Achievements

• Cleaned up unused infra on old stack resulting in tighter security, cost saving and reduced developer cognitive load.
• Responded to customer needs on scaling up infrastructure and observing the cost increase alongside usage.
• Spearheaded incident response efforts and engineered an internal GitHub Actions workflow to streamline recovery processes.
• Developed and deployed a “break glass detection” mechanism, enhancing infrastructure observability and operational confidence.
• Delivered the “split monitoring stack” project aimed at improving security, operating safely and reducing cost in AWS accounts by approximately $1600 per month.
• Migrated the PWA service resulting in faster deployment times, increased developer confidence and a unified deployment experience.
• Completed additional projects such as upgrading lambda versions with no downtime, alerting on certificates, set up regional monitoring stack.
• Oversaw scale-up for new customer and monitored related costs, managed scale-down afterwards.
• Hosted dagster documentation to allow non-data teams to see data columns and data lineage.

Design and Documentation

• Significantly expanded platform documentation, including contribution guidelines, development conventions, and workflow definitions.
• Architected a comprehensive testing strategy for blue/green EKS deployment pipelines.
• Redesigned documentation on VPN subscriptions, aligning on new process with security team.

Collaboration and Mentorship

• Provided hands-on support to product engineers for debugging across services such as recording infrastructure, GoCD pipelines, out-of-hours deployments, and certificate renewal tasks.
• Successfully onboarded new users to OpenSearch and refreshed associated documentation.
• Enhanced GitHub Actions performance and readability, accelerating pull request processing and developer feedback cycles.
• Volunteered with REDI School, organizing and hosting mock interviews to prepare aspiring engineers for real-world job experiences.

Company Building

• Launched and led new tech huddles to foster better alignment and collaboration across engineering teams.
• Reimagined and relaunched the Whereby Community Volunteer Hours program to broaden employee engagement in volunteering efforts. Additionally set up mock interviews for developers to gain experience in interviewing.
• Streamlined and documented the email/domain configuration process to support the sales team more effectively.
• Maintained a professional and efficient standard in sharing photos of dogs 🐕.

Specific Feedback Addressed

• Being more cautious around deployments and work:
  • Postponed regional monitoring work as it would negatively impact ongoing discussions around regional services.
  • Performed EKS/AMI upgrades on a cluster-by-cluster basis to anticipate any errors.
  • Used an iterative process on the redshift-login lambda to account for each login rather than whitelisting all.
  • Lead discussions with teams before decommissioning services (i.e cloud-observer, lambdas.)