Overview
I currently work as a software engineer with emphasis on backend engineering for SaaS companies.
I believe good design, thought out projects and well written and tested code is a key to growth and maintainability. This can be observed in many aspects of how I write code. That when designing code, one should consider amongst others: risk, monitoring, alerting, auto-recovery (fault tolerence), maintainability, scalability. Some of those topics are described in more details in the blog.
Contact
| E-mail: wahl77+web@gmail.com | Tel CH: +41 78 204 30 02 |
| Website: frankywahl.com | Tel US: +1 415 425 7144 |
Work
January 2017 - August 2021 | |
Senior Software Engineer - Technical Lead | San Francisco, USA |
Contributor to some of UserTesting’s core products including customer features, LiveConversations, MyRecruit, Panel management and customer flows helping bring the company from a single product to multiple set of products. Worked with the data team to build a new data pipeline that would aggregate millions of events daily to be later process by our analytics team. Core engineer working with various departments tasked with a new pricing and packaging model that would integrate with old functionality and was attributed $5M dollars in revenue
- Core contributor and lead on the switch to event driven architecture for a usage based pricing model
- Led teams through the various phase of product development using agile methodologies
- Designed architecture and implemented new technoligies that were added to our core stack (GraphQL, Terraform, Kubernetes & Helm, Go, Kafka, Github Actions). This included monitoring (Grafana & Prometheus), performance and maintenance of some of those core technologies. Also thought and educating the colleagues to the usage and benefits of those tools (sometimes having to learn it myself).
- Built & lead devolment around internationalization efforts, building the tools and flows for engineers to become effective rapidly
- Built entire integration with a third party for preventing fraudulent user abuse on our system
- Mentoring - onboarding & offboarding process. Major contributor to optimizing flow between a new hire and getting them up to date with our environment
- Established marketing requirements and technologies, helping move marketing away from the critical path of product engineering
- Developed a new documentation system that allowed for engineers to contribute to documentation in a more effective way and allowed anybody to browse while keeping a flow they are most familiar with
- Worked cross teams with design to help establish a framework for a design system. These later worked as the core components for engineers to speed up feature delivery and enable consistency throughout our platform.
- Refactored some of the core components of our monolith leading to an improved velocity over some of the core objects (Tasks, Copier, …)
- Background jobs - Developed a new means to work with background jobs that allowed for better monitoring and performance of background tasks
- Led interest groups to increase adoption and exposure of new technologies to be used
- Technologies & Tools: AWS, Rails, Go, Angular, GraphQL, Docker, Terraform, Kubernetes, Git, SQL (MySQL and PostgreSQL), ElasticSearch, Kafka, Redis, CircleCI, Trello, Jira, Hugo
October 2013 - April 2016 | |
Software Engineering | San Francicso, USA |
Major contributor to designing and implementing a highly available, scalable, monitored and secure business services that combine to assemble the SaaS infrastructure of the company, taking the company from being a start-up to a public company.
- Designed a reporting service from inception to multiple releases. Implemented Domain Specific Language (DSL) for abstracting reporting from heterogeneous data sources. The service is critical to reporting for monthly and quarterly finances of a public company.
- Worked on breaking up monolithic architecture towards a mircoservices architecture. This has had an immediate benefit that reduced time to add a product to SaaS infrastructure from three software engineers working three months to one software engineer working less than a week
- Created a secure portal for enterprises and partners to manage accounts, written in Angular and interacting with a Ruby backend, it has become a key to major revenue sources
- Found and fixed multiple security vulnerabilities (leading to recognition by the security teams amongst others)
- Developed a process and environment towards a continuous integration - continuous delivery system (CICD), enabling 1-click deploy of a service. This includes testing, staging, and production systems.
- Improved deploy processes to prevent runtime failures (a factor leading to a second consecutive quarterly bonus)
- Introduced new technologies that made handling background tier a simpler task
- Collaborated with team members, always available to provide extensive knowledge in several areas including Ruby, Ruby on Rails, domain knowledge and code base
- Worked in an agile process with sprints and retrospectives from a prioritized backlog. Provided feedback on acceptance criteria, further decomposition of stories and estimating. Worked closely with product manager to identify next features to build.
- Evaluated candidates for software engineer and engineering manager positions that included preparation, interview and feedback
- Onboard of new hires to successfully transition and become effective fully integrated team members
- Technologies: Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, Angular, Docker, Git, SQL (MySQL and PostgreSQL), Redis, PagerDuty, Jira, Jenkins
May - December 2010 | |
Intern | Edinburgh, United Kingdom |
Worked as part of a team on the parallelisation of an embedded processor, upgrading the simulator
- Worked on asynchronous systems using MPI, Pthreads, OpenMP and cache coherency protocols
- Measured simulated performance in terms of power, speed, memory required
- Technologies: C, C++, Subversion
Summer 2007 | |
Intern | Geneva, Switzerland |
Internship in the Hedge Fund department
- Found IT solutions to automate reporting activities
Summer 2006 | |
Intern | London, United Kingdom |
Four-week internship in a digital photo company for manufacturer of developing equipment
- Exposure to digital market analysis and an insight to the field of automated vending machines
Summer 2003 | |
Intern | Paris, France |
Sales intern in one of Paris' shop
Education
| General Assembly | June - August 2013 |
| Web Development Immersive | San Francisco, USA |
- Acquired framework knowledge by building from ground up mutliple little webapps
| Univerisity of Edinburgh | 2006 - 2011 |
| Masters of Engineering with Honors Electronics & Computer Science | Edinburgh, United Kingdom |
- First class degree (equivalent to Summa Cum Laude) & only student to successfully complete the degree within 5 years
- Technologies: Java, C, MIPS Assembly, Verilog, Bash
| Collège de Candolle | 2002 - 2006 |
| Graduate ‘Maturité Suisse’ | Geneva, Switzerland |
- 1st prize in physics and applied mathematics
- Includes an erasmus year (2003-2004), studying 6 months at Magdalen College School, Oxford, UK and 6 months in Bunsen Gymnasium, Heidelberg, Germany
| Collège Saint-Louis | 1999-2001 |
| Student | Geneva, Switzerland |
| Notre Dame du Lac | 1993-1999 |
| Student | Geneva, Switzerland |
Interest
- Open Source Projects
Open Source:
Personal Open Source:
- Reading Politics, philosophy and current events
- Sports Tennis, martial arts, skiing and snowboarding, rock climbing, hiking, most of them at a competition level
- Academic Model United Nations
Languages
- English: Fluent
- French: Fluent
- German: Advanced knowledge
- Spanish: Basic knowledge
