[paul.oppenheim]

Summary

Experienced software engineering leader at startups in realtime collaboration, virtual worlds, enterprise, and games, working on servers, APIs, tools, and infrastructure.

Objective

Work with kind, thoughtful people. Provide and receive clear expectations and frequent, constructive feedback. Deliver value. Leave in time to pick up my kids.

Experience

EasyPost Remote Staff Software Engineer, Carriers Special Project / Core Platform 2021-09 — Present
Remote Software Engineering Manager, Infra-Eng 2020-04 — 2021-08
San Francisco, CA Senior Software Engineer, Infra-Eng 2019-06 — 2020-04
Software engineer on core Ruby on Rails monolith and other internal microservices, then manager, then engineer on carriers core.

Help architect application level sharding for the main API Ruby on Rails service. Help plan / execute / review extraction of vertical services from monolith. Help lead team refactor high throughput event webhook delivery service from MySQL to a scalable eventually consistent storage layer (Cassandra). Create a new code review team and process ("Monolith Deputies") to maintain high code standards while keeping code delivery throughput high. Banter. Help lead the team right after layoffs, through a pandemic, transition to remote work, transition to scrum, transitions of leadership, new formal review and leveling process, and other miscellaneous startup chaos. Create a culture of accepting warmth and togetherness.

Ginger Labs (Notability) San Francisco, CA Software Engineer 2016-08 — 2018-08
Backend / Services lead, twobird, and other unreleased app prototypes.

Work: Auth systems, CRDT operation storage, continuous deploy automation, UI wireframe implementation. Tech: Typescript, React, Redux, Node 6, WebSockets, GraphQL, MySQL, Kubernetes on Google Cloud Platform, Google APIs, bash.

Figma San Francisco, CA Software Engineer 2015-09 — 2016-05
Illustration tool for UI designers.

Led backend service production readiness for beta launch. Helped prototype a realtime collaboration server. Scripted AWS EC2 server config, rewrote deploy for horizontal scale, setup monitoring and alerting in DataDog and PagerDuty. Created policy and trained devs for 6-person on-call and deploy rotation. Tech: Bash, JavaScript / TypeScript, Ruby, and Python.

LiveLoop (acquired by Microsoft) San Francisco, CA Software Developer 2012-11 — 2015-03
5-person startup building PowerPoint collaboration and web presentation sharing.

"Full stack" work:

Voidpop (Slackulator) San Francisco, CA Software Developer 2011-03 — 2012-03
Software for hire and independent product development. Designed and shipped Slackulator, which reads a twitter stream and estimates the amount of time required to read it. (Currently defunct.)
Linden Lab (Second Life) San Francisco, CA Software Engineer 2007-06 — 2010-07
Helped the virtual world Second Life give several million residents a good experience by working on backend system infrastructure software. Helped:
BDNA Mountain View, CA System Discovery Engineer 2005-04 — 2007-05
Worked on BDNA Inventory. Wrote software (mostly perl) to communicate with operating systems & servers via many protocols to inventory hardware and software. Clients include Motorola, Kaiser Permanente, and US Navy.
University of Michigan - AI Lab (SOAR) Ann Arbor, MI Research Assistant 2004-09 — 2005-03
Worked under Prof. John Laird converting the java SOAR editor VisualSOAR to an Eclipse plug-in. Assisted with Mac OS X port of SOAR.
High Voltage Software Hoffman Estates, IL Programming Intern 2002 Summer
Wrote a cross-platform Codewarrior / Microsoft Visual Studio build tool (Sony Playstation 2 "Hunter: Wayward" and Microsoft Xbox "Hunter: Redeemer"). Created DVD layout and demo disc (Xbox "NBA Inside Drive 2003").

Education

University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI BS Computer Science Graduated 2004
Curricular: Artificial Intelligence, Game Development, Graphics. Extracurricular: Wolverine Soft Game Dev (President 2002 & 2003), Siggraph, Entity Digital Arts, UMich-MUG, BUNAC

Projects and Code

Hobbies

Snowboarding, DJing & music, software, privacy, personal informatics / "quantified self", video games, existential angst
☙ References furnished upon request. ❧