May 2016 – Jan 2018 · 1 yr 8 mos

• I helped build and operate Cloud Spanner: a globally consistent, highly available distributed SQL database for mission critical applications.

Mar 2015 – Apr 2016 · 1 yr 1 mo

• Secret stuff.

Apr 2013 – Mar 2015 · 1 yr 11 mos

• FoundationDB was a startup that built high-performance and rock-solid distributed databases with very strong guarantees (most famously multi-key ACID transactions with serializable isolation) and world-class fault tolerance.
• Our success was enabled by a new programming language we developed, and a deterministic simulation testing technology that pushed the state of the art. I gave a talk about both of them at the 2014 Strange Loop conference, which sat on the front page of Hacker News for three days. If you're technically inclined, you may get a kick out of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fFDFbi3toc
• In addition to working on our core key-value store product, I led development of the FoundationDB Document Layer, a full-featured document database that was one of the company's main strategic priorities from 2014 onwards. I also ran the customer early-access program for the document layer until it got too big, working closely with several major customers and prioritizing their feature requests.
• We were acquired by Apple in 2015.

Jun 2011 – Apr 2013 · 1 yr 10 mos

• Coral Networks was a private equity-backed startup marketing a data virtualization platform.
• In addition to writing plenty of code myself, I managed the team of developers who optimized the back-end storage layer. The most interesting part of the job, though, was the business side: collaborating with the marketing and finance teams, meeting with potential customers, and studying the market to prioritize feature development for our products.
• I worked on-site with a major government customer, collaborating closely with their developers and subject-matter experts first to build a proof-of-concept and then to help them onboard onto our platform.

Jun 2010 – Jun 2011 · 1 yr

• Themis was a 501(c)4 nonprofit providing data and analytics to other nonprofit organizations.
• I was brought on for my mathematical and statistical knowledge, and got my hands dirty with neural networks, decision trees, agent-based simulations, variable selection, and dimension reduction. But it also marked the point in my career when I began getting interested in software for its own sake, which led to me developing a data abstraction library to facilitate data movement and integration with GIS systems.
• The models we developed significantly outperformed naive demographic slices in a variety of issue advocacy turnout efforts. I learned a ton and it was a great experience.

Sep 2004 – May 2010 · 5 yrs 8 mos

• Computational Biodynamics was a biotech startup that I helped found after high school. The company's product was based on a finite element analysis model of the human brainstem and spinal cord that I built.
• In my time there, I led the effort to turn my model into a polished piece of medical software, secured IRB approval for human subject studies, and oversaw data acquisition and analysis for studies involving more than a hundred human subjects. I also assembled multicenter research grants for DOD funding, drafted our commercialization plan, and coauthored several papers and a book chapter, including:
• Henderson F, Wilson W, Mott S, et al. Deformative stress associated with an abnormal clivo-axial angle: A finite element analysis. Surgical Neurology International. 2010;1(30). Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2940090/.
• Henderson FC, Wilson WA, Benzel EC. Pathophysiology of Cervical Myelopathy: Biomechanics and Deformative Stress. In: Spine Surgery: techniques, complication avoidance, and management. Vol 1. 3rd ed. Elsevier Churchill Livingstone; 2012.
• Wong KH, Choi J, Wilson W, Berry J, Henderson S. Spinal cord stress injury assessment (SCOSIA): clinical applications of mechanical modeling of the spinal cord and brainstem. In: Proceedings of SPIE.Vol 7261. Lake Buena Vista, FL, USA: SPIE; 2009:726106-8. Available at: http://spie.org/Publications/Proceedings/Paper/10.1117/12.813791.