Work Experience
My professional journey from wildland firefighting to senior software engineering.
Senior Software Engineer
Act-On Software, Portland
AWS BedrockKafkaSnowflakeTerraformSpring BootClaude Code
- AI Product Replacement: Sole backend engineer delivering a full AI product replacement under a 3-month deadline. Owned architecture, implementation, production rollout, release cycle, on-call, and customer onboarding.
- RAG Architecture: Built multi-agent, multi-source RAG infrastructure with AWS Bedrock, web crawler with Cloudflare/auth handling, and async queuing. Delivered on deadline, then expanded to many-to-many agent/source mapping.
- Email Performance Optimization: Collaborated with Customer Support, Design, Product, and Ops to build a subject line optimizer using Bedrock. Drove a 17% increase in customer email open rates.
- High-Scale Data Architecture: Architected a schema-agnostic Custom Objects feature processing 1M+ complex records per 10 minutes. Enabled real-time ingestion via Snowpipe streaming and Kafka integrations.
- Operational Excellence: Automated Postgres-to-Snowflake replication via OpenFlow. Provisioned infrastructure with Terraform (VPCs, subnets, IAM, Vault). Reduced connector setup from hours to under 20 minutes.
- Mentorship: Trained junior and mid-level engineers on best practices and AI-augmented workflows, including hands-on Claude Code and LLM tooling.
Mid-level Software Engineer
Act-On Software, Portland
Java 21PostgreSQLSCDFSnowflakeAWS
- Legacy Modernization:Upgraded a mission-critical dataflow service (11 downstream dependencies, customer-facing analytics) from Java 8 to Java 21. Consolidated distributed H2 databases into centralized PostgreSQL, eliminating recurring data corruption every few months. Reduced incidents by ~90-95% and established real-time monitoring (previously undetected for up to a month). Directly enabled migration from Act-On's data center to AWS.
- Pipeline Engineering: Built multiple data processing pipelines using Spring Cloud Data Flow to integrate Snowflake, S3, and internal microservices.
- System Design: Designed a segmentation initialization subsystem evaluating contacts against factor types (behavior, profile, CRM, etc.). Used factory and strategy patterns to make onboarding new factor types trivial.
Junior Software Engineer
Act-On Software, Portland
Spring BootSnowflakeKubernetes
- Performance Optimization: Optimized data handling for a data ingestion microservice, eliminating duplication errors and reducing response times from 8 minutes to 300 milliseconds.
- Process Improvement:Fixed a critical UTF-8 corruption issue affecting ~70-80% of customer accounts — all data with special characters or emojis was impacted.
- Customer Support Champion:Championed escalation resolution, reducing org-wide high escalations from 20+ to 9, mediums from 15+ to 2, and fully eliminating my team's 5 escalations.
Research Assistant
University of Alberta
JavaGitEmpirical SE
- Spearheaded a project to revitalize refactoring-aware operation-based merging in a Java-based implementation.
- Emulated double dispatch in Java to make operation-based merging feasible to scale and maintain.
- Leveraged state-of-the-art refactoring detection tools applied to Git.
- Leveraged sparsely documented third-party libraries to programmatically perform refactorings and detect refactoring-related merge conflicts, supporting 17 of the most common known refactoring types.
- Performed large-scale empirical evaluations comparing with IntelliMerge. Published results in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE 2022).
Teaching Assistant
University of Alberta
C/C++Operating Systems
- Delivered course material in lab settings for CMPUT 379 (Operating Systems).
- Designed assessments, quizzes, and exams alongside the instructor.
STEM Tutor
Clark College
CSMathElectrical Engineering
- Assisted hundreds of students at all levels in STEM fields including computer science, math, and electrical engineering.
- Adapted teaching methods to each student's learning style.
- Received the OSWALD Award (Outstanding Students With Academic Leadership and Development Skills) for excellence in service.
Wildland Firefighter (Type 2 Initial Attack)
GFP Response
LeadershipTeam CoordinationRisk AssessmentCommunication
- Completed rigorous wildfire training with an 82% attrition rate — one of 11 out of 60+ trainees selected for the crew.
- Operated in high-risk wildfire environments requiring rapid decision-making under pressure, real-time risk assessment, and tight team coordination.
- Executed tactical firefighting operations including building and holding fireline, burnout operations, and initial/direct/indirect attack strategies to contain and suppress active wildfires.
- Actively communicated fire behavior with other firefighters and air attack to ensure safe fire engagement.
My time as a wildland firefighter taught me communication, discipline, working under pressure, time management, and organizational skills — all directly transferable to software engineering.