Adam Jones

Kit is an email marketing platform focused on content creators.

Refactoring

Led a project to rebuild core of business email sending code. We improved performance, reliability, correctness, and business flexibility with no downtime.

Extracted high volume link click tracking to its own service, improving relability and security.

Redesigned Sequence email feature for observability and performance improvements.

Application Performance

Regularly solved stability compromising MySQL query and access problems.

Led an application wide performance project, significantly reducing page response times and timeouts.

Redesigned the database layout for the Sequence email feature, halving query times and eliminating the need for a dedicated replica database.

Migrated MySQL-based email activity tracking to Elasticsearch, scaled out to 2.5 billion emails/month (~150bn total records).

Designed indexes to optimize SQL queries, including using Github's gh-ost tool for online schema migration.

Revised and rewrote SQL queries to address suboptimal query plans.

Cross-Team Collaboration

Regularly worked with product and design teams for successful feature planning.

Worked with account managers to fulfill specialized usage reports for large accounts.

Gathered requirements and pitched projects to support our account migrations team.

Software Quality

Principal contributor and maintainer for core of business email sending code.

Performed multiple Rails and Ruby migrations for 150kloc Rails application.

Frequent pairing sessions to share domain knowledge and seek better designs.

Popularized use of TDD for introducing regression tests in response to bugs.

Regularly successful at deducing bugs from user reports and data analysis.

Operations & On-Call

Participated in engineering on-call rotation.

Helped devise and refine incident response processes.

Frequently worked with infrastructure team to address system wide issues.

Championed use of pair programming practices during emergency response to avoid exacerbating issues.

Teaching & Leadership

Regularly gave organization wide project presentations.

Consistently conducted engineering team educational presentations.

Contributed technical discussion to the company engineering blog.

Frequent pairing and teaching on refactoring, performance optimization, and reliabiity.

Helped define and revise engineering interview process.

Additional Projects

Built asynchronous data syncing, reporting, and chart visualization for 600+ million subscribers using Elasticsearch.

Led a project to optimize importing email lists, resulting in 10x performance improvements and reusable data ingestion tooling.

Trimble is a GPS and geospatial hardware and software company. My department primarily worked on a storage and processing service for massive geospatial datasets.

Collaboration and Project Management

Guided geospatial storage service through post acquisition rebrand, working with product and design teams to improve functionality.

Oversaw multiple integration projects with other teams inside the company.

Conducted requirements interviews for ongoing integration support.

Organization & Leadership

Designed and executed hiring process.

Conducted performance reviews and advised on review process changes.

Oversaw ongoing revisions to development and planning processes.

Instituted formal code review process to improve software quality.

Development Principles

Introduced continuous integration testing.

Introduced application performance monitoring.

Replaced live patching with build/deploy for emergency bug fix process.

Led long term project to expand test coverage (10% -> 80% coverage).

Finished multiple incomplete tool transition projects (haml -> erb, Test::Unit -> rspec).

Operations & On Call

Participated in infrastructure and engineering on-call rotations.

Responsible for infrastructure design, implementation, and maintenance.

Application Performance

Conducted database optimizations to resolve performance issues.

Reconfigured Nginx and Ruby (garbage collector) for performance improvements.

Optimized user experience by moving work out of the request path.

Additional Projects and Achievements

Principal implementer for 'geospatial data marketplace', including payment integration.

Rebuilt file upload tool for 1000x performance improvements (2 hours -> <10 seconds).

Principal designer and implementer for API abstractions around geospatial ETL pipelines.

Oversaw core database migration from MySQL to PostgreSQL.

Planned, implemented, and completed a zero-downtime switch from Solr to Elasticsearch.

Contributor towards a web map tile system capable of layering, caching, monitoring, usage tracking, and secure end-user distribution on top of upstream providers.

Worked with designer on redesign of pre-acquisition application (WeoGeo).

Self-taught Ruby and Rails to join web development team. Rose to team lead.