Platform and infrastructure engineer with 15+ years shipping software and growing teams. I build the delivery pipelines, application platforms, and multi-site data stores other teams ship against, along with the web applications that run on them. I’m accountable for outcomes and build autonomous teams where no one is a single point of failure.
Proficiency highlights
- Platform & Infrastructure Engineering (Kubernetes, containers, CI/CD, deployment automation, and workload orchestration — Go, Bash, Docker, Jenkins)
- Distributed data systems at scale (Redis, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB)
- Web application & API development (Ruby on Rails and standard web technologies — HTTP, JavaScript, CSS)
- Open source (22 merged pull requests into Shopify/shipit-engine and an upstream HAProxy feature; maintainer of a Kubernetes Redis operator; accessibility-focused theme skins for k9s; upstream bug reports and fixes across the ecosystem — RuboCop, the Percona operator, and PagerDuty’s Terraform provider)
- Team growth and leadership (Extreme Ownership, agile and Lean principles, mentor and educator)
Recent Accomplishments
Power Home Remodeling
Lead Software Engineer
August 2025 - Present
Promoted to lead the internal platform team that powers the company’s CI/CD, container platform, and shared data infrastructure — the systems every engineer in the org ships against.
Setting a 2-year direction that shrinks operational surface area: driving the platform roadmap toward a simplified recommended application stack, a versioned deployment-template library replacing copy-paste manifests, and cluster-scoped operators, collapsing per-app maintenance into a single consistent model. The result: fewer bespoke systems to babysit and a lighter on-call rotation.
Maintaining the paved road itself: the company’s bespoke continuous-delivery pipeline — built on Shopify’s shipit-engine — and the golden-path reference implementation; driving architectural direction through written RFCs, so decisions are debated in the open and outlast any single owner.
De-risking the company’s most consequential platform migration: leading the cutover of 5+ applications (the flagship and its satellites) from the legacy container platform to its successor — coordinating data migrations across Redis (multiple GB), Elasticsearch (dozens of GB of indexed documents), and a widely-shared InfluxDB instance, plus DNS and change-control across multiple teams, without customer-visible downtime.
Building bus-factor resilience: distributing ownership of critical platform components (cluster-scoped operators, deployment templating, data-center decommissions) so senior teammates now lead cross-team initiatives the team once single-threaded through one person — 6 components that had a single owner now have two or more.
Shaping who joins the team and how they grow: owning annual reviews, hiring loops, and team strategy for a 7-person senior platform team.
Senior Software Engineer
July 2023 - August 2025
Returned to Power Home Remodeling to join the platform team chartered to let application teams run reliably at scale.
Cut average Redis call latency by ~73% (7.9 ms to 2.1 ms) on the flagship Rails app by leading a Redis fleet upgrade from v3 to v6 — zero customer-facing disruption, 100% of production clusters migrated, and eliminated the commercial Redis Enterprise licensing spend by replacing it with an internally-maintained open-source operator.
Authored and merged an init-state server-configuration feature into upstream HAProxy (commit 50322df, September 2024), closing a years-open issue and fixing a Redis-failover bug responsible for past production incidents.
Shipped application-layer DDoS protection across the company’s most-trafficked public properties, proactively closing a longstanding security gap.
Made deploys and CI faster for the entire engineering org: cut average production deploy time for the flagship app from ~14 to ~10 minutes and worst-case CI time by 30% — compounding daily across every engineer who ships.
Took over and modernized a critical open-source dependency: maintainer of an open-source Kubernetes Redis operator (Go), added multi-site replication, and made cross-data-center disaster-recovery exercises routine rather than a fire drill.
Grew the team’s depth through mentorship and knowledge-sharing rituals: engineering mentor in the company’s internal coding academy; led the internal Refactoring book club; founded two recurring practices still running today — “Maintenance Monday” (team-level) and “Tech Talk Thursday” (open mic across the technology department).
Shopify
Senior Software Developer
September 2021 - May 2023
Shipped the $2.5 billion Deliverr acquisition integration ahead of schedule — defined the APIs and built the Shopify-side integration that gave Shopify Fulfillment Network (SFN) merchants a seamless experience, coordinating delivery across a geographically distributed team.
Increased Returns system throughput by 500% ahead of the SFN Returns 2022 Black Friday / Cyber Monday season. Ran capacity and resilience testing to identify choke-points. Led disaster recovery drills and defined on-call and incident response policies.
Discovered silent failure modes in warehouse management software and added observability instrumentation.
Used machine learning to build a product taxonomy that both improved how related products are surfaced to shoppers and optimized warehouse placement for faster picking and packing.
Identified bottlenecks in feature gating system. Scaled feature flag management capabilities from 10 to 2 million merchants. Added percentage-based feature rollouts, feature lifecycle automation, enhanced human-consumable feature metadata.
Grew 2 interns into autonomous Individual Contributors in weeks through pairing, synchronous 1:1 support, and defining right-sized work items.
