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Who am I?

Portrait under greenhouse grow lights.

Tech Stack

Like most people my age, I am 34. (That was a joke).

The journey to this point in my life has been… let's call it "scenic."

I was bread and buttered in Atlanta, GA. I studied what is now termed "neuropsych" at Georgia State University. So yes, I can read minds. I kid, it is a fancy way of saying I took a bunch of psychology and neuroscience classes. After college, I bounced around a few sales jobs but eventually, I decided life needed a plot twist: I packed my bags and moved to Munich, Germany, so close to the Oktoberfest grounds that I could throw a beer glass and hit one of those famed, giant tents.

In Munich, I spent my days teaching English to kindergarteners and quickly realized I had a lot in common with them: I, too, dislike vegetables and see no reason to wear socks indoors. Somewhere between wrangling tiny humans and butchering German grammar in online lessons, I picked up coding. Eager to level up, I moved back to the States, completed a frontend program at Turing School in Denver, and landed a full-stack gig soon after.

Since then, I've been tinkering with firmware, puttering around with Raspberry Pis, and generally sticking my nose into all things software-related. These days, building and experimenting isn't just my career—it's my favorite way to procrastinate.

Scroll down to "Career Journey" to see my experience!

Career Journey

Download Full Resume

Sep 2024 - Present

Software Engineer III

Built tooling to manage feature flag tracking as part of our CI/CD pipeline to reduce code bloat
Moved domain services to an event driven queue-based design, improving elasticity and development cycle time

Responsibilities:

Managed and processed critical user data from external calendar providers such as Google and Outlook.
Updated data integral ingestion pipelines to evolve with external providers and customers.
Extracted monolithic services into their own microservices as part of an org-wide effort.
Revitalized our testing in the absence of a dedicated QA team member, built out Postman test suites, smoke tests and observability for critical APIs.
Built and maintained internal tooling to manage and track feature flag enablement and deprecations, reducing code complexity and bloat.

Sep 2022 - May 2024

Software Engineer II

Guild Education

Reduced customer onboarding engineering overhead by 100%
Reduced consumer calls by 30% through architecture redesign

Responsibilities:

Managed and processed data used by over 22 of Guild’s 26 teams; data required to be top notch and services highly performant for the business to function and flourish.
Led an effort to free engineers from manually onboarding new partners through code. This involved leveraging JsonLogic in a React frontend portal to allow implementation and delivery managers to build the business logic needed instead of having engineers log hours doing so in a Python/Node.js backend; reduced amount of engineer touchpoints for a new onboarding by 100%.
Built event-driven, distributed microservices in Node.js/Typescript and Python to interact with other arms and systems of the business in AWS's serverless ecosystem.
As a part of the business's most central development team, led efforts to improve performance, throughput and data quality of services to better serve consumers, both internal Guild and exogenous customers. More than doubled the amount of partner's data that passed through our systems.
Merged data, domains, and design through domain consolidation and shared systems, decreasing consumer calls by 30% and improving architecture for better business and user-centered logic organization-wide.

Mar 2021 - Sep 2022

Software Engineer I

Guild Education

Brought system error rates to less than 1% for data pipeline
Built systems to support 2x number of consumers in 18 months

Responsibilities:

Designed and implemented event-driven microservices within the AWS ecosystem; brought down system error rates to less than 1%.
Implemented a new integration with a business partner that set the standard for public-facing APIs at Guild.
Leveraged Python and Object Oriented Programming to build one of the central services to Guild's operations; 76% of Guild's teams used system data.
Collaborated with the more business-oriented teams to ensure code met the needs of users and partners with scalability in mind.
Took lead on architecture designs and influenced direction of our software to future-proof systems and allow for the growth of the platform; facilitated 50% faster feature deployment and supported an internal 2x consumer expansion within 18 months.

Aug 2020 - Mar 2021

Junior Software Engineer

Reduced customer onboarding engineering overhead by 100%
Reduced consumer calls by 30% through architecture redesign

Responsibilities:

Managed and processed data used by over 22 of Guild’s 26 teams; data required to be top notch and services highly performant for the business to function and flourish.
Led an effort to free engineers from manually onboarding new partners through code. This involved leveraging JsonLogic in a React frontend portal to allow implementation and delivery managers to build the business logic needed instead of having engineers log hours doing so in a Python/Node.js backend; reduced amount of engineer touchpoints for a new onboarding by 100%.
Built event-driven, distributed microservices in Node.js/Typescript and Python to interact with other arms and systems of the business in AWS's serverless ecosystem.
As a part of the business's most central development team, led efforts to improve performance, throughput and data quality of services to better serve consumers, both internal Guild and exogenous customers. More than doubled the amount of partner's data that passed through our systems.
Merged data, domains, and design through domain consolidation and shared systems, decreasing consumer calls by 30% and improving architecture for better business and user-centered logic organization-wide.

Apr 2018 - Nov 2019

English Teacher

Elly und Stoffl, Gmbh

Responsibilities:

Provided high-quality language lesson development and delivery
Advised co-curricular clubs and activities
Participated in on-going planning development and evaluation of curriculum
Used a variety of instructional strategies to provide equity and excellence to students of all ability levels
Worked cooperatively with other teachers in developing and sharing curriculum strategies
Ensured effective and positive parent communication

Jun 2017 - Dec 2017

Enterprise Software Sales

Responsibilities:

Researched potential market, studying rivals' products, and defining marketing strategies
Provided creative and analytical input to the sales and marketing teams
Integrated sales and marketing strategies in order to exceed expected results
Led outbound prospect development, increased outbound leads by a factor of three
Worked closely with senior sales directors to schedule calls and meetings with future customers
Provided feedback to sales and marketing team to determine effective sales strategies

Sep 2016 - Jun 2017

Inside Sales Rep

Responsibilities:

Exceeded monthly expected sales by 45%-75%
Regularly recognized by customers and management for customer service skills
Provided detailed technical diagrams of product based on individual customer needs
Assisted with customer service disputes and troubleshooting calls
Built rapport with customer to maintain relationships, leading to future purchases
Required to have extensive knowledge of product in order to provide expert advice on customers’ needs
Utilized online store customer database to pursue leads via phone calls and email to achieve sales
Researched potential business partners all over the country, reached out via phone calls and email to produce partnerships for future company growth and success

1990-10-03

The spaceship that was carrying me as a baby crash-landed on earth.