I am a former Microsoft distributed systems engineer who has spent his career on the cutting edge of cloud and web3 computing with 6+ years of experience. I have ~5 of deep experience architecting, developing, and operating systems at planet scale and have spent the last 2 years empowering smaller organizations to reach that level. I am hungry to continue building scalable, performant, and maintainable systems in high-performing, mission-driven organizations. I'd love to share a few parts of my professional journey with you below:
I grew the most from my time working on Microsoft Azure Networking. As a professional, an engineer, a teammate, and a leader, I had completely changed from a timid, totally green new grad to someone who had delivered entirely new public-facing features, collaborated with brilliant engineers to scale and grow a planet-scale computing platform, and self-actualized and gained confidence in my skills and abilities technically and professionally. I grew as a leader and mentor, gathering feedback from new hires at a time when we were all adjusting to remote-only collaboration during the pandemic, and acted on it in order to drive a culture of documentation and mentorship that our organization was lacking. I'm very lucky to have had such a profound growth experience as my first role as I was starting my career, and I'm eager to continue to ply these skills in my next role.
There are myriad projects which benefited from my contributions, but one that I'm particularly proud of focused on the scalability, reliability, and modernization of the Azure Software Defined Networking control plane. For context, every creation, update, or deletion of virtual networking resources came through our regional controller; each time a customer updated their virtual network, our service needed to drive a corresponding update in our physical network and data plane. My focus during my time in Azure Networking was on delivering scalability and reliability improvements and delivering new SDN features to our product offerings. I was able to eliminate several critical single points of failure from our architecture, enhancing the reliability of Microsoft’s cloud offering as well as our ability to scale. One example I'll focus on was my work to transition a key singleton microservice to a sharded alternative. The microservice in question was part directory service, part load balancer. It was responsible for storing mappings from customer ids or resource ids to a given worker partition, and provided load balancing among these worker partitions for new resources.
This particular microservice was both critical (i.e. in the hot path of every API call) to the functionality of our distributed application and a critical obstacle to our scalability and availability; the total state (which was maintained on replicas of the service) size and read/write traffic volume on the service was creating severe performance issues and threatening to lead to loss of availability. We needed to design, develop, test, deploy, and migrate to a scalable alternative, quickly. My task was to lead this effort. I was able to replace this service with zero customer downtime. The delivery of this project removed an entire category of scalability and availability issues which were previously presenting severe problems to our control plane.
One of the things that my coworkers have consistently mentioned to me over the course of my career is that they (miraculously) genuinely enjoy working with me. They've related a few reasons for that; chief among them is that I'm an empathetic and effective communicator. I strive to be as upfront, concise, honest, and caring as I can be when working on any team. Another aspect that they've related is that I can bring a good amount of levity, humor, and positivity to the organizations I join. I'm very cool under pressure (I definitely developed quite a bit of tolerance to it), and I know firsthand that everyone has a better time if we actually enjoy interacting and socializing with each other.