Power Home Remodeling Group
Senior Software Developer / Substitute Instructor / Mentor
May 2018 - September 2021
Slashed deployment times by 82% by transforming the deployment topology to self-hosted, Kubernetes-based container orchestration.
Became a sustained upstream contributor to Shopify’s open-source deploy tool, shipit-engine — 22 merged pull requests from 2019 to 2021, as an outside contributor, spanning domain modeling (elevating the repository to a first-class concept, renaming PullRequest to MergeRequest, extracting webhook handlers) and maintenance-grade internals (task timing on a monotonic clock, git-cache-corruption recovery, GitHub push-event handling). Primary author of its Review Stacks feature (PR #1102): ephemeral, full-stack preview environments spun up per pull request, delivered with a small team and reviewed by Shopify maintainers.
Took Talkbox — our in-house telephony system — from ~5 daily outages to one by identifying the constrained resources and distributing the system by call type, keeping the call center online through the workday.
Expanded development organization capacity by 20% by growing “Power Code Academy” student developers into Individual Contributors — serving as a substitute instructor and post-graduation mentor.
Bauer Xcel Media
Technical Team Lead / Senior Software Developer
February 2016 - May 2018
Boosted ad revenue by ~200% by optimizing impression value and advertising rank. Deferred ad load requests until ad slots were just about to scroll into reader’s view.
Cut non-production infrastructure spend by ~50% by moving stakeholder preview and review environments from always-on to on-demand — spun up per change and torn down after use, instead of running continuously.
Reduced work-item cycle-time by ~34% by encouraging adoption of pairing and building a healthy code review culture.
Increased site traffic by ~300% by optimizing metadata for search engine and social media ranking.
exercism.io
Volunteer Mentor
August 2019 - September 2021
Mentored over 60 students along the Ruby and Emacs-Lisp language tracks.
Example Open Source Contributions
Shopify/shipit-engine
https://github.com/Shopify/shipit-engine
Shipit is a deployment tool that makes shipping code better for everyone. It’s especially great for large teams of developers and designers who work together to build and deploy GitHub repos. I have 22 merged pull requests here, including primary authorship of the Review Stacks feature.
derailed/k9s
https://github.com/derailed/k9s
A popular terminal UI for managing Kubernetes clusters. I contributed the Gruvbox light and dark skins (PR #1088) and a set of eight accessibility-focused Modus theme skins (PR #4104) meeting the highest WCAG contrast standard, with variants tuned for red–green and blue–yellow color-vision deficiency.
percona-xtradb-cluster-operator
https://github.com/percona/percona-xtradb-cluster-operator
Percona’s Kubernetes operator for XtraDB Cluster. I contributed a fix merged upstream (PR #521) that resolved a crash when the operator pod started without a HAProxy PodDisruptionBudget.
rubyforgood/mutual-aid
https://github.com/rubyforgood/mutual-aid
Mutual Aid is when people get together to build community by voluntarily sharing resources with each other. Mutual Aid groups are more concerned about local resiliency than global campaigns, and prefer solidarity before charity. I contributed 10 merged pull requests, largely hardening the Docker-based development environment for new volunteers.
basecamp/kamal
https://github.com/basecamp/kamal
Basecamp’s tool for deploying web applications anywhere. I’ve proposed a SOPS secrets adapter so Kamal can pull deploy-time secrets from a SOPS-encrypted file (PR #1906), with accompanying documentation (kamal-site PR #201). Both are open and under review.
Sample Side Projects
asdf-guile
https://github.com/indiebrain/asdf-guile
An asdf version manager plugin to manage GNU Guile installations
resque-alive
https://github.com/indiebrain/resque-alive
A Kubernetes Liveness probe for Resque
Talks
Git Internals
https://github.com/indiebrain/talks/blob/master/git_internals/git_internals.org
Explains the inner workings of git and sheds a bit of light on how the internal structure of git as a data store influences its user interface.
Git Workflow
https://github.com/indiebrain/talks/blob/master/git_workflow/git_workflow.org
Treats version-control history as project metadata: a workflow built for reason-ability (what, exactly, is in production?), communication, and a semantic commit history that records the intent code alone can’t.
Release It!
https://github.com/indiebrain/talks/blob/master/release_it/release_it.org
A brief, and messy, history of releasing software — from ENIAC and the 1968 “software crisis” to how modern practices arrived at continuous, lower-risk delivery.
Elsewhere
Education
West Chester University of Pennsylvania
Bachelor of Science, Computer Science with Information Assurance Minor
January 2006
- Magna Cum Laude
- Award for Academic Excellence (2006)
- Dean’s list (2005 and 2006)
Research
Small File Affects on Hadoop Distributed File System
The Hadoop Distributed File System is a high throughput distributed File system designed to accommodate large data sets; average file sizes in the gigabyte-terabyte range. However when a data set is composed of large amounts of small files, say in the kilobyte range, the storage system’s semantics introduce high amounts of overhead in terms of file system block storage and read latency. This paper explains the architectural attributes which cause these problems and examines techniques to mitigate their impact when working with data sets comprised of large numbers of small files.