Professional Experience 💼

Note: You can also view my resume here or on LinkedIn

• Lido

  Founding Engineer

  Dec 2019 - May 2022

  New York, NY (remote)

  One of the first engineers hired to build out a data-intensive no-code web application for a VC-funded early stage startup that had just gotten funded. Backend and frontend development.

  • Led development of greenfield Saas project to launch, hiring and managing a team of developers
  • Built a data integration system enabling users to pull data from various 3rd party APIs (Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, Shopify, etc) into PostgreSQL and dynamically join this data together in real-time, automatically generating the necessary SQL queries and joins on the backend via a universal ontology and modeling the entity relationships as a graph.
  • Initiated and led migration off old legacy ORM (Prisma v1) to TypeORM/TypeGraphQL
  • Standardized best practices on backend GraphQL API and frontend with Next.js, React, etc.
  • Various backend and frontend work such as building out datasets on frontend/backend, org permissions, web builder components, etc.

  Buzzwords: Node.js, PostgreSQL, GraphQL, Apollo, TypeORM, TypeGraphQL, Next.js, React, Typescript, puppeteer, web scraping, Redis

• Vroom

  Engineering Lead

  Jul 2016 - Nov 2017

  New York, NY

  I was hired as the first engineer in the new NYC HQ for Vroom (over $1b in revenue) as a Senior Software Engineer and promoted to Engineering Lead after 10 months, managing a team of 5 engineers.

  I rewrote Vroom.com from the ground-up as a universal/isomorphic Javascript single-page app with Node.js, React, Redux, Webpack, PostCSS, Sass, Nginx, Docker, CircleCI (continuous integration), Google Cloud, Optimizely, Segment.io, etc. Built out core site, catalog page, product page, search, analytics, and payments flow -optimizing for UX, performance, and SEO. Server-side rendering and server/client side caching for blazing speeds. A/B testing for new feature releases (with Optimizely).

  This resulted in page speed improvement of over 10x, reduced server costs, and drastically increased development speed and release cycles. The codebase I wrote was spun off into a boilerplate that was open sourced and used as the starting template for other apps both internal/external within the company (eg. sellusyourcar.com).

  Hired and managed/mentored a team of 5 engineers, implemented agile/scrum processes.

• iHeartRadio

  Full Stack Engineer

  Dec 2014 - Jun 2016

  New York, NY

  Full-stack web engineer for www.iheart.com (200M pageviews/month, 100m registered users), an isomorphic single-page app with a music player for live and custom radio, as well as podcasts. Was the lead/solo web engineer for 3 of those months. Some buzzwords: React.js, Node.js, Javascript (ES6), Sass/Compass, Jenkins, AWS, Jenkins, Docker, Foundation, Jira, Agile, etc.

  • Developed favorites radio station page/functionality, my music page, and new podcast player.
  • Migrated music player from flash-based FlowPlayer (RTMP) to HTML5-based JW Player utilizing HLS. Fixed remaining inherited critical bugs (eg. player randomly freezing) that had been delaying the migration for months prior to me joining and costing the company tens of thousands of dollars.
  • Implemented features such as automatically reconnecting user if user loses internet connection, drastically increasing total listening time (TLS), one of the company's key performance indicators.
  • Made app responsive and mobile-friendly utilizing Sass and Foundation (when I joined the application wasn't supported on mobile). Created mobile banner ad
  • Implemented Optimizely for A/B testing, Appboy for real-time push notifications, and persistent anonymous listening functionality enabling anonymous user listening history to be saved.
  • Maintained Nginx config and Ansible deployment scripts
  • Updated the Chromecast player to support JW Player and HLS streaming
  • Analytics tagging with Omniture and Localytics
  • Implemented SEO meta tags on artist/radio/song/podcast pages
  • Starting athlete on company soccer, volleyball, and kickball teams.

• Varick Media Management

  Platform Engineer

  Feb 2014 - Aug 2014

  New York, NY

  Spark, Scala, Hadoop, Javascript, D3.js, Three.js, Angular, Java

  • Wrote MapReduce queries in Scala to run via Spark over Hadoop cluster.
  • Created interactive data visualizations with D3.js and Three.js/WebGL
  • Proposed the adoption of a front-end framework to upgrade jQuery-based frontend, implementing Angular.

  kbs+ Ventures Fellow - an in-house training program on entrepreneurship taught by kbs+ Ventures, the venture capital arm of kbs (under MDC Partners, the same parent company as Varick)