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.

Served as the technical lead on ‘digital presentment’, our text-to-pay solution for medical providers to eliminate cost of paper statements by moving to SMS and HIPAA-compliant bill presentment.

Single-handedly implemented our integration with Humanlike to automate bill payments by using conversational AI to call providers to pay users’ bills.

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.