Ph.D. coursework in Computer Science, CUNY Graduate Center; Withdrawn in good standing, 09/2008 - 05/2013
M.S. Computer Science (enroute to the Ph.D.), The City College of New York, 05/2013
B.S. Computer Science and Minor in English, The City College of New York, Cum Laude, 09/2003 - 06/2008
Senior Staff Software Engineer, Spotify, 09/2022 - Present
- Serving as the lead architect for a company-wide initiative to unify multiple ad servers.
Staff Software Engineer, Spotify, 04/2018 - 09/2022
- Served as the architect (engineering lead) for a new, sponsored recommendation ad format to promote artists' work. This 1+ year effort spans 4 business units (8+ squads).
- Led the adoption and case building of Phoenix Liveview and the BEAM VM for internal applications. Grew a grassroots BEAM community from 3 to 35+ people. Wrote a 26 page RFC analyzing the BEAM VM across numerous technical dimensions to prove its superiority in building high-traffic, highly concurrent systems.
- Served as the lead architect for a year-long effort to build and launch a self-serve ad marketplace in Spotify for Artists, spanning 3+ missions and 7+ squads. We shipped our most complex effort on time due to my involvement.
- Led the monolith to microservices transition for Spotify Ad Studio; an effort spanning 5 teams.
Senior Software Engineer, Spotify, 06/2016 - 04/2018
- Served as a full-stack, technical leader in the development of Spotify Ad Studio: a self-serve advertising platform for small/medium sized businesses. The platform was written primarily React/Redux, Java, and MySQL.
- Refactored code and teams with the goal of optimizing for the success of the business and products.
- Served as the right hand to product – bridging product and business goals with technical solutions.
- Served as a key team member in scaling the product from zero to millions of dollars in revenue.
- Served as a key team member in designing and implementing a payment stack that supported multiple payment provider integrations: PayPal, Adyen, and the Spotify payment stack.
- Served as a core team member in the design and architectural review of numerous key features/systems powering the product and connected applications.
- Served as a key contributor to making Ad Studio GDPR and ITGC compliant.
- Mentored less experienced engineers across teams to become more effective engineers and leaders.
- Saw the team grow from a single team with a handful of people to many teams with 50+ people contributing.
JavaScript Engineer, Bēhance team at Adobe Systems, 04/2014 - 04/2016
- Co-authored and maintained a rewrite of the front-end for the Bēhance project editor – powering all content creation on the Behance.net and Adobe Portfolio web applications using a combination of Ractive.js and internal frameworks.
- Spearheaded and implemented JavaScript build process optimizations cutting deployment build times by about 50%.
- Mentored less-experienced team members: teaching them advanced JavaScript concepts and instilling best practices in software development.
- Authored and open sourced a number of tools and libraries used in production.
Full-stack Software Engineer, YouNow, 10/2013 - 01/2014
- Led all JavaScript development: architecting various Backbone.js (both client and server-side rendered) apps and building the front-end infrastructure for the site's migration from Flash to HTML5 technologies.
- Authored and open sourced a number of production-quality jQuery and Backbone.js plugins.
- Championed and co-led the company's migration from SVN to Git.
- Implemented reports-centric, database optimizations in MySQL shaving off 30% CPU load. & Built a custom, backend event-tracking tool for analyzing the product's virtual economy.
Product Development Intern, Codecademy, 06/2013 - 08/2013
- Led the company's server-side, A/B testing efforts.
- Implemented bug fixes and usability features across the Ruby on Rails technology stack.
- Managed about a dozen volunteer course creators in the production of the Code Year Python Track.
Founder, Mr. Joel Kemp's Programming Lessons, 08/2012 - 08/2015
- Had around 5+ customers over the years who signed up for my private programming courses.
- Had a repeat customer for 5 years (8th grade through high school). At the end of our time, he built a facebook clone in Python/Flask with MySql and git.
Python and Front-end web development mentor, Thinkful, 04/2014 - 09/2014
Adjunct Lecturer, New York University, 01/2012 - 05/2013
- Taught the "Introduction to Computer Programming" course in Python
Adjunct Lecturer, Hunter College, 08/2009 - 02/2012
- Taught the "Introduction to Computers" course
- Taught the "Introduction to C++ programming" course
Adjunct Lecturer, The City College of New York, 08/2009 - 05/2011
- Ran the "Software Engineering lab"
"Parallel Uglification" - FullStack Academy, 02/2016
"Navigating codebases using Static Analysis and Node.js" - NodeJS NYC Meetup, 07/2015
"Using Static Analysis to Give Build Tools a Brain" - FullStack Conference, 10/2014
"R.js: A Love Story" - NYCHTML5 Meetup, 10/2014
"Using Grunt to Auto-Generate Gruntfiles" - Powered by JavaScript Conference at Strangeloop, 09/2014
"Using Grunt to Auto-Generate Gruntfiles" - QueensJS Meetup, 08/2014
"Large-Scale JavaScript" - New York University, 05/2014