Before starting my career as an illustrator, I worked as a software engineer for over a decade. Find my software resume below.

Experience

Independent Illustrator

(2019-2023)

  • Honed skills in story-driven illustration and entertainment design through formal training and self-study. Wrote and illustrated original comics, accepted freelance illustration projects, and provided private tutoring to high school students in art fundamentals and techniques.

Amazon Web Services - CloudTrail

Software Engineer

(2016-2019)

  • Modernized CloudTrail's web console by refactoring 90% of the codebase using Angular, increasing test coverage from 40% to 95%, and implementing an E2E test suite. Streamlined deployments, saving ~15 hours of developer time per deployment and tripling the release rate. Significantly reduced console-related on-call tickets from a few per week to one every few months. Implemented new features such as Event Download and Data Events integration. Mentored a web developer to take over console ownership.
  • Spearheaded a team of 3 engineers to automate CloudTrail infrastructure setup for deployment in new AWS regions in order to meet organization-wide goal of touchless region expansion. Reduced region expansion time from 6 weeks to just over a week by leveraging internal and AWS infrastructure automation tools (CloudFormation, CodeDeploy, and CodePipeline) and increasing test coverage for 20+ microservices to meet continuous deployment standards, nearly eliminating developer involvement in deployments for existing regions.
  • Contributed to the design and implementation of Data Events lookup in Java, indexing billions of events per minute for sorting and search. Provided critical service logic and reviewed the majority of pull requests submitted by other engineers.
  • Demonstrated leadership in on-call follow-up tasks, advocating for the prioritization of automated incident resolution by implementing auto-scaling, additional testing, and retry/redundancy logic, leading to a 30% reduction in weekly on-call tickets.
  • Conducted over 100 web developer interviews (averaging 2-3 per week) for positions across the entire Developer Tools AWS organization.

Optimizely (Welcome, formerly NewsCred)

Architect/Lead Software Engineer

(2013-2016)

  • Spearheaded the development of the Content Marketing Platform (> $2 million MRR) from inception using Node, AngularJS, and MongoDB. Took on responsibilities as an architect, team lead, technical product manager, and mentor while remaining a top individual code contributor.
  • Led a team of six developers to deliver V1 of the platform in under six months, personally contributing over 50% of the project's lines of code.
  • Played a pivotal role in scaling the Node/Angular codebase to over 48 developers across five squads in NY and Bangladesh.
  • Architected and built critical application components, including the domain model, REST API, social publishing infrastructure, SSO authentication, permissions/roles, and modular front-end structure.
  • Coached engineers on best practices for writing maintainable code, set coding patterns, gave internal talks, and provided one-on-one mentorship.
  • Served as a first-responder for outages and assisted the support team in classifying and escalating bugs. Developed tools and trained support engineers to debug and resolve issues with minimal developer involvement.
  • Initiated a culture of performance by introducing metrics measurement and coaching engineers to become performance experts.
  • Directed efforts to migrate the codebase from a monolithic architecture to a service-oriented architecture while simultaneously delivering client-facing features.
  • Collaborated closely with product and UX teams in ideation and decision-making.

Bio-Rad Laboratories

Web Developer

(2011 - 2013)

  • Designed, architected and implemented a Java/Javascript single-page application to manage all of Bio-Rad's B2B clients.
  • Created and managed a SQL database containing information on all Bio-Rad B2B clients by coordinating with business and technical teams.

Bio-Rad Laboratories

QA/Automation Engineer Intern

(2008-2009)

  • Developed and implemented automated end-to-end testing using Selenium and Java for Bio-Rad's eCommerce platform, ensuring thorough coverage of testing requirements. Significantly enhanced the efficiency of the QA automation team by refactoring code to facilitate greater reusability and maintainability.

Pomona College - Information Technology Services

Technical Support Student Consultant

(2007-2011)

  • Provided technical support and troubleshooting services for students, faculty, and staff at a university. Resolved issues related to hardware, software, networking, and system access while maintaining a high level of customer service.

Gabriel Lucas

Web Developer Intern

(2005)

  • Developed a comprehensive full-stack web application using JavaScript and PHP, enabling a high school teacher to efficiently manage and distribute homework assignments and quizzes to students through an online platform.

Skills

  • Technologies: Javascript, Angular, React, AWS (EC2, S3, DynamoDB, CloudTrail, Cloudformation, CodeDeploy), Node, Python, Java, MongoDB, DynamoDB, Ansible, HTML/CSS
  • Other: Single-Page Applications, UX/Design, Cloud Infrastructure, Highly Scalable Software Architecture, Service Oriented Architecture, Continuous Deployment, Monitoring/Alerting...

Education

Pomona College

(Claremont, CA)

BA in Computer Science, 2011