EXPERIENCE
Square Inc, 2/2019 - Present
Software Engineer
I missed working on technical problems and switched gears to join the Weebly/eCommerce infrastructure team. This SRE-type team has an incredibly wide range of responsibilities, including build/release engineering, local development environments, administering Kubernetes clusters and much more. The projects and scope is numerous, but some interesting technologies I've worked on are:
Square Inc, 5/2017 - 2/2019
Team Lead
Upon joining Square, I led the Merchant Experience team for our Capital Business Financing product. This team focuses on Growth and Product Diversification through a variety of projects from experiments, features and Federal regulatory requirements. My responsibilities in this role include:
Facebook Inc, 8/2016-5/2017
Software Engineer
At Facebook, I focused on understanding the landscape of small-medium businesses (SMBs) and helping them succeed in growing their business on Instagram. This involved experimenting with ways to make it easier for everyone to promote and advertise on the Instagram platform. It touched on areas of growth and improving adoption of our products, which impacted revenue and top line metrics. Being on an ads team is an interesting twist, looking at the picture from another perspective. I was no longer a consumer but a creator of the platform.
Kabam Inc, 1/2015 - 8/2016
Sr. Engineering Manager
As part of the Kabam Phoenix Age (KPA) leadership team, I oversaw the engineering organization and was responsible for its stability, development and growth. My teams owned the Castle Age and Underworld Empire titles. In this role I was responsible for:
In 2015, I had an opportunity to create a new Marvel game. There was lots of work and late nights, but the challenge was exciting. The game needed to support a global launch on the iOS and Android, localized to multiple languages. Everything was a blur, but some of my responsibilities include:
Kabam Inc, 3/2014 - 1/2015
Principal Software Engineer / Engineering Manager
Phoenix Age, Inc. got acquired by Kabam! With the acquisition it brings in new opportunities as well as challenges, which include:
Phoenix Age, Inc, 4/2010 - 3/2014
Sr. Software Engineer
Being in a smaller company provided many opportunities to learn new technologies. Among the responsibilities, I've worked on or been a part of:
LexisNexis Group, 5/2009 - 4/2010
Sr. Solutions Engineer
This position provided an opportunity to work more closely with the business side of the corporate teams. We focused on fast prototype iterations and agile development with a distributed team to cover a lot of ground.
LexisNexis Examen Inc, 4/2007 - 5/2009
Project Lead
While staying technical and hands on, this role gave me a chance to do more project management and lead offshore teams in India.
LexisNexis Examen Inc, 7/2005 - 4/2007
Software Engineer
This position taught good software practices and coding/design approaches in Java server technologies.
Software Engineer
I missed working on technical problems and switched gears to join the Weebly/eCommerce infrastructure team. This SRE-type team has an incredibly wide range of responsibilities, including build/release engineering, local development environments, administering Kubernetes clusters and much more. The projects and scope is numerous, but some interesting technologies I've worked on are:
- Kubernetes, Ansible, Helm, Docker
- CI/CD via Jenkins
- Artifactory on-prem and distributed in Google Cloud regionally
- Local development environment VMs (scripts and Vagrant) and Golang tools
- Envoy Proxy
- Kibana/Grafana
- Solr/Elasticsearch
Square Inc, 5/2017 - 2/2019
Team Lead
Upon joining Square, I led the Merchant Experience team for our Capital Business Financing product. This team focuses on Growth and Product Diversification through a variety of projects from experiments, features and Federal regulatory requirements. My responsibilities in this role include:
- Establishing processes for team to function effectively
- Managing multiple and concurrent projects and their execution to ensure expectations and timelines are met
- Partnering with stakeholders on communication, expectations, planning and forming future roadmaps
- Staying hands-on in the code
Facebook Inc, 8/2016-5/2017
Software Engineer
At Facebook, I focused on understanding the landscape of small-medium businesses (SMBs) and helping them succeed in growing their business on Instagram. This involved experimenting with ways to make it easier for everyone to promote and advertise on the Instagram platform. It touched on areas of growth and improving adoption of our products, which impacted revenue and top line metrics. Being on an ads team is an interesting twist, looking at the picture from another perspective. I was no longer a consumer but a creator of the platform.
- Work on a variety of technical challenges across mobile and internal platforms
- Lots of cross team collaborations to dig deep and understand our approaches. There are lots of details and angles to cover with so many users.
