Software engineer with 16 years of experience in platform engineering, reliability and large-scale data systems. At GitHub since 2016, I've led multi-year initiatives across Ruby on Rails, MySQL, data migrations and distributed caching. In recent years, AI-assisted software development has become a core part of how I work.
Expertise
Platform engineering · Database reliability and scalability · Large-scale data migrations · Distributed caching · Database observability and governance · AI-assisted software development · Ruby on Rails · MySQL · Technical leadership
Experience
GitHub
Staff Software Engineer
- Technical leadership: set technical direction for multi-year database reliability initiatives spanning large-scale data changes, application boundaries, distributed caching and database proxying.
- Distributed caching: architected and shipped a reusable caching framework handling over 1M operations per second and removing hundreds of thousands of queries per second from MySQL.
- Database partitioning: improved the reliability and scalability of GitHub's large Ruby on Rails and MySQL deployment by partitioning relational database workloads.
See my GitHub blog post about partitioning GitHub's relational databases.
- Data transitions: built an automated data-transition platform and drove its adoption as the default for GitHub's Rails application and multiple services.
- Database governance: built observability and governance tooling that exposed costly database usage, established ownership and enforced company-wide reliability standards through CI.
Senior Software Engineer
- Core product features: improved repositories, pull requests, code review and issues.
- Commit attribution: added support for co-authors on repository commits.
See the GitHub blog post announcing commit co-authors.
- Performance: made diff pages 3x faster.
See my GitHub blog post describing how we made diff pages 3x faster.
- Protected branches: added configurable status-check requirements and user and team push restrictions.
See my GitHub blog post describing relevant product changes.
Simplificator
Software Engineer, Team and Project Lead
- Customer consulting: advised customers on engineering practices and team organization.
- Led web and mobile projects from requirements through production scaling.
Software Engineer
- Web engineering with Ruby on Rails.
- Mobile engineering for iOS and Android.
Education
University of Zurich
Master of Science in Computer Science
Bachelor of Science in Information Systems