To continue my career in software engineering, focusing on work where precision and correctness are required.
Brian is a seasoned software professional with 18+ years of experience in designing and implementing horizontally scalable systems in Silicon Valley. Brian also has experience guiding and assisting engineering teams accomplish goals, using techniques ranging from 1:1 mentoring to driving broad organizational initiatives. Recently, this experience includes integrating support for real-time measurement and analytics and private cloud infrastructure at American Express, as well as low-latency metadata distribution for Netflix Originals.
Manager Cirrus Software LLC, San Jose, California March 2016–present
Help clients with software projects, including but not limited to design and implementation, cloud migration, DevOps, problem solving and all other matters of software engineering.
Distinguished Engineer, Vice President Technologies American Express Company, Enterprise Growth Division, New York, New York April 2014–February 2016
Introduce cloud computing concepts to Serve: openstack, Asgard, bakery. Introduced graphite to bring transparency to a previously opaque operational model. Helped transform Amex’s Foreign Exchange platform from waterfall to an agile delivery model. Introduced a microservice architecture by implementation of a configuration service and guidance on REST resource modeling. Migrated 13 subversion repositories, 90,000+ revisions, 8+ years of history into a single subversion repository. Forwarded Amex’s open-source contribution model. Worked on BI/Big Data by getting Serve OLTP data into Hadoop and writing Map/Reduce jobs.
Senior Software Engineer Netflix, Inc., Los Gatos, California December 2010–April 2014
Work as part of a team to transform Netflix’s new user acquisition from USA/English-only into an international effort: Canada, Latin America, EU, Nordics, United Kingdom, Netherlands, and preparations for other regions of the world. Reconstruct datacenter-based infrastructure and back-end systems to take advantage of Amazon’s Web Services cloud-computing platforms (EC2, S3, etc.). Design and develop solutions to movie metadata distribution challenges. Design and implement “Grapevine”, an event-based publishing system using S3 and Zookeeper to replace a simple but expensive polling implementation. Grapevine was used to distribute metadata for the first two years of Netflix Originals. Reduce average latency between publication of movie metadata and consumption of that metadata from 30 minutes to sub-second. Participate in the “Cloud Performance: Special Ops” cross-functional working group. Implement and open-source a Java Garbage Collection visualizer: gcviz.
Principal Architect Yahoo!, Inc., Sunnyvale, California July 2008–December 2010 Identify and resolve performance issues present in the Yahoo! Updates platform, which publishes Yahoo! users’ events across the Yahoo! Network. Migrate the Yahoo! openness strategy (Y!OS) team from CVS and Perforce to Subversion, moving 12+ years of history, 8+GB of sources and 70,000+ revisions. Manage the MyBlogLog team through its final founder leaving Yahoo! Design a store to securely hold (and globally distribute) OAuth 1.0A, FB connect, OAuth 2.0, and other 3rd party authorization tokens/credentials; co-lead a team through its implementation. Develop processes to copy large data sets and use Hadoop to analyze Yahoo! Address Book (~9TB) and the data sources (~14TB) underlying the social features of Yahoo! Contribute some of these technologies back to the Hadoop project.
Senior Member of Technical Staff VMware, Inc., Palo Alto, California December 2007–July 2008 Improve VMware engineers productivity by reducing build time, by resolving long-standing build infrastructure issues, implementing procedures to restore builds from tape, and developing build infrastructure.
Senior Software Engineer Sputnik, Inc., San Francisco, California April 2007–December 2007 Design and implement version 4.0 of the Sputnik Control Center, a networking management system for wireless access points. Duties include scaling and performance improvements.
co-Founder, CIO Feder8.com, Inc., Sunnyvale, California January 2006–April 2007 Co-founded Feder8.com, a computer-gaming community. Responsibile for daily operations and development of the server-side software and website.
Computer Consultant Ultimate Technology Incorporated, San Jose, California December 2004–August 2006 Assist Cisco Systems with the performance, scalability, resiliency, and quality of its Wireless LAN Solution Engine (WLSE), WLSE Express, and AON switch/routers in several hardware configurations.
Founding Software Engineer Silver Spring Networks, San Mateo, California September 2003–October 2004 Architect and implement a utility networking back-office system which communicates with up to 10,000 systems (“gateways”) each aggregating up to 1,000 gas, water, and electric meters.
Computer Consultant Self-employed April 2002–September 2003 Solve problems for clients. Two projects include processing of acoustic data received in a mining application and modeling the thickness of a pipe for a mining application.
Senior Software Engineer NetVMG, Milpitas, California October 2001–April 2002 Design, implement, and provide technical leadership in the management interface for a software/hardware route-control device for multi-homed hosts. Projects include building various methods for configuring and monitoring the device through SNMP while mentoring a team of younger engineers to do the same.
Senior Software Engineer Epinions.com, Brisbane, California June 2000–October 2001 Design and implement infrastructure to allow the website to function correctly and efficiently. Projects include building a generic server framework (http://mvserver.sourceforge.net/) to instantiate application servers which accept and perform requests, an event distribution mechanism, a caching layer at the application level, and implementation of the search functionality.
Software Design Engineer Hewlett-Packard, Cupertino, California January 1999–June 2000 Work as part of a team to modify the HotSpot Java Virtual Machine for PA-RISC/HP-UX 11.0. Projects include C++ name demangling for internal debugging and profiling support, a harness that generated tests for the internal assembler and disassembler, and thread and mutex debugging.
Graduate Teaching/Research Assistant University of Kansas EECS department August 1996–December 1998 Grade projects for and assist in teaching EECS 665 Compiler Construction in the Spring 1996, Fall 1997, and Spring 1998 semesters. Research in the area of programming languages, including type-recovery, flow-analysis, and compiler construction. Research in the area of artificial intelligence, including machine-learning, theorem provers, and deductive-logic systems. Teach and grade two sections of EECS 188 Introduction to Programming in the Fall 1996 semester.
Student Programmer/Consultant University of Kansas Computer Center May 1994–January 1997 Write and maintain data analysis and statistics code. Teach and supervise computer users. Engage in research and special projects.
Customer Service Assistant University of Kansas Computer Center May 1992–May 1994 Provide microcomputer assistance to customers. Maintain print queues and more than forty microcomputers. Apply knowledge of many different software packages on several platforms.
A Java Garbage Collection Visualizer
http://github.com/Netflix/gcviz
http://techblog.netflix.com/2013/05/garbage-collection-visualization.html
A portable ANSI-C data structure and utility library: http://libmooreb.sourceforge.net/
A generic server framework: http://arcs.sourceforge.net/
A blackjack simulator: http://bjsim.sourceforge.net/
A DEC-alpha Scheme compiler written in Scheme.
A Java Virtual Machine written in Scheme.
ANSI C, Python, Java, Perl, Scheme
UNIX, MacOS, MS Windows.
University of Kansas Lawrence, Kansas August 1991–December 1998 MS, Computer Science with Honors. December 1998.
BS, Mathematics. December 1995.
National Merit Scholar.
Kansas Scholar.
Nerd For The New Millenium, Runner-Up.
Eagle Scout.
San Jose Tech Museum “Tech Challenge” judge, 2008–2012.
References are available upon request.