Liz Bennett

Software Engineer

Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, Japan13 yrs 10 mos experience

Most Likely To SwitchHighly Stable

Key Highlights

Over 10 years of experience in large-scale software systems.
Led high-impact security features at Confluent.
Passionate mentor fostering team excellence.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a SaaS expert with a strong focus on security and identity management.

Contact

Skills

Core Skills

Identity And Access Management (iam)Software Architectural Design

Other Skills

MentoringDistributed SystemsSoftware InfrastructureSoftware DesignGo (Programming Language)KubernetesApache KafkaGolangAWSAuth0MusicLinuxVimPythonC

About

A passionate, goal-oriented and meticulous software engineer, I’ve been working in the realm of mission-critical, large-scale software systems for 10+ years. My work has included everything from high-level, strategic design work, establishing best practices, mentoring and coaching teammates, project planning, DevOps automation, to quickly banging out well-crafted code. I’m fascinated by the challenges of building high quality software and I love working collaboratively to drive value and ship projects. https://medium.com/@lizbennett https://twitter.com/@zzbennett

Experience

13 yrs 10 mos

Total Experience

2 yrs 4 mos

Average Tenure

6 yrs 8 mos

Current Experience

Confluent

2 roles

Senior Staff Software Engineer

Promoted

Feb 2023 – Present · 3 yrs 3 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

Technical lead for Confluent's Identity and Authentication teams. Responsible for delivering some of Confluent's highest priority security features involving security-sensitive, mission-critical, large-scale, distributed systems. As the most senior engineer on a team of 15+ engineers, I am deeply involved in mentorship and coaching of junior engineers, while also enforcing a very high bar for operational excellence, code quality, and developer productivity. On my teams, I strive to foster a culture of high-performance, but also positivity, compassion and camaraderie.
Some highlights of my achievements include:
Led a complete re-architecture of Confluent's secure token issuing and verification systems. Led a team to build a self-service, flexible, extensible, globally-available, high-performance platform for issuing and verifying secure tokens
Designed and shipped Confluent Cloud's IAM systems for our hosted Flink offering
Led a large re-architecture of Identity and Organization management. Shipped support for Users belonging to multiple Organizations
Migrated Confluent Cloud's customer facing authentication systems to Auth0
Won 1st place in Confluent's Hackathon by leading a team to build a self-service platform for internal tools that aid in debugging and troubleshooting
Identity and Authentication teams consistently score 5-10 points higher than average in company-wide engagement scores
I use these tools and technologies on a daily basis:
Golang, gRPC, occasionally Python and Java
Kubernetes, Helm, Docker
Mainly AWS, some GCP and Azure
Auth0, Okta
Postgres, Elasticsearch, Kafka, Terraform, Datadog, Semaphore
I am very familiar with open standards for IAM such as OAuth2.0, OIDC, and SCIM2.0

MentoringSoftware Architectural DesignIdentity and Access Management (IAM)Distributed SystemsSoftware InfrastructureSoftware Design+3

Staff Software Engineer

Sep 2019 – Apr 2023 · 3 yrs 7 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

Leading various projects to improve security and identity across Confluent Cloud.

Stitch fix

Member of Data Platform - Compute Infrastructure

Oct 2016 – Sep 2019 · 2 yrs 11 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

Led efforts to re-architect Stitch Fix's streaming data infrastructure. Shipped a complete rewrite of Stitch Fix's real-time data systems. Established event-driven and logging best practices in the department. Architected Stitch Fix's data warehouse GDPR compliance strategy and data governance systems.

Loggly

2 roles

Senior Software Engineer

Promoted

Jun 2015 – Oct 2016 · 1 yr 4 mos

Delivered several projects across the logging infrastructure. Rebuilt Loggly’s parsing engine to allow users to define custom parsing rules. Implemented a caching layer to enable auto-completion in the search bar. Worked on a rewrite of the Elasticsearch query engine, which enabled caching and incremental streaming of results over websockets. Built general purpose Elasticsearch benchmarking utilities.

Software Engineer

Sep 2014 – Jun 2015 · 9 mos

Software Engineer

Jul 2013 – Sep 2014 · 1 yr 2 mos · Mountain View, CA

As part of a major rewrite of LinkedIn’s News Feed infrastructure, I wrote the ingestion service that consumed events from LinkedIn’s Kafka pipeline and indexed them into the RocksDB based datastore that powered the News Feed. Prototyped a news feed architecture based on LinkedIn’s search infrastructure, Galene. Wrote a preprocessor for JSON to facilitate iterating on the News Feed recommendation models.

Booz allen hamilton

Intern Research Assistant

Jun 2012 – Aug 2012 · 2 mos · Herndon, VA

Aligned to the Solutions Engineering and Design Intern Cohort
Main research projects included topics such as: Cloud Computing, Big Data, Heads Up Display technology, Android mobile development
Designed and implemented a MS Access database to organize the human capital efforts for a proposal of 400+ personnel

International contemporary ensemble

Systems and Production Intern

Jun 2011 – Sep 2011 · 3 mos · Brooklyn, New York

Configured ICE's CMS based website, installed modules and plugins (Expression Engine)
Wrote custom e-mail templates in HTML
Designed detailed stage diagrams using Google Sketchup
Researched and wrote articles about prominent performers and composers
Backstage support during performances

Turings craft

Part Time Linux System Administrator

Jan 2011 – Jan 2012 · 1 yr

Designed and implemented a script to provide easy installation, setup and maintenance of Ruby on Rails development environments
Various troubleshooting and fixing of server related issues (Fedora Linux)