About

Work Experience

• Back End Engineer, Remote, Kiva Microfunds

  Jan, 2023 - Oct, 20252 years 9 months

  Back end development, infrastructure work with a small remote team.

  • Contributed to the design of observability metrics and alerting systems that now catch issues weekly, including high-severity bugs, preventing user-facing disruptions.

  • Participated in CI/CD pipeline improvements, increasing automated test inclusion and reducing reliance on manual QA.

  • Coordinated updates to backend APIs and Kafka messaging systems, improving visibility into content delivery and enabling non-engineers to edit templates quickly.

  • Updated lending platform databases to support new transaction types, enabling a project that boosted user engagement by 5% and ensured audit compliance with zero issues.

  • Leveraged AI to accelerate unit test generation and improve test coverage.

  • Cut annual email sending costs by 50% by restructuring tooling and architecture.

  • Improved sending reputation by 40%, restoring full ESP functionality and enhancing deliverability.

  • Migrated legacy emails from Drupal/Smarty to Iterable, strengthening security and increasing template editability for non-engineers — reducing update time from days to minutes.

• Quality Assurance Automation Engineer, Kiva Microfunds

  Jun, 2019 - Jan, 20233 years 7 months

  Quality assurance automation coding, management, design and development on a small remote team.

  • Built and maintained automated pipelines (Python, Selenium, Robot Framework), catching 1–2 bugs per release and preventing major bug incidence by an estimated 80%.

  • Transitioned tests to Cypress (JavaScript), increasing test speed by 40% and enabling frontend engineers to contribute to QA.

  • Designed bug triage protocols and championed appropriate prioritization for the organization - protocols still producing excellent results to this day.

  • Reduced weekly customer support requests by 50% through improved testing and collaboration on product enhancements.

  • Implemented code fixes and QA enhancements, saving the QA team 2.5% of routine task time weekly.

  • Partnered across engineering and product to resolve complex system-wide bugs via root cause analysis, improving reliability and user satisfaction.

  • Supported ticket triage and prioritization, improving engineering velocity by 20%.

• , Freelance Engineer

  May, 2016 - Jun, 20193 years 1 month

  Freelance web development and quality assurance work for small businesses and non-profits.

  • Performed manual quality assurance for new user interfaces that resulted in 98% bugless releases

  • Designed and implemented testing plans and cases to ensure thorough and consistent app validation across releases

  • Successful modifications and troubleshooting resulted in 100% client satisfaction

• Senior Technologist, North American Science Associates

  Jan, 2014 - Jan, 20162 years

• Field Research Manager, University of Michigan Gelada Research Project

  Jan, 2012 - Jan, 20142 years

• Research Assistant, Nanoscale Neurology Lab, VA Hospital

  Jan, 2008 - Jan, 20124 years

Skills

Education

References