Darwin Corn

﫷Greater Seattle Area
 (406) 852-5280
﫮 me@ndarwincorn.me
爵 blog.ndarwincorn.me
爵 sr.ht/~ndarwincorn
 GitHub  LinkedIn

Platform Engineer

Staff-level professional with diverse experience in the Enterprise SaaS world. Extensive background in improving application reliability and development velocity for fintech, big data, health care, marketing and insure-tech firms. Currently maintaining Avalara's first-party synthetic monitoring tool and the greenfield developer of its Kubernetes Operator.

Up-to-date resume available at blog.ndarwincorn.me/resume/resume.

COMPETENCIES

Proficient

<40 hours to productivity
  • Languages: | Go || Python || JavaScript || PowerShell || Shell || C# |
  • Instrumentation: | opentelemetry || structured logging || metrics |
  • Frameworks: | JQuery || .NET MVC || Laravel || kubebuilder |
  • Tools: | Terraform || git || (n)vim || GitLab-CI || Docker || draw.io || Grafana |
  • OS: | Linux (NixOS) || Windows |
  • Platforms: | Azure || AWS || GCP || Kubernetes |
  • System Tools: | SSH || Systemd || Cron |
  • DB: | MSSQL || Postgres || Prometheus |
  • Methodologies: | Agile || Lean || DevOps || 12 factor |
  • Professional Development: | Mentoring |
  • Security: | Static Analysis || Risk Assessment || Compliance |

Comfortable

<160 hours to productivity
  • Languages: | Lua || Rust || Typescript |
  • Frameworks: | ASP .NET Core |
  • Tools: | pulumi || Vagrant || CircleCI || PowerShell DSC || Temporal.io || Honeycomb |
  • Web Servers: | Nginx || Httpd || IIS |
  • Platforms: | Heroku || DO |
  • DB: | MySQL || Redis || Etcd || OLAP |
  • Networking: | Routing || DHCP || DNS |
  • Analytics: | BI (SSRS et al.) || ETL |
  • Security: | Threat Modeling || Pen Testing |
  • Testing: | Chaos || Integration || Unit |

Familiar

<320 hours to productivity
  • Languages: | Ruby || Java || C |
  • Frameworks: | React || GoBuffalo || GoKit |
  • Tools: | TFS/ADO || Visio || TeamCity || TestCafe || Selenium |
  • DB: | Firebase || SQLite |

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Senior Site Relibility Engineer

Avalara Inc.

2022/04 - Present

Sr. platform engineer, primary maintainer of first-party synthetic monitoring tool.
  • Built K8S Operator for first-party synthetic monitoring tool to automatically generate self-service RED metrics for any product deployed in Kubernetes.
  • Primary maintainer of said tool, evangelizing its use and soliciting upstream improvements to consolidate monitoring on a single platform and reduce o11y costs.

Senior Site Relibility Engineer

Openly Insurance

2021/04 - 2022/04

Fourth SRE hire and founding member of the developer efficiency team.
  • Worked on tooling to automate the refactoring of a big ball of mud monolith into independently scalable services, increasing developer velocity and reducing system fragility.
  • Identified sub-optimal terraform usage within a month of start date, introduced modularized and in-line terraform to increase infrastructure code re-use and reduce re-work.
  • Took responsibility for deployment optimization, reduced ~30 minute pipelines to <5 minutes.
  • Implemented the first distributed tracing at Openly, reducing time spent triaging outages.

Site Reliability Architect

Agency Mania Solutions

2018/02 - 2021/04

First ops hire, introduced lean engineering and mentored developers.
  • Overhauled a development process with no VCS to a GitLab(+CI) to AWS workflow with on-demand terraformed review apps, reducing re-work in development and deployment.
  • Added NewRelic telemetry and alerting to reduce time spent debugging and proactively respond to service disruptions, improving client satisfaction.
  • Facilitated dev team growth with new hires deploying to production within a week.
  • Founding member of diversity and inclusion committee.

Software Engineer

Milliman MedInsight

2017/01 - 2018/01

Engineer focused on systems automation, particularly transitioning to Azure.
  • Broke ground on migrating application infrastructure from a SharePoint 2010/SQL PDW on-prem deployment to Azure PaaS to increase woefully non-performant ETL.

Full Stack Engineer

Consumer Direct

2016/01 - 2016/12

Maintained LOB web apps and streamlined their deployment.
  • Re-wrote a legacy Access application in .NET MVC to alleviate maintenance burden and add features to reduce manual labor and error from end users.

EDUCATION

B.A. Econ/Phil

University of Montana

2008/08 - Incomplete

3.33 GPA
  • Varsity Debate: 3 years
  • 1st Place 49th US Air Force Academy Debate Invitational
  • 1st Place Inaugural Rocky Mountain Round Robin
  • National Merit Scholar
  • MUS Honor Scholarship

PRO BONO EXPERIENCE

Career Mentor

Private Mentorship

2017/03 - Present

  • Work with mentees weekly as a sounding board for academic and professional career goals.
  • Provide guided self-study of relevant literature in mentees' areas of interest.

Full Stack Engineer

PFRMT/Good Neighbors Montana

2015/08 - 2018/01

  • Helped local coalition of nonprofits reach a broader audience by serving as everything from front end web developer to sysadmin.
  • Developed sites using Ember, Go and Postgres, scripted deployment to GCP IaaS running separate containers for each layer.