Jan 2025 – Present · 1 yr 3 mos

• Drove preprod stability across environments as part of the Preprod Triage effort, taking primary ownership on complex networking / Kafka incidents, writing runbooks and deep‑dive analyses.
• This role required me to be involved in all parts of the company and deeply understand our complicated infrastructure. I worked on kubernetes, networking, and kafka issues across multiple cloud providers
• and became well known as the go-to person for preprod issues. I wrote numerous runbooks and deep dive analyses to help the company understand and fix preprod issues.
• I pushed teams to add more monitors and alerts to catch issues earlier, and worked with teams to improve their incident response processes. I helped bring meaningful month over month
• decreases in mean time to mitigation for preprod incidents, and significantly improved preprod stability overall.
• This year I also started a "Developer in Residence" program, where I would spend a quarter embedded in a team to help them improve their developer experience. I spent Q4 2025 embedded
• in the identity team, splitting up our overprovisioned pipeline which delivered authorization and authentication data to Confluent Cloud services.
• This project had been discussed and planned for many years, but never executed due to its complexity and risk. I took ownership of the project, working closely with the identity team and completed it
• in just one quarter due to my experience with Confluent Cloud infrastructure. This involved redesigning the architecture of the pipeline, writing migration and rollback plans for devel/stag/prod, and executing controlled org‑by‑org rollouts

Jun 2023 – Jan 2025 · 1 yr 7 mos

• Next, I moved on to the Developer Productivity team to standardize and improve the developer experience at Confluent. I am the main owner of
• Service Runtime Go, the framework that most Confluent Cloud Go services are built on. I fixed customer facing bugs, improved observability, and added features to make life easier for service owners.
• In particular, I:
• Significantly sped up OpenTelemetry adoption by solving tricky issues with metrics emission and setup
• Improved service code health through dependency injection and lazy loading
• Enabled server to server authentication by adding plug-and-play support for mTLS and TLS to existing grpc and http servers
• Added test support for kafka and postgres via testcontainers, making it easy to write integration tests that use real dependencies
• Wrote thorough documentation and examples to help new teams onboard to the framework quickly, including some of the oldest code in the company
• One thing I'm proud of here is I wrote a component testing framework that makes it easy to write "integration like" tests that are fast, reliable, and easy to write. This test framework
• would start your service up locally with testcontainer dependencies or mocks, and allow you to set a debugger and see every code path your service would take in production.
• This made it easy to write tests that cover complex interactions between components without the flakiness of full system tests. This caught numerous issues and significantly improved
• service reliability; most importantly, the framework is incredibly light weight and easy to use, so teams actually use it! To date, of our ~200 services in Confluent Cloud, ~90 services use Service Runtime Go,
• and 63 have adopted the component test framework, with hundreds of component tests written.

Jan 2022 – Jun 2023 · 1 yr 5 mos

• Revamped Confluent Cloud's entire api key system, replacing a difficult legacy monolith with microservices for faster delivery and less required tribal knowledge.
• Migrated every single api key for every single customer to our new system, totaling millions of api keys without a single customer disruption.
• I coordinated with the Kafka, KSQL, Schema Registry, Traffic teams to make sure their api keys worked with the new system
• I set up a new deployment pipeline so api keys could get from control plane to data plane quickly and reliably
• I created a new api key table for more efficient storage and retrieval of api keys
• I set up new backend API services so customers could CRUD api keys quickly - with lots of alerts on latency and errors to ensure reliability
• I wrote tons of careful migration guides and runbooks to ensure the migration went smoothly. Of course, not everything went perfectly, but
• I wrote incredibly detailed RCA documents to make sure we learned from our mistakes and improved the process for next time.
• Lots of monitors and alerts to ensure we caught any issues early and could respond quickly
• And of course, an incredibly dense test suite to ensure correctness of the migration process
• This was a massive and brutal undertaking that had been attempted twice in the last four years but were unsuccessful until my attempt. I turned api keys from one of our most feared systems to a gold standard service.
• We've had maybe < 5 incidents in the last three years since the migration, compared to multiple incidents per month before.
• My efforts unblocked our largest deal in the company history at the time (8 figures!).

Jan 2021 – Jan 2022 · 1 yr

• I convinced my intern manager and mentor to let me work on Cloud Audit Logs even as an intern. This was a critical security feature for Confluent Cloud that was behind schedule.
• I built the main cloud infrastructure for audit logs, including:
• The service that provisions Audit Log kafka clusters for customers
• The service that routes Audit Log events from customer clusters to their Audit Log clusters
• The emission library that teams use to emit Audit Log events from their services
• The schema and shape of the Audit Log events themselves
• I even worked on Confluent Kafka itself to support the feature.
• Many of the services I wrote are still in use today, and they've reliably served thousands of customers since launch.
• One particular point of pride for me is that I wrote the Audit Logs user guide, the framework for onboarding different teams to emit Audit Logs for customers. The user guide was so well received that it became the gold standard for future Confluent Cloud onboarding documents.

Jun 2020 – Dec 2020 · 6 mos

• One of the founding members of the audit logs initiative in Confluent Cloud and was kept on past my summer internship specifically to deliver audit logs, unblocking 30+ million dollars worth of deals.
• Stabilized audit logs by fixing parse errors and tricky race conditions within the complex Apache Kafka codebase, allowing us to onboard customers into preview and unblocking general availability.
• Integrated audit logging with Datadog and Pagerduty, adding appropriate alerts and monitors.
• At the time, our k8s deployment system was pretty primitive, but was able to figure out and deploy our audit log related services, working through some tricky issues.
• Updated the Confluent CLI to integrate with audit logs.
• As of 2023, I've since moved off the audit logs team, but we have a full team of engineers working on it, and it's one of the critical backbones of our security story!