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Hi, I’m Bill!

he/him • 💻 GitHub/vegetabill • 📚 Goodreads

Me in a Nutshell

I have a long track record of delivering consumer-grade SaaS products, both greenfield and embedded within tricky legacy systems. I’m comfortable across the stack but recently focused on backend API and event-driven processing.

Recent Experience

Senior Software Engineer, Lattice

2021, October – 2023, January (San Francisco)

💾 Tech stack: Typescript, Postgres, GraphQL, React w/Relay, SQS

Most Recent Role

Senior backend-focused engineer in Lattice’s performance reviews product domain, owned by 18 engineers across 4 teams.

Reviews was the business-critical product for Lattice, empowering enterprise customers to run review cycles with thousands of employees.

Delivery & Leadership

  • Redesigned customer-facing analytics backend from the ground up using denormalized view DB powered by async events
    • Coached L1 peer on this project leading to promotion
  • Self-directed tech debt cleanup of text sentiment analysis
    • Replaced several custom DB tables and code paths with SQS
    • Integrated Google API including handling rate limiting and idempotent retry
  • Project lead for CSV import/export adding employee calibration feature across massive legacy codebase
  • Reorganized React frontend app hierarchy to improve user onboarding
    • Simultaneously migrated components to Next.js pages
  • Key contributor migrating monolith code to use new services

Org Impact

  • Created new interview question from scratch with accompanying training materials
    • question consistently praised by interviewers as effective and interviewees as fair/realistic
  • Officially mentored multiple peers, including coaching a junior L1 through rapid promotion to L2
  • Facilitated an engineer book club on functional domain modeling resulting in cross-pollination of ideas across teams

Apprenticeship Engineering Manager, Techtonica

2020, January - July (San Francisco)

  • Managed non-profit’s 4th cohort
    • bootcamp for low-income women and non-binary adults with stipend and laptop provided
  • Directly managed 13 apprentice engineers learning full-stack web development using React and Node.js to prep for internships

Lead Developer (SDE3/L6), Goodreads (Amazon)

2014-2019 (San Francisco)

💾 Tech stack: Rails, Python, Apache Spark, React, Java, MySQL

Revenue Engineering Team (2017-2019)

  • Led team of 7 other engineers to deliver ad products and author promo features for largest business unit in the org, collecting $2MM monthly revenue
  • Partnered with Kindle engineering teams to share ebook deal data via internal schema-based publishing platform
  • Resolved on-call tickets for Kindle-facing services, overnight email pipeline, and public website both as SME and coordinating with other ops and engineering teams inside and outside Goodreads
  • Coached engineers on the team via regular 1:1’s as well as advising product managers and other senior technical leaders
  • Analyzed and estimated multiple projects for business and technical stakeholders ranging in size up to 24 dev-months
  • Coached first-time Tech Lead to build confidence and empower team

Cross-Team/Cross-Project Contributions

  • Evangelized React Native and GraphQL through talks and multiple hackathon projects, resulting in adoption for production features
  • Co-founder of Lightning Talk series for engineering and product/design to share their stories
  • Formally mentored several junior engineers within Goodreads, AWS, and Amazon Music

Homepage Rebuild (2016)

  • Rebuilt the complete web homepage using React inside existing large Rails app
    • Before vs After (As of 2018, daily traffic of 2MM sessions)
  • Owner of integrating React (pre-1.0) into Rails app
    • pull requests to 3p react-rails gems
    • designed dev and prod build pipeline

Lead Developer, ThoughtWorks Products

2010-2014 (San Francisco)

Tech Lead - Mingle (Agile Software Project Management Tool, discontinued)

  • Evolved an on-premise Java/JRuby app to a multi-tenant SaaS system supporting 40K users
  • Extracted separate service to handle user license data
  • Promoted the product with salespeople at several conferences
  • Provided L3 production support for global customers, including site visits

Selected Writing

Formal Education

  • MS, Information Science. University of Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh, PA, USA
  • BA, English. University of Mary Washington. Fredericksburg, VA, USA