Stripe

Jan 2020 – now

At Stripe, I have focused on building, improving, and hardening APIs, as well as refactoring and modularizing legacy code into separate services to build new abstractions and platforms for the core models that support Stripe's expanding architecture. Recently, I was a founding member of a team that released a new product vertical in less than 18 months. Now, I spend my days on our Tech Enablement team building software, tools, and processes that make Stripe a better, easier place to do your work.

From February 2021-May 2022, I helped grow a new department from a single team of 7 to an organization consisting of more than 70 people and 5 engineering teams. As a tenured engineer, I helped the growth and definition of the new teams and organization by building new processes collaboratively, creating and fostering positive culture with a supportive work environment, and sharing knowledge of internal architecture, tooling, systems, and processes. With dozens of new hires and internal transfers joining the team over the last year, I’ve pushed the team to build sustainable onboarding practices for our team.

In addition to my core work, I served as our team’s Product Security Lead for 2021. I was responsible for creating our security roadmap based on internal team priorities, security initiatives, and engineering-wide priorities as well as providing assistance to my peers with our internal Security Review process and any security-related issues.

During 2020, I built new features and made API improvements for Stripe Invoicing, including line-item level discounts, discount stacking, and Invoicing on behalf of for Connect.

Some of my proudest accomplishments at Stripe are not technical, and I take great pride in the work I do to improve a sense of belonging, foster an inclusive work environment, and make work days just a little more enjoyable.

In 2020, I co-led Stripe’s first-ever fully remote Hackathon with the theme of “Remote Together”, garnering more than 100 entries, multiple prize winners, and praise from past in-person Hackathon participants (I am really, really proud of this).

Recently, I completed a revamp of the engineering department’s Code Review training for all new hire engineers, including producing a new presentation and leading the team creating written training materials. As the lead for the project, I changed Stripe’s approach to code review to include a new emphasis on a learning mindset, fostering a blameless culture, and empathy alongside robust technical discussions.

I mentor several newly hired engineers from our New Grad program, make myself available to help both on and off my team whenever possible, and am my team’s self-designated DRI of Fun (Directly Responsible Individual). Most recently, I ran team trivia!

GitHub

Sept 2017 – Dec 2019

During my time at GitHub, I left an impact both technically and culturally. As the Technical Lead for GitHub Projects, I served as an advocate for the product and our team during times of organizational change, onboarding 5 new engineers, 2 new managers, and 3 new product managers to the product roadmap and system architecture for Projects. Prior to my departure, I provided guidance on the new iteration of GitHub Projects and helped shaped the direction of future work.

I built and released numerous customer-facing features for github.com as both an individual contributor and technical lead, including advanced Projects permissioning, Issues performance improvements, User projects, and Project imports, to name a few. I drafted, collaborated, and sought out approval for proposals to processes around project management, batched deployment, oncall response, and monitoring, iterations of which continue to be used at GitHub to this day. My code reviews were provided as examples for clear, empathetic communication while still raising blocking issues in an approachable way.

As a technical contributor, I leveraged my internal expertise to provide additional risk assessment code reviews during critical delivery periods involving high profile public announcements. As the team’s security lead, I coordinated with AppSec on feature reviews, patching numerous security vulnerabilities, and auditing the Projects API authorization matrix while fixing gaps in current authorization paths.

I spent my free time providing support to peers in several areas as a subject matter expert, including GraphQL, accessibility, and other technical questions, as well as mentoring other engineers. I served as a founding member for Adacats, GitHub’s marginalized genders employee resource group, and helped form the group’s mission, roadmap, and priorities for its first year. I was a frequently sought-after interviewer for priority candidates due to my ability to articulate pros and cons, answer difficult questions, and provide thoughtful feedback on candidates.

Past experience

HashiCorp, Software Engineer for Terraform Enterprise (Mar–Aug 2016)

New Relic, Senior Software Engineer for APM and Alerting (Sept 2014 – Mar 2016)

Girl Develop It, Chicago Chapter Lead (July 2013 – August 2014)

Instructure, Software Engineer for Canvas LMS (August 2013 – August 2014)

Independent contractor, Wordpress, website design, and site building (September 2003 – March 2013)