University of Waterloo Computer Science, Class of 2020

Welcome to my site!

My name is Jeff.

I like to build things.

Websites, APIs...

Cloud infrastructure...

ML models & pipelines...

...you name it!

If it's challenging...

You can bet I'll love it.

Check out my work ↓!

Welcome to my site!

Full Stack Engineer | Robinhood Tech Lead | Co-founder of Open Mind

University of Waterloo Computer Science

About

What I'm all about.

I am a highly driven and inquisitive engineer with a passion for solving tough problems. I have 5+ years of industry experience at industry-leading companies, including 2 years in a technical leadership role at Robinhood.

Wherever I am, I strive to embody a startup mentality. To me, that means seeking out important issues, owning them from end to end, and delivering value to end users regardless of titles or organizational boundaries. At current and previous companies, I have taken this kind of initiative to drive millions of dollars in cost savings, tens of thousands of hours in engineering hours saved, and multiple new product launches.

I am fortunate to have had the opportunity to explore a variety of technical areas in my lifetime, from cryptocurrency to artificial intelligence, cloud infrastructure to developer productivity, mobile apps to websites. I believe this breadth reflects my natural curiosity about technology, as well as my ability to dive both deeply and quickly into new areas.

Feel free to reach out with questions, ideas, or collaboration opportunities!

At a Glance

  • 3International Medals
  • 2Hackathons Wins
  • 1Peer Reviewed Paper

Skills

What I can do.

Cloud Infrastructure

Kubernetes, AWS EC2, Route53, Lambda, Prometheus, Jaeger, Docker

Backend

Flask, Django, Nginx, Gunicorn, Postgres, MongoDB, Redis, Kafka

Web Dev

React, Redux, Meteor and anything else that can be npm-installed

Machine Learning

Artificial neural nets, convolutional neural nets, Bayes classifiers

Continuous Integration

Jenkins, Bazel, CircleCI, Phabricator

Leadership

Mentorship, architectural design, OKR setting/delivery

Experience

Where I've been.

  • Robinhood

    San Francisco | 2020

    Led a team of 10 engineers to build a Kubernetes-based development and testing platform utilized daily by the entire company, reducing incidents and saving hundreds of thousands of engineering hours annually. Architected and implemented Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, and Jenkins improvements to handle 10X scale, including >1k simultaneously active developer environments, >30k hourly service creations, >100k DNS names.

  • Google

    Seattle | 2019

    Developed and launched a Golang microservice to analyze configuration changes and estimate their impact on production resource availability. Built a data pipeline that aggregated data from the microservice and generated AngularJS web reports for project managers to review.

  • Splunk

    San Francisco | 2018

    Designed a Kubernetes service to predictively adjust AWS capacity in response to internal testing demand, saving 1.3 million dollars in the first year. Expanded Splunk's supported platforms to Kubernetes with a custom operator capable of bootstrapping distributed Splunk deployments.

  • SelfMade

    New York City | 2018

    Overcame a company-wide blocker by proposing and implementing an auto-scaling, self-replicating EC2 cluster capable of bypassing Instagram’s 200 request/hr API rate limit. Built a triplet convolutional net in Pytorch to identify stylistically similar Instagram users. Developed this model into a content sourcing feature, enabling client managers to automatically find relevant images to repost on customers’ Instagram accounts.

  • Teranet

    Toronto | 2017

    Implemented a location-based search results caching feature using the Java Spring framework and PostgreSQL, improving load time by an average of 45%. Designed and implemented a cross-domain cookie authentication system to securely load and cache proprietary images from a partner company. Overhauled CI system by upgrading Jenkins, porting a Windows build process to Linux, and refactoring Selenium tests, saving at least $50,000 in hardware maintenance costs.

Education

How I've learned.

  • University of Waterloo

    Computer Science (2016)

    4.97/5 GPA, Dean's Honor List (all terms), President's Scholarship of Distinction.

Awards

How I've done.

  • International Chemistry Olympiad Bronze Medal Bronze Medal
  • Major League Hacking Season Medal Season Medal
  • CEMC Top 1% Top 1%
  • Kik Technology Pitch Competition Finalist Pitch Finalist
*More extensive list available on LinkedIn.

Contact

Get in touch!

  • LocationSFO
  • Phone+1 (206) 208 3883
  • Websitejeffan.ca
  • Emailtheofficialjeffan@gmail.com