Resume / CV

Netflix Senior Product Reliability Engineer (3 years 5 months)

Tier 2 software support engineer for internally developed web applications at Netflix, I played a crucial role in evaluating escalated tickets from our tier 1 user experience team. I conducted technical research and collaborated with Engineering teams, Product Managers, and Technical Solutions Managers to prioritize bug fixes and address feature requests.

Sitting at the intersection of various aspects of the Netflix studio, including content creation, ingest, encoding, metadata capture, deployment, go-live, and promotion, I developed cross-functional relationships with internal teams and partners. While my subject matter expertise centers around artwork acquisition and promotional media workflows, I am adept at addressing a wide range of issues that our team can be paged for.

A significant contribution I made during my tenure is the development, maintenance, and promotion of an application ownership tracker known as “Who Owns What” or “WOW.” This comprehensive tool spans the entire company and ensures consistent responses to on-call pages. With a reliable source of truth, we no longer relied on tribal knowledge to determine ownership arrangements. When we received a page, we could quickly access an up-to-date rolodex to identify the relevant teams, even if we lack direct subject matter expertise.

Considering the dynamic nature of Netflix, which often leads to frequent changes in tools and team structures, the Who Owns What tool had proven indispensable. It not only documented ownership but also tracked cross-functional team associations, enabling easy discovery of who is working on what across various applications. Additionally, it helped us stay informed about team name changes, aiding in the competitive recruitment of talent. In line with Netflix’s growth, I also explored script-based solutions to programmatically expose this information, further enhancing its utility for the future.

Skills: Streaming Media · Triage · Cross-Functional Team Building · Technical Support · Problem Solving

Netflix Support Engineer, DevOps (4 years 5 months)

As a Tier-3 DevOps Support Engineer, I played a pivotal role in triaging user tickets, ensuring timely and accurate resolution of complex technical issues. I leveraged my in-depth knowledge and expertise to analyze incoming tickets, diagnose underlying problems, and provide efficient solutions. By effectively prioritizing and escalating tickets, I facilitated seamless communication between end-users and the engineering team, ensuring that critical issues received prompt attention.

In addition to ticket triaging, I engaged in technical writing to contribute to a comprehensive knowledge base. This involved documenting the troubleshooting steps, resolutions, and good practices for various issues encountered by users. By documenting our knowledge, we enabled more consistent understanding of information, decreasing response times for tickets of known issues.

Furthermore, I had a hand in business process illustration. This entailed visualizing and documenting the workflows, procedures, and dependencies within the support organization and across different teams. Through the use of flowcharts, diagrams, and other visual aids, I effectively communicated complex business processes, enabling stakeholders to gain a holistic understanding of the support ecosystem. These visual representations not only facilitated knowledge transfer but also highlighted areas for process improvement and optimization.

Skills: Business Process Mapping · Technical Writing · Cross-team Collaboration · Technical Support · Problem Solving

Prototyper / Lab Tech / Machinist / Shop Manager

I held a multifaceted position that encompassed a wide range of responsibilities. Collaborating closely with designers and engineers from hardware startups, I enabled ideas to be brought to life, in preparation for business pitch presentations.

As a prototyping lab manager, I was responsible for maintaining an organized and well-equipped laboratory environment. I ensured the availability of necessary tools, equipment, and supplies for projects and experiments. Additionally, I oversaw the calibration, maintenance, and repair of prototyping equipment to ensure accurate and reliable design validation. I also managed inventory, tracked consumables, and enforced safety protocols and regulations within the laboratory setting.

Operating and programming a range of machining equipment, including a lathe, Bridgeport mill, and Tormach CNC, I produced prototype components and parts. I selected appropriate materials and cutting tools for machining operations, and advised on these aspects to our program participants.

Full Stack Web Software Engineer
Apple Education Marketing,
Sales Planning and Operations,
Business Process Re-engineering

I had the opportunity to work on diverse projects involving the development of internal tools for managing data and business processes. These experiences allowed me to contribute to Apple Education sales and marketing, as well as North America enterprise sales. Here’s an expanded description of my responsibilities and achievements:

Initially, I focused on building internal tools to support Apple Education sales and marketing efforts. One notable accomplishment was enabling thousands of teachers to receive a complimentary copy of Mac OS X, providing them with valuable resources for their educational needs. Additionally, I facilitated discounted access to iWork for many of these teachers, further enhancing their productivity and collaboration capabilities.

In collaboration with the education marketing team, I constructed numerous sales lead forms to capture relevant data. These forms streamlined the lead generation process and facilitated efficient data utilization for marketing purposes. By working closely with the team, I ensured that the captured data was effectively analyzed and leveraged to drive targeted marketing campaigns and initiatives.