Kabam Inc, 1/2015 - 8/2016
Sr. Engineering Manager
As part of the Kabam Phoenix Age (KPA) leadership team, I oversaw the engineering organization and was responsible for its stability, development and growth. My teams owned the Castle Age and Underworld Empire titles. In this role I was responsible for:
- Organizing and managing the teams and roles, providing training where needed to help individuals grow as professionals
- Owning the engineering infrastructure for our game and planning server capacity to decide on impact to our bottomline expenses
- Regular 1:1s to help our team level up by identifying areas of opportunities for individuals to take charge and own, providing performance reviews regularly to discuss progress, challenges, feedback and compensation
In 2015, I had an opportunity to create a new Marvel game. There was lots of work and late nights, but the challenge was exciting. The game needed to support a global launch on the iOS and Android, localized to multiple languages. Everything was a blur, but some of my responsibilities include:
- Coordinate cross-team sync ups to ensure everyone is on the same page at all times
- Manage team resources, allocations and scheduling. Schedules are important, but building out everyone's skill sets is just as important. Hitting hard deadlines without learning anything new is a fast way to burn out
- Hands on with coding, mentoring others with direction and design, doing code reviews, working on features and managing builds for app submissions and alpha/beta tests
- Adapt project management workflows to work best with time/people/priority requirements. With multiple projects in parallel, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. There are lots of moving parts - integrations with other teams and vendors, submission requirements for Apple iTunes and Google Play stores, regular product updates, and localization
- Work on game performance to ensure we hit internal goals. This is both on a technical and business level to watch for DAU, retention rates, and revenue.
Kabam Inc, 3/2014 - 1/2015
Principal Software Engineer / Engineering Manager
Phoenix Age, Inc. got acquired by Kabam! With the acquisition it brings in new opportunities as well as challenges, which include:
- Working on multiple games, providing technical direction and mentoring others
- Managing the Castle Age team and and helping team members achieve their own growth and goals
- Interaction and integration of our games with the new parent company. Lots of cross-team fun things going on here
- Keeping an eye on game performance, both tech-wise via sys administration tasks and revenue-wise from tools/dashboards/reports
Phoenix Age, Inc, 4/2010 - 3/2014
Sr. Software Engineer
Being in a smaller company provided many opportunities to learn new technologies. Among the responsibilities, I've worked on or been a part of:
- Core member of Castle Age for Facebook, Castle Age: Heart of Darkness for Facebook, and Castle Age HD for iOS (starting with version 1.0 prototype)
- Internal library used in Underworld Empire for iOS
- Systems monitoring and administration for the Castle Age servers; responsible for code deployments and iOS app submissions
- Exploring and creating prototypes for new areas of potential such as Android and Unity platforms
LexisNexis Group, 5/2009 - 4/2010
Sr. Solutions Engineer
This position provided an opportunity to work more closely with the business side of the corporate teams. We focused on fast prototype iterations and agile development with a distributed team to cover a lot of ground.
- Collaborated with customer advocates to develop working prototypes for future and next generation ideas/features in new Lexis products
- Studied legal research trends to identify areas for improvement in data relevance and search result recommendations
- Self initiated research in areas of mobile applications and voice recognition
- Mentored contractors in technical knowledge with Adobe Flex and C#
- Frequent inter-team knowledge sharing meetings to learn from collective intelligence and promote transparency
- Performed quality studies of prototypes with customer advocates, reworking iterations as needed with other teams
LexisNexis Examen Inc, 4/2007 - 5/2009
Project Lead
While staying technical and hands on, this role gave me a chance to do more project management and lead offshore teams in India.
- Managed offshore/outsourced development teams. Provided technical training, created new SDLC, and oversaw development efforts for all offshore projects
- Led a year-long project to internationalize a product for multicurrency support, worked with teams across departments and completed on time and on schedule
- Technical lead engineer for a $5 million product. Designed, directed and implemented software approaches for product enhancements/features
- Developer for the flagship web-based legal spend management application using Java, JSP/Servlet, JavaScript/AJAX, EJB3, and SQL technologies
- Performed build validation, release engineering, software verification and testing
LexisNexis Examen Inc, 7/2005 - 4/2007
Software Engineer
This position taught good software practices and coding/design approaches in Java server technologies.
- Provided maintenance support for a legal spend management product in a JBoss 3.2 environment with C engines
- Designed and implemented features and enhancements for customers
- Worked with Java, JSP/Servlet, JavaScript, EJB2.1, and SQL technologies
- Performed build validation, feature verification and testing
EDUCATION
2006 - 2009
California State University - Sacramento
M.S. Software Engineering
2001 - 2005
University of California, Davis
B.S. Computer Science and Engineering
California State University - Sacramento
M.S. Software Engineering
2001 - 2005
University of California, Davis
B.S. Computer Science and Engineering
PUBLICATIONS
mySQUARE: A Semi-Automated SQUARE Tool for Security Requirements, published 11/2/2009
www.actapress.com/Abstract.aspx?paperId=36772
www.actapress.com/Abstract.aspx?paperId=36772
AWARDS
TBD