Kafka event pipelines, cloud migrations, and backend services
Software engineer with 7 years of experience building backend services and data infrastructure. At
Indeed I worked
on company-wide Kafka event infrastructure used by dozens of teams, led a migration of event-dependent services
to AWS, and designed and shipped a service that downstream data jobs depend on. Before that, at Quantea, I built
DPDK-based packet capture products as a lead engineer.
Indeed · Software Engineer II, Data Infrastructure
Dec 2018 – Oct 2021
Quantea · Lead Software Engineer, packet capture appliances
Selected work
Internal details are generalized. Diagrams are simplified sketches of how data moved, not
architecture docs.
Partition Ready Events
Indeed · 2023 · design and delivery
Downstream jobs such as index builders needed to know when a partition of event data was complete and safe
to consume from the internal storage layer. I designed and shipped a Kafka service that announces exactly
that.
Event storage layer
Partition Ready Events
Readiness events on Kafka
Downstream jobs (e.g. index builders)
Simplified flow
Gathered requirements from 4 consuming teams, wrote the design docs, and presented them to the team and
stakeholders for feedback.
Evaluated data-structure designs for processing log-volume metrics events with a teammate and chose the
approach the service shipped with.
Took the MVP to production, then reproduced and profiled the service to fix processing bottlenecks,
missing events, and offset-seeking bugs.
Led its operational readiness review and designed changes to guarantee event delivery.
KafkaEvent Metadata Service
Moving event metadata services to AWS
Indeed · 2022 · led
Three event-dependent services ran on on-prem MySQL, and moving them to AWS was a prerequisite for
decommissioning the legacy data center. I led the migration, wrote the project design, and broke the work
down across engineers.
Services on on-prem MySQL
Aurora databases created (QA and prod replicas)
Production cutover validated
Legacy data center decommissioned
Delivered incrementally, with results validated at each step
Created the MySQL Aurora databases and coordinated QA and production replicas with the SQL and platform
teams.
Migrated Typecode Service, Storage Location Service, and EventViewer, and validated the production
database cutover.
Moving all three services to Aurora cleared them out of the legacy data center ahead of its
decommission.
AWS AuroraMySQLTerraform
Kafka Exchange UI
Indeed · led
I designed and led a subscription-based web app that simplified company-wide onboarding to the Kafka event
pipeline.
Engineering teams
Kafka Exchange UI
Event pipeline subscriptions
Simplified flow
Owned the data model, UI/UX collaboration, ticket breakdown, infrastructure as code, and code review.
Mentored an intern through implementation, took the app to production, and presented it to the wider
Data Infrastructure organization.
Node.jsReactTypeScript
Tracking down duplicate event types
Indeed · 2023 · incident
Duplicate event types started appearing in the Event Metadata Service. I analyzed the incident
independently and put correcting the data ahead of new feature work.
Duplicate types found
Impact analyzed
Race condition fixed with a Postgres sequence
Data correction prioritized, retrospective written
Sequence of the response
Traced the duplicates to a race condition in type-code creation and fixed it with a Postgres sequence
generator.
Wrote the incident retrospective.
Delivered the service's production readiness: full legacy API support, API key authentication, and the
cutover plan.
JavaPostgreSQLS3
Cutting data volume and query cost
Indeed
Two changes that reduced what the pipeline stored and what its queries cost.
Benchmark plan with exit criteria
Correctness tests with the Data Lake team
New default Presto/Trino parser
~$1,700/month saved
Parser rollout
Built bulk event-type updates that let the team turn off writes for 2,843 event types, which made up 29%
of records and about 16% of bytes in Q4 2022.
Built a benchmarking plan with exit criteria for a new log parser, ran correctness tests with the Data
Lake team, and kept stakeholders updated weekly before making it the default.
Query costs dropped by about $1,700 a month.
Presto/TrinoKafka
Packet capture appliances
Quantea · 2018–2021 · lead
engineer
I designed and implemented applications for packet capture, dissection, and storage, and led
DPDK-based Network Packet Broker development as subject matter expert for 5 stakeholders.
Capture
Dissection
Storage
The pipeline each appliance ran
Raised packet capture throughput from 1–2 Gbps to 15–20 Gbps (10×) with DPDK, which
helped win long-term contracts, and expanded filtering options 4×.
Designed the capture, dissection, and storage applications behind 2 new appliance products,
which generated $1.4M+ in sales.
Cut Network Packet Broker development time by 25% as DPDK subject matter expert for 5 stakeholders.
C/C++DPDKLinux
Fixing a monastery's web store
Saint Paul's Monastery · Boscobel, WI ·
Sep–Oct 2026 · volunteer, one week
The Icon Shop of Saint Paul's Monastery runs on WordPress and
WooCommerce. Over one week I cleaned up its catalog, fixed problems customers saw on the live store, and
left the staff a guide so they can run it themselves. I used Claude to speed up investigation and
implementation, and verified each change on the live store before rolling it out.
Inventory shown wrong on the live store
WooCommerce hooks traced
Custom snippet found
Fix confirmed past caching
The storefront bug, from symptom to cause
Reconciled inventory across 1,000+ SKU and variation records, found missing catalog entries, and built
CSV bulk-import workflows to create and update variations (SKU, attributes, pricing, stock).
Debugged failed variation imports across parent/child products, global attributes, variation metadata,
visibility, and stock settings, testing on a small set of products before updating the whole catalog.
Traced a live storefront inventory bug through WooCommerce hooks to a custom snippet on the
woocommerce_get_availability filter, and confirmed the fix past WordPress caching.
Fixed the store's inability to mark customers as tax-exempt by setting up a WooCommerce tax-exemption
plugin.
Wrote a plain-English help guide and training material for the non-technical staff who manage the store.
WordPressWooCommerceCSV importClaude
Also at Indeed
Java 17 migrationDelivered across 30+ data infrastructure codebases.
Jenkins to GitLab CILed the migration and automated 30+ recurring jobs with Slack
alerts.
On-call readinessWrote 24/7 runbooks and added SLO monitors for 6 key Kafka services.
Kafka cluster operationsProvisioned Kafka clusters in new regions and documented the process
for company-wide rollouts.
Inflight SanitizationIntegrated with Datadog to stop automatically when pipeline latency
crossed a threshold, ending recurring manual work.
Kafka platform toolingPII indexing and schema inference daemons, and Gradle tooling for Schema
Registry.
Hiring and mentoring17+ technical interviews; onboarded engineers and interns.
What I work on
Distributed systems
Services other systems rely on to be correct, like knowing when a partition of event data is complete.