I also developed the backend for a laptop cart quote configurator. This involved creating the back end for a user-friendly webpage with multiple configuration steps, enabling education customers to customize laptop cart quotes as part of an invoice purchase process. The configurator seamlessly generated customized PDF quotes, simplifying the quoting process and enhancing the overall sales experience.

I also participated in Macworld booth staffing, and Apple Education’s National Education Conference meetings.

Skills: Lead Generation · Full-Stack Development · Marketing

President of the Board of Directors (10 months)

Managed one of the oldest non-profit arts organizations in San Jose, during an extremely challenging period of it’s life. Coordinated 85% of the entire annual art auction. Ran monthly board meetings. Pushed to hire a gallery coordinator. Was one of only two board members at the lowest point, and helped to turn around the board so that it sits at 8 members at the time my tour of duty was done.

Member of the Board of Directors (2 years, 2 months)

Ran a whole lot of music and art events. Implemented a bunch of web technologies and communication tools. Helped to keep the boat afloat.

Email Marketing support (since 2007)

Managing the email channel for outreach and event marketing. There is at least one mass email to almost 1000 people that I still send every month, and we get about 40% open rate. Not Bad!™

Co-Founder
Clinks, Inc.
Oct 2008 – Mar 2009 · 6 mos
Advised on branding, infrastructure, design, user experience, and back-end data systems.

Full Stack Engineer
Pearson Branded · Full-time
2002 – 2003 · 1 yr
One specific project I did was to develop an in-house project postmortem assessment tool to be used by staff and clients to determine how well the agency did on specific projects. It involved data capture, front end design, back end administration tools, and analysis and summary report preparation. This was before UserVoice… or even a simple google form. I’d do a build-versus-buy analysis now. Now, there are better options for this than building something from scratch.

Structured Document production, prepress, and Full Stack Engineer
Cgrafx
2001 – 2002 · 1 yr
Developed a web-based marketing tool to track responses to email campaigns. Mass mailings were sent out to email lists and then we measured how people responded to the email by tracking what they clicked on. Analysis and reporting tools were created for cgrafx account executives for reporting to the client on the effectiveness of the email campaign. This was before mailchimp and whatever we have now.

… 9/11 happened here …
… the “dotcom crash” happened here …

Co-Founder, Visual Design Lead
Puppettime, then Cycore
1999 – 2000 · 1 yr
Creative and technical design and implementation of 3d characters for use in a 3d story-telling content creation tool. This was a startup I co-founded that was acquired. I got to take some meetings on page mill road at a bigtime silicon valley M&A law firm. Holy moly this was before docusign, too. Lots of signatures. Then I got to go to Sweden for a couple of weeks! It was awesome!

Print Production Designer
CKS, USWeb/CKS, marchFIRST
1998 – 2000 · 2 yrs
CKS was a world famous integrated branding, media, and marketing company. I was in the Cupertino office working alongside creative directors and designers to ensure that their concepts translated perfectly into high quality print-ready media. I created real 3d mockups for product box designs. I prepared other large format prints and other high-value previsualization tools. I produced imagery in photoshop like a manual chatGPT, but like, manually. A creative director would tell me what they want, and I’d go try to figure that out. “Can you make it pop more?” they would ask. This was back at the dawn of time, basically.

Quality Assurance Engineer: Photoshop
Adobe Systems
1996 – 1998 · 2 yrs
putting my natural talent for breaking things to good use, I brought my prepress field experiece with me to Adobe and worked alongside Engineering as they released versions of their code during the development and release phases of the software lifecycle. I broke photoshop, and logged bugs in the bug database and worked with engineering to reproduce the issues. Photoshop shipped, and we began to prepare a dot release once users started locating the corner cases. Then we worked on the localized versions of photoshop for non-English European languages.

Prepress Print Production
Electric Pencil
1995
Photoshop, Illustrator, QuarkXpress, mostly. Also operating film printers. dye sublimation printers. “Jaz” drives came out around this time.

Prepress Print Production
Graphic Pizza
1994
Photoshop, Illustrator, QuarkXpress, mostly. Also operating film printers, dye sublimation printers. We used “zip drives”.

Very Assorted Others… 1990-1994

• at Pizza Hut, cooking up that deep dish
• at a custom framing shop. Owner loved the “oldies”, and played them in the shop, all the time. “Oldies”, for him was songs from the 1950’s, when he was a kid. razors, and broken glass being the worst of the dangers, but omg! so much matte board scrap!
• a shop that wholesale sold balloons, AND selling balloons and glow sticks on the weekend, at street festivals. The founder wore clown makeup at them.
• phone sales, for a shop that sold computer parts and cheap 1Mb ram modules to companies.
• telemarketing for a chiropractor, doing cold calling. old school. “pick up the phone and dial!”
• at Michael’s, before they even had barcode scanners at the checkout! we had to do tax math on the calculator, in realtime, all day long.