Experience

Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Shopify

Jan 2023 - current

Resiliency · Incident Management · Rails · MySQL · GCP · CI/CD

Primary incident manager on-call for millions of online stores: first responder to automated alerts signalling interruptions to commerce
Primary manager of ongoing incidents, ensuring the right teams’ involement, responsible for progressing issues toward resolution
Conducting follow-up on each meaningful incident, to learn and to extract appropriate action items, so teams know what to do next
Consultation with other engineering groups on how to build low-latency, debuggable, highly resilient systems
Cleaning up the noise in our signals, ensuring we can get an understanding of our systems and debug problems easily
Helping teams build tools to automate the toil of on-call duties

Feb 2022 - Oct 2022

Terraform · Docker · Kubernetes · Nomad · Gitlab CI · Nginx · PHP

Consolidated and centralised dashboards for the team in Grafana and Splunk
Created Terraform module and Gitlab repository with CI pipelines to manage on-call shifts in Pagerduty adhering to infrastructure-as code principles
Led a project to convert homepage and marketing website from Next.js server-side generation to server-side rendering (SSG to SSR), using Docker Compose, Kubernetes, Nomad, Vault, Nginx, and Prometheus

Mar 2019 – Feb 2022

Ruby · Python · Chef · Kubernetes · AWS · CI/CD · AI/ML

Hardened and standardised software delivery processes and data pipelines
Migrated legacy Answer Bot product to modern infrastructure: EC2 instances to Kubernetes, MySQL to Aurora RDS, custom ELK stack to Datadog, custom deployment system to Spinnaker

Nov 2017 – Feb 2019

Ruby · Java · MySQL · Vitess · Cryptocurrency

Worked on database sharding for the banking ledger, which handles tens of thousands of queries per second, tracking over US$100M of stored value on behalf of over 10M CashApp customers
Liaised with VISA to make regulatory compliance changes to the ISO8583 file format which Square exchanges with card networks
Improved internal tooling for customer support agents and added Bitcoin-related functionality

Nov 2015 – Aug 2017

Ruby · Go · Docker · AWS · Terraform · Automation · Dev tools

Migrated infrastructure from dedicated servers to AWS using Terraform and Chef, improving reliability
Migrated from instance backed image uploads to a content-addressable storage backed by S3, improving reliability and implicitly de-duplicating uploads
Championed best practices among the development team, such as backing CI containers with a Docker registry to simplify updates
Worked extensively on developer tools such as a command-line interface for common development tasks

Aug 2012 - Oct 2015

PHP · Ruby · DevOps · Continuous deployment

Full-stack web development using PHP, Ruby and Rails, and Python
Automated standard operating environment using Vagrant, VirtualBox, and Babushka
Became an expert on internationalisation and localisation of legacy web applications
Conducted review of EC2 instance types in use, improving performance for end-users and reducing cost for the business
Worked on refactoring a very large, monolithic application into simple, maintainable services

Nov 2010 – Aug 2012

PHP · Magento · Customer support

Full-stack e-commerce web development using PHP, Magento, and Laravel
Successfully completed Magento Certified Developer Plus certification
Liaised with and occasionally managed remote developers
Initiated various productivity-improving workflows, including migrating version control from Bazaar to Git, and advocating the use of improved task management tools
Frequently required to quickly come up-to-speed on new codebases, including conducting audits and preparing reports for clients and internal use

Feb 2005 – Nov 2010