Software Engineer | Sydney, Australia
I'm a software engineer and architect with 15+ years of experience building and scaling distributed systems at Apple, Canva, eBay, Atlassian, and Walmart. I focus on building (most importantly), reliability, performance, and business impact for products of all shapes and sizes. I've alternated between being a wagie and working on contracting gigs with different clients.
I build high-throughput, low-latency platforms with consistent-hashing topologies, focusing on scalability, extensibility, resilience, and automated delivery. Currently running Tentacle Software, a boutique engineering consultancy where I bring my experience across many of the top companies in the world to clients that wish to uplevel their engineering efforts and software.
- Instruction Fine Tuning for LLMs
- RAG and Agentic Workflows
- Distributed Systems
- Platform Engineering
- Cloud-Native Architectures
Platform Engineering at Scale (Walmart)
- Built core platform systems for config management, auto-generated CRUD APIs, and parallel deployment orchestration
- Enabled an 8,000-developer ecosystem to rapidly build and scale ecommerce
- Drove migration from proprietary platform to open-source stack, saving $100M+ annually
Live Collaboration Products (Canva)
- Led development of 5 frontier live/collab products: Talking Presentations, Reactions, Remote Control, Playlist, Canva Live
- Grew 10M+ MAUs in 2 years on the 1B+ presentations/year platform
- Scaled Canva Search from 20M to 80M MAU (4x growth)
High Availability Systems (Apple)
- Principal Engineer for globally distributed load balancer with 99.999% availability
- Led a team of 12 engineers on device activations platform
Search Infrastructure (Atlassian)
- Architected active-active load balancer with ZooKeeper for Elasticsearch cluster
- Reduced downtime by 20+ hours/quarter, increased customer NPS for search by 15%
Languages: Java (primary), Go, Python, Kotlin, Scala, Node.js
Cloud: AWS (EC2, RDS, DynamoDB, SNS/SQS), GCP (BigQuery, Dataform, Pub/Sub)
Distributed: Kafka, Spark, Redis, ZooKeeper, consistent hashing, active-active topologies
Frameworks: Spring, GraphQL, gRPC, Temporal, Protobuf
Search: Apache Solr (indexing/serving at scale)
AI/ML: LLMs, RAG, LangGraph, agentic workflows, Prefect
DevOps: Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, Spinnaker, ArgoCD
- Systems and methods for interactive presentations - US 20230205552
- Systems and methods for storing and replaying presentations w/ video and audio - US 20230205808
- Systems and methods for remotely controlling electronic presentations - US20230076902A1
- System and method for increasing throughput of a PaaS system - US 9342369 B2
- Verification of complex multi-application and multi-node deployments - US 20140109082
- Building a Data-Driven Autocorrection System - Canva Engineering Blog
- Lessons Learnt from Building Reactive Microservices for Canva Live - Medium/Canva
- Introducing Regressr: An Open Source Regression Testing Tool - eBay Tech Blog