Professional Skills & Experience
If you’re looking to get a succinct overview of my work experience, please look at my resume. This document focuses on a more qualitative, in-depth approach, while others may be seeking a more compact overview.
What kind of engineer am I?
A great mentor once told me:
If you don’t feel comfortable bragging about yourself, describe yourself through the lens of a past manager or coworker.
Here are qualities that are often attributed to me by managers and peers:
- Empathetic. I am sensitive to the feelings of those around me. I make others feel heard and psychologically safe when they work with me.
- Attention to detail. I am analytical and proficient at breaking down problems into manageable parts. I consider edge cases. I’m proficient at identifying issues before they come up.
- Expert communicator. One of the most frequent pieces of feedback I get is that my communication skills are exceptional. I’m good at fine-tuning my communications depending on the audience. I write clear and concise documentation that is referenced often.
- Logical. A unique piece of feedback that I got from a previous coworker with a background in math is that I am extremely good at following sequential, logical processes to come to a solution.
- Leader. Particularly during incident response and project management, I often receive the feedback that I am a strong leader. This means guiding several teams to a solution through inter-team communication.
- Good under pressure. I have fought many, many fires. Through this experience, I’ve gotten comfortable with debugging production applications under pressure.
- Trustworthy. If I am handed a project, it will be delivered on time with great quality.
- Autonomous. I’m not afraid to ask for help when I need it, but I am highly independent. After I’ve ramped up on a project, I need very little guidance.
- Debugger. I’ve been told that I have a unique skill for debugging issues that are hard to understand and/or track down.
Technologies
A list of technologies I have worked with in the past:
| Programming Language | Technology/Framework |
|---|---|
| Python | Django |
| Java | Apache Kafka |
| C# | PostgreSQL |
| JavaScript | REST APIs |
| Go | Microservices |
| React | |
| Kubernetes |
Experience
| Company | Years of Experience |
|---|---|
| Shippo | 5 |
Shippo
I joined Shippo as a fresh new grad out of college with no experience. In just 4 years, I was promoted to Senior Software Engineer. In the following sections, I’m going to spend some time going over qualitatively what I did at Shippo.
What is Shippo?
Shippo is an API company that allows users to programmatically fetch prices for shipping, purchase shipping labels, and track packages.
What did I work on at Shippo?
I was on multiple different teams at Shippo.
- The first team I was on was called the carriers team. We were the primary owners of the 100+ API integrations that Shippo has with carriers. Not only that, but we were the primary contributors and maintainers of the Rating, Label, Tracking, Manifest, Refund, Pickups, and Carrier Account APIs. To understand the scope of this work, it’s worth pointing out that the work of this team was later split into 4 different teams. During this time I worked on adding new API integrations to Shippo, maintaining existing integrations, adding features to core infrastructure, and developer tooling.
- The next team I was on was called team Mercury. During this time period we primarily worked on the File Track service, one of the first microservices at Shippo. This file track service reduced the time to receive tracking updates from 4 hours to just minutes for eligible accounts.
- The third team I worked on was the Label team at Shippo. We were responsible for the Label, Manifest, and Refund APIs. During my time on this team, I worked on reconciliation pipelines, API migrations, optimizing monitoring and alerting, optimizing CI/CD, and other things.
USPS
It’s worth mentioning that I was a subject matter expert on a system responsible for a very large portion of revenue: USPS. In my time at Shippo, I solved many USPS problems, designed many technical solutions within the USPS domain, and was a primary contributor and owner of USPS processes. I estimate I’ve either prevented the loss of or directly unlocked significant portions of revenue within the 10s of millions range related to USPS.
Projects
Instead of repeating the projects that appear on my resume in this section, I ask the reader to look at my resume, which gives a detailed overview of many of the projects I worked on at Shippo.