Employment

Sabbatical

04.2021 - present

Extended period of time off to decompress and reset. (Best decision I’ve ever made!)

Principal Software Engineer - Foundation Medicine Inc.

04.2020 - 04.2021

I worked as a Tech Lead for a contractor-based team for a few months before switching over to a development team building v2 of FMI’s core Medical Reporting microservices.

As Tech Lead:

  • Upgraded a wacky* build process to a Gitflow-like model, and built out associated Jenkins pipelines
  • Eliminated long merge freezes from FDA-mandated development process by splitting “build an artifact” from “deploy the artifact”
  • Debugging critical issues that caused validation failures (QA deleting data during tests; dropped promises)

*I really mean it. One branch per sprint, manual build and promote, dependencies on packages that no longer exist. Oh, and the build system was a zip file copy of a devops repo from a deleted GitLab instance.

As IC:

  • Gathered requirements across multiple groups and stakeholders for a rules engine implementation (project shelved for later)
  • Rapid developed microservice on top of open-source software to extract approval process from the store of record
  • Became de facto DevOps liaison; wrote CloudFormation and Jenkins pipelines to build and deploy the team’s services

Principal Software Engineer - Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

01.2017 - 04.2020

I worked on Terra and its ecosystem since their inception in 2015. It’s a cloud-based platform that gets compute and data management out of the way of genomics researchers so they can focus on the science and run their analyses at large scale.

I contributed as an engineer, did systems design, led a team, mentored junior engineers, did R&D, and championed career advancement and learning inside our organization. I’ve found leading teams and mentoring and growing developers the most rewarding part of my career so far.

  • As Advancement and Learning Facilitator, built out new career leveling rubrics for Associate to Principal SWE, and created 10% time program for self-driven projects
  • As Tech Lead for four developers, built Leonardo, a microservice to spin up Spark clusters on Google Cloud Dataproc installed with Jupyter and Hail to enable analysts to explore and compute against their data interactively; handed off project to another TL once it was stable
  • Dropped integration test runtime from 55 to 15 minutes by rapid developing a microservice to pool Google Cloud Platform projects
  • Created compressed file format for sequencing data, dropping file sizes to 4% of original, and presented it at the Global Alliance for Genomic Health 6th Plenary Meeting
  • Presented at GATK Workshop in Pretoria, South Africa; put together a series of exercises to walk attendees through learning WDL
  • Built out a new Python microservice on Google App Engine on a tight deadline
  • Reached #1 ranking of Slack messages, with over 115,000 messages posted over ~4.5 years

Senior Software Engineer - Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

09.2013 - 12.2016

  • Wrote much of the workspace and analysis-submission service for Terra
  • Scrum master fill-in for six months (including Scrum Alliance cert)
  • Ancient history: built a 3-month rapid prototype of a cloud-based workflow execution engine backed by Apache Aurora and Mesos; analysis for a $4m project to determine the statistical power of a new sequencing technique; development and support for the internal predecessor to terra.bio

Gameplay Programmer - Splash Damage

06.2011 - 05.2013

  • Titles worked on: [redacted secret project], Batman: Arkham Origins
  • Hired for expertise with Unreal Engine as studio was transitioning from other technology. Documented common pitfalls and best practices; first point of contact for programmers asking advice about engine features and quirks
  • Wrote networked, scriptable, automated functional testing framework which runs on every CI build and has been ported to multiple projects
  • Prototyping and implementing gameplay mechanics, in collaboration with designers
  • Responsible for monitoring and improving performance, identifying hotspots and handing out or implementing optimizations

Gameplay Programmer - Ninja Theory

10.2008 - 06.2011

  • Titles worked on: Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, DmC: Devil May Cry
  • Wrote save game system including custom serializer, stat tracking and achievement systems
  • Performance profiling and resulting optimizations

Education

M.Eng. Computing, 1st Class Honors, Imperial College London

2004 – 2008

Won Departmental Project Prize for Excellence and Best Presentation award for final year project on dynamically modifying MIDI files during playback to suit mood.

Introduction to Biochemistry - Harvard Extension School

Fall 2014