.
• Owned developer experience using Bazel — hermetic, minimal-setup local environments that mirrored production. New engineers were productive on day one.
• Built the quoted history detection and stripping system — critical for Shortwave's chat-like email UI. Supported multiple languages.
• Designed and built the full search experience, from UX to ElasticSearch integration. Implemented a custom query language (lexer, parser, autocomplete, syntax highlighting) compatible with Gmail's search syntax. Improved query performance 4x through ES tuning and cut manual index migration steps by 50%.

Google Inc

Cloud Firestore | April, 2018 - January, 2020

• Added three new classes of queries to Cloud Firestore.
  • Array containment queries, requiring a rewrite of the indexer to support inverted indexes.
  • Collection Group queries, which required the first ever breaking change to the Security Rules engine.
  • IN queries via an extended query planner — a feature 10 years in the making. Also laid groundwork for != and NOT IN.
• Contributed to the Security Rules compiler and runtime — found holes in the CEL spec and prototyped initial variable support.
• Rewrote the legacy Cloud Datastore query planner to use new infrastructure. Derisked the migration using anonymization techniques and shadow mode execution, reporting plan differences.
• Built Firestore's Reverse Query Matcher (RQM), which efficiently computes the set of listeners to notify when a document is written — an inversion of the traditional query planner. Used novel data structures to achieve a 100x improvement over the previous solution, designed to extend naturally as the query planner gained new capabilities.
• Authored the definitive query semantics document for Cloud Firestore — detailed visuals, principles, and scan/plan breakdowns. Became the go-to onboarding resource for new team members.

Firebase Emulator Suite | April, 2017 - January, 2020

• Created the initial Realtime Database emulator for internal teams, which grew into an official product. Designed as a stripped-down production server to keep maintenance costs low.
• Mentored engineers building the Cloud Firestore emulator, teaching Firestore's consistency model, architecture, and query semantics. Reviewed code closely to maintain production fidelity.

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

• Pioneered a new clustered KV storage layer for RTDB — eventually a major focus for the whole team. Helped hire and onboard engineers to work on it.
• Reverse-engineered MongoDB's WiredTiger storage format to enable 10x billing infrastructure improvements and unlock accurate billing for our largest customers.
• Performed deep performance tuning: reduced GC pressure, cut memory allocations, and built heap dump tooling.

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.