Lead Engineer, FAST ∙ October 2024 to Current ∙ Blizzard Entertainment

Led a team of experienced engineers whose primary focus was reducing the friction between game teams and shared technologies.

• Built the FAST team with a focus on candidates who were self-starters, built on a foundation of teamwork, and had a clear skill for cross-team communication.

• Built a culture of collaboration, encouraging the team to set up lunch and learns, as well as setting aside time in our weekly team meetings to share new ideas and knowledge.

• Set up the team’s standards of excellence, guiding the team to build systems and frameworks that improved reliability for code changes and deployments.

• Established new relationships with game teams.

• Through my guidance, the FAST team has been able to:

  • Modify and deploy Blizzard Arcade for Ubisoft cloud streaming

  • Perform a multi-layered upgrade of StarCraft 2 which allowed us to deploy it to the new infrastructure built for China. These upgraded services were able to support concurrent traffic three times the concurrency in our largest region for the rest of the world.

  • Perform a multi-layered upgrade of StarCraft Remastered to make it compatible with Ubisoft streaming

Lead Engineer, Warcraft Rumble ∙ October 2022 to October 2024 ∙ Blizzard Entertainment

Led multiple engineering teams for Warcraft Rumble

• Worked with senior leadership to align my teams with Warcraft Rumble's strategic initiatives which helped player satisfaction and  retention.

• Worked with other team leads and members to solve cross-functional problems and build alignment.

• Met with team members in 1:1 meetings to keep in touch with morale, initiate feedback in both directions, and to share hobbies and interests to keep them connected.

• Helped my team through career growth by giving feedback on their strengths, opportunities for growth, and their progress towards their goals.

• Fostered a culture of excellence, guiding the team to build, test, and deploy an architecture that supported 800,000 concurrent players which resulted in one of the smoothest launches in Blizzard history.

Senior Software Engineer, Warcraft Rumble ∙ February 2022 to October 2022 ∙ Blizzard Entertainment

Responsible for designing and implementing several initiatives for the Server-Platform team

• Both the Client and Server architecture were written in C#, and persisted in Cassandra. Kafka was leveraged as a message transport for our RPC framework. The client was built in Unity, and the Servers were deployed as Docker containers running on Kubernetes.

• Built metrics components that kept track of client binary and asset versions currently in play.

• Improved the signing and encryption library that allowed more secure communications between the client and server, including the ability to trust that data from the client originated from the server.

• Implemented traffic throttling that prevented either poor client behavior or fake clients from flooding our services with messages.

• Improved the robustness of the End-Of-Game pipeline so that the results of completed games were not lost.

• Improved cross-cluster communications through a simple library that made these messages as simple to send as messages within the same cluster.

• Improved the scalability of our message routing by allowing finer grained control of our service partitions.

Principal Software Engineer / Software Engineering Manager ∙ February 2020 to February 2022 ∙ iHerb

Worked with multiple platform teams to help guide them and give them direction

• Teams consisted of:

  • WES - A team that specialized in interfacing with devices and automation in iHerb’s warehouses.

  • TMS - A team that specialized in interfacing with our carrier partners to ship product and with our eCommerce department to give them information on shipping costs, available carriers, shipment statuses, etc.

  • Firmware - a team that was tasked with writing the firmware for iHerbs robots.

• Coordinate developers’ efforts to meet deadlines

• Guided team on putting together best practices.

• Worked with Product to come up with user stories, and validate conditions of acceptance, then communicate these out to the teams responsible.

• Mentor developers and help them grow in areas of opportunity.

• Helped with technical interviews for hiring resources

• Guide teams on CI/CD and monitoring which improved visibility of the current state of our microservices infrastructure and helped identify issues early and increased uptime.

Involved in championing and supporting multiple projects. These projects include (but are not limited to):

• Integration with Haven’s booking services

  • This integration gave our Global Logistics team the ability to simplify the carrier bookings for freight forwarding operations.

  • These improvements reduced operating costs by 30% and also reduced much of the manual communications and overrides that the Global Logistics team had been doing with the warehouse systems..

  • The microservices were built on .NET Core, Redis, and MongoDB. Our administration portal was written on .NET core and React and leveraged Material UI.

• Preparing the bots for proof of concept

  • Worked closely with the Firmware team to figure out how we can take the robots from an experimental state to getting them ready for POC.

  • Worked with the team to clean up the architecture which reduced near-constant crashes.

  • Worked with the team to add compensating behaviors to the robot so that they would reliably arrive at their destination without the need for manual intervention.

  • Worked with the team to implement a finite state machine in the robot’s executive code to prevent conflicting behaviors and invalid state transitions.

  • Introduced best practices to the team, such as code reviews, pull requests, CI/CD, and common  coding standards and formatting.

• Soft Launch of bots in iHerb’s first fully automated warehouse.

  • Worked closely with the IT/Devops teams to build out our software infrastructure, such as RabbitMQ, Kubernetes, SQL Server.

  • Worked with the network team to ensure that the required configurations were in place that allowed the robots and other IOT devices, such as Ablepick were able to communicate with the software.

  • Worked with warehouse technical teams to configure and set up devices.

  • Worked with software to come up with a deployment plan to launch the robotics services.

Lead Software Engineer /Software Engineering Manager ∙ Nov 2015 to Jan 2020 ∙ Pricespider

Helped architect, design and develop and lead multiple teams.

• Teams consisted of:

  • A platform team of 3 NodeJs developers

  • A full stack team of 5 NodeJs and Angular developers

  • A 3 developer platform team of .Net Core and Go developers

  • A 2 developer offshore full stack team of Angular, NodeJs and Go developers

• Coordinate developers’ efforts to meet deadlines

• Performed code reviews and trained team on best practices.

• Worked with Product to come up with user stories, and validate conditions of satisfaction, then communicate these out to the teams responsible.

• Mentor developers and help them grow in areas of opportunity.

• Helped with technical interviews when hiring resources

• Trained teams on CI/CD and monitoring which reduced operational complexity and increased uptime

Architected and designed multiple projects from the ground-up for Pricespider’s client-facing applications and internal microservices. These projects include (but are not limited to):

• A client-facing product performance portal

  • This application gave our clients the capability to measure their conversion metrics across more than 3000 websites.

  • In the last 12 months, my direct contributions enabled the business to add four enterprise clients, growing the revenue by 200%.

  • The portal was written in Node.js, Typescript, Angular 1.x and 6 and backed by Postgresql and partitioned Elasticsearch

• A global web indexer

  • Built a system which is capable of collecting and indexing product information from over 3000 retail websites with a block rate of less than 0.5%

  • This system replaced an existing system which was hitting the boundary of it’s SLA.
    This new system is projected to meet the demand of our clients for the next 6 years.

  • The global web indexer was written using the following technologies:

    • Pipeline: .net core 

    • Telemetry: OpenCensus

    • Data: Postgresql, Elasticsearch, and RabbitMQ

    • Crawlers: Go and Node.js (Puppeteer)

    • Deployment: CI using Docker, Helm and Kubernetes