Sep 2023 – Present · 2 yrs 7 mos

• Shapes architectural direction and drives engineering standards across 5 product teams, bridging technical strategy and execution. Facilitates cross-team technical decisions, produces documentation, and coaches lead engineers on platform architecture.
• Eliminated ~165M daily database writes (93% reduction) by designing a JSON authorization storage migration, reducing permissions latency by 75% and improving system reliability across GitHub's authorization platform.
• Consolidated 140 service-level objectives into 13 unified objectives following Google SRE best practices, improving incident detection and reducing on-call noise.
• Led and mitigated multiple high-impact availability incidents by coordinating cross-team response across support, authorization, and identity teams; built reusable libraries solving systemic query performance issues.

Mar 2020 – Sep 2023 · 3 yrs 6 mos

• Technical lead for cross-team platform and authorization initiatives, consulting across 5 product teams on secure design so they could ship independently. Owned projects end-to-end from design through public beta, coordinating 4+ engineers across multiple quarters.
• Led fine-grained Personal Access Tokens from design through public beta as tech lead for 4+ engineers; showcased at GitHub Universe keynote and reached #6 on Hacker News.
• Resolved a critical availability incident same day, reducing query times from >6 seconds to 0.16 seconds; then drove a cross-team proposal that secured another team's funding for a long-term architectural fix.
• Designed and shipped OAuth Device Authorization flow (RFC 8628) for GitHub Apps, immediately adopted by the GitHub CLI team as the standard auth path for command-line tooling.

Jan 2016 – Mar 2020 · 4 yrs 2 mos

• Core platform engineer responsible for building and scaling the GitHub Apps developer platform. Including permissions modeling, webhook architecture, installation management, and API surface. Partnered with security and product teams on authorization design, incident response, and API standards.
• Built the GitHub Apps platform from inception to production readiness and presented the stable release at GitHub Satellite in London.
• Designed and shipped scoped installation tokens adopted by Microsoft, Google, Travis CI, and Dependabot. Enabling secure fine-grained access critical to the GitHub Actions launch.
• Led security remediation for a SAML bypass breach involving exfiltration of 50,000+ private repositories, shipping Device Flow as a mid-term fix and designing PATs v2 as the long-term resolution.

May 2015 – Dec 2015 · 7 mos

• Founding contributor to GitHub Classroom, an open-source Ruby on Rails tool for managing coding assignments. Now used by 3,000+ teachers and hundreds of thousands of students. Featured in Wired: https://www.wired.com/2015/09/github-open-sources-tool-teaches-students-code/.