Papaya - Principal Software Engineer

July 2022 - present

Worked across teams to create 'real-time bot', a bot that detects if a bill is payable before the user submits the bill. This decreases the amount of time our operations team spends trying to pay bills that won't be accepted by a provider and gives immediate feedback to customers, improving customer experience.

Led an engineering-wide system scalability investigation, resulting in a variety of improvements across a variety of services that would have failed as our product was exposed to higher traffic and data storage:
- eliminated redundant storage in our compliance product, leading to a 37% reduction in our MongoDB database size.
- created an automated process to remove expired or un-actionable bills from our Bill collection, reducing the collection size by 23%
- used the Atlas Performance Advisor to identify non-performant queries across legacy products, then refactored, improved, or removed non-performant queries. This led to a significant performance and speed improvement across all products.
- led an investigation into service-wide intermittent 502 issues, resulting in our team discovering and fixing a glaring bug with a 3rd-party service.
- introduced automated test coverage to a legacy system wrapping our MongoDB access, leading to safer refactoring and bugfixes on this core service. Created example tests for future developers to use as a guideline as they make their changes.

Led a talk on observability at Papaya, exposing areas of our application that lack observability and ways we can improve (and find time to improve) observability by more effectively using our alerting and logging software.

Worked with the operations team to re-design core pages on our admin portal, resulting in easier onboarding for manual operators and faster bill payments.

Papaya - Senior Software Engineer

August 2021 - July 2022

Refactored core functionality and introduced testing to our admin portal, webhooks service, and crons services, primary business products used for actioning bill payments.

Introduced Sentry exception tracking and alerting systems to the company, installing it on multiple business products to improve observability in each system. Integrated with Slack to introduce alerts to necessary engineering and operation team members and channels, improving our response time for bill payment issues. Led a tech talk on the best practices of Sentry and how each time can use this software effectively.

Transitioned our automated payment system definitions from a file to an internal service. This provided an easy-to-use GUI for internal users to easily edit and enable or disable bots that we use to pay individual providers' bills without the need of an engineer.

Transitioned Puppeteer and Selenium bill payment bots to Testim, a 3rd-party service that enables users to create, record, and re-play browser steps easily. This led to faster creation of bill payment bots and faster debugging of those bots when issues occurred.

Trained new developers to write bill payment bots to automatically pay bills for specific providers as they were submitted to Papaya.

Worked with the operations team to re-design our pay queue, resulting in faster payments from manual operators.

Interviewed potential Papaya engineering candidates and shaped the current front-end interviewing process.

Introduced automated testing and test coverage to legacy applications, allowing for safer editing of older applications with less downtime.

Introduced linting to legacy applications, improving readability and reducing time spent nit-picking trivial details during code review.

Created and led the first engineering book club at Papaya, a bi-weekly event to facilitate conversation and better practices across a variety of topics such as test-driven development, building microservices, and improving observability.

HomeLight - Senior Software Engineer

March 2020 - August 2021

Worked with the Consumer team to implement the Move Safe™ certification, added to help customers interact with real estate agents safely during the COVID-19 pandemic. This led to 20,000 additional agents signing up for HomeLight from Mar-Apr 2020.

Architected the Client Dashboard experience, a React project that increased the number of scheduled meetings from leads by 14% and doubled the number of returning users.

Led the Consumer team to deliver our Agent-Client Messaging platform, allowing users to communicate with agents using in-platform messaging and phone notifications rather than by email or phone call. 5% of our clients have switched to this as their preferred method of communication.

Started the Engineering Book Club, a bi-weekly event hosted to help educate the engineers of HomeLight.

Created the CI/CD testing pipelines for the Client Dashboard and Home Hunter projects, installing code coverage as a quality gate and prerequisite before staging and production releases.

Delivered a tech debt paydown effort to remove our native email sending logic and templates from our monolith and port them to a scalable API and SendGrid.

ActiveCampaign - Software Engineer

April 2016 - March 2020

Helped grow ActiveCampaign's product set and implement its current design from 2016-2020.

Projects: Date-based automation blocks, saved responses, new navigation, deal custom fields, Ember framework upgrades, Ember CI/CD pipelines, Ember parallel testing, Ember code coverage reports, ELK stack efficiency and logging cleanup, our GitHub+CircleCI -> GitLab transition, quality gates as pre-deploy checks, and campaign sending improvements that increased send rates by 250k messages/hr.

Helped organize our first company-sponsored trip to EmberConf 2018 in Portland, Oregon, and gave presentations on tackling impostor syndrome and preventing developer burnout.

Pharmedio - Software Engineer

February 2014 - April 2016

At Pharmedio I programmed a SaaS platform for compounding pharmacies using CakePHP, jQuery, MySQL, HTML, and CSS along with various APIs.

Ideas Jam: Observability

Dec 16, 2022

Led a talk on the importance of observability in engineering systems, then facilitated discussions among the engineering teams on how we can improve observability on each team to reduce the amount of time spent debugging.

Sentry.io: Error Handling & Alerting

May 20, 2022

Presented a demo on the Sentry software and how teams at Papaya can use it effectively for better alerting, debugging, and observability of their systems.

ELK Stack: How to Log & Debug

Jan 25, 2019

Presented on how to effectively clean up your Kibana logs and when to use different logging levels to help easily debug your application.

Impostor Syndrome & Mental Health

May 16, 2018

Gave a talk about the importance of focusing on mental health and combating impostor syndrome in the tech industry.

Ember Parallel Testing & Code Coverage Reports

May 1, 2018

Presented ActiveCampaign's implementation of parallel test pipelines for Ember Chicago.