Principal Platform & Distributed Systems Engineer

20+ years building products, platforms, and distributed systems that remain understandable as they scale. Has been a first or founding engineer, owning and evolving end-to-end systems in fast-moving environments. Focuses on high-throughput pipelines, messaging platforms, media processing, recommendation engines, and real-time infrastructure. Builds real-time dashboards and browser-based tooling to observe, debug, and control distributed systems, using local-first storage and media processing as well as real-time communication workflows. Designs systems that remain understandable and resilient under load, retries, and partial failures. Recent work includes building a messaging system delivering millions of emails and push notifications, deploying real-time pipelines and recommendation systems for tens of millions of users, launching a browser-based video editing and encoding platform, and scaling event ingestion 100x. Prefers small, product-focused teams where engineers stay close to production, communicate early about risks and tradeoffs, and work directly with customers. Pragmatic about LLMs, finding them effective for exploration, debugging, documentation, and tightly scoped implementation work when paired with strong engineering judgment and rigid testing. Interested in full-time, part-time, or contract roles in Forward deployed engineering, Founding or early engineering, Platform and systems engineering, and Data engineering.