Skills

Experience

Senior Systems Engineer at ServiceNow

Nov 2023 - present

Senior Platform Engineer at Forem

Mar 2023 - Oct 2023 Departure: Mass layoffs

My role here was some parts a developer, for example the maintenance and evolution of the Forem Cloud SaaS offering's infrastructure, or the handling of operational maintenance inherent to running a Rails app on Heroku, but was in many more parts a mentor, tutor, and interface with an open-source development community. I worked to make our infrastructure confidently and meaningfully accessible by both any engineer at the company, and by external contributors to Forem's repository.

Senior Software Engineer at The Wanderlust Group

Oct 2021 - Oct 2022 Departure: Mass layoffs

My arrival marked the beginning of the eventually-3-person infrastructure team, sitting at the middle of two product development teams and tasked with service stability and developer experience. My role here was one part operational maintenance and evolution of a long-standing Rails monolith on Heroku, one part greenfield development of internal tooling, and one heaping helping of cross- team mentorship on best practices for developing observable, debuggable, and robust code.

Software Engineer at Logixboard

Jan 2020 - Sept 2021

After joining as a seed-round engineer and helping to build the launch product, I went on to found the SRE and "DevOps" team here, tasked with all things infrastructure, operations, and developer experience.

I made our tens of thousands of lines of Terraform more accessible to product engineers, I oversaw and scaled both the public-facing multi-tenant application and the internal customer success tooling, I established logging, metrics, and observability practices, and I built developer tooling to build and deploy applications faster and more securely.

Software Engineer at LiveStories

Jul 2019 - Jan 2020

Architected and built new in-house data ingestion pipeline for US Census data capable of processing tens of millions of rows in under a half hour. Migrated backend services to an EKS-based Kubernetes cluster which I maintained.

Software Developer at Lumen5

Jul 2018 - May 2019

Full-stack development of a Django application and the observability and monitoring thereof, including integration with third-party media providers such as Getty and AudioBlocks.

Software Engineer at Textio

Jun 2017 - Jul 2018

I implemented performant APIs powering a latency-sensitive text editing application, I managed AWS resources with CloudFormation, I ensured data security and GDPR compliance in S3 and via new IAM policy rollouts, and I helped to level up the team's understanding of how and why Git works.

Software Engineer at SpotOn

Aug 2015 - May 2017

Eventually becoming the de-facto lead of the frontend team, I rewrote the aging SpotOn frontend with modern web components, with performance and maintainability as key tenets. I also built microservices to shuttle around financial data.

Freelance Software Developer

2012 - 2015

This far back in time, I was working on things that resemble my contemporary work quite little, and some of the toolchains used aren't even maintained anymore! Why don't we just call it a résumé here and be done, eh?

Testimonials

From Kayla Kantola

a coworker at The Wanderlust Group

“I worked with Josh, but on a different team, and I got to reap the rewards of Josh's stellar work - eg, an awesome and ever-improving DevXP. Josh is extremely passionate, thoughtful, and smart, and it comes through in his work. I had great interactions with him in the times that I got myself into a jam; he would help unbreak my code, and, he'd teach me the "why" behind it, at a level that was useful to me. I learned SO much from Josh when we worked together.

“Beyond being extremely technically talented, Josh is just a genuine delight to work with. He's interesting, kind, communicative, and puts great thought and care into the work he does. I really hope I get the chance to work with Josh again - whoever he works with next will be lucky to have him.”

From Jim Battin

a coworker and mentor at SpotOn

“Josh is really easy to work with. Extremely knowledgeable and [...] willing to say when he doesn't know something, [...] and also willing to do the necessary research to fill in any gaps. He can be opinionated without being abrasive or a stick-in-the-mud. He's helped manage and mentor several junior developers who have grown tremendously under him and they have said in their bi-annual reviews they love working with Josh, mirroring my own experience. Personally speaking, every project I've worked on with Josh has gone smoothly: he gets things done, doesn't get in anyone's way, and avoids "siloing" himself: he has always kept the team apprised of what he's doing.

“Greatest strength: His deep system-level engineering skills, from creating easy to use APIs, tracking their performance, and even deployment and reliability engineering.”

Free Software Contributions and Creations

At work…

At play…

Other Accolades

In my volunteer refereeing and play-by-play broadcasting work with FIRST Robotics, I've been recognized with two Volunteer of the Year awards, one at the 2019 FIRST Robotics Competition Canadian Pacific Regional, and the other at the 2023 FIRST Tech Challenge Washington State Championship.