University of Colorado Boulder

Software Engineer

Denver Metropolitan Area

After being promoted to Staff Engineer, I worked on high visibility projects that enabled third-party developers to directly impact Twitter surfaces and the people who use Twitter. I played the role of a workstream tech lead, defining technical and product direction for my team for greenfield product investments.

During this time my teams:
-  Launched the "Twitter Toolbox" showcasing developer built solutions in an app-store like environment, including promotion and discovery mechanisms built into Twitter (<a href="https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/21/twitter-to-promote-developers-apps-directly-on-its-platform">https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/21/twitter-to-promote-developers-apps-directly-on-its-platform</a>)
-  Launched the Twitter Tiles experiment, enabling developers to define visual configuration for how links render inside of Tweets, increasing brand identity and providing a richer Twitter experience  (<a href="https://searchengineland.com/twitter-is-testing-a-new-tweet-tiles-display-for-publisher-links-387619">https://searchengineland.com/twitter-is-testing-a-new-tweet-tiles-display-for-publisher-links-387619</a>)
-  Building and experimenting on Twitter custom timelines, allowing developers to build curated feeds for Twitter users, including a focus on how Twitter users will discover these timelines in Twitter owned clients (<a href="https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/14/twitter-is-testing-custom-timelines-and-first-one-is-about-the-bachelorette/">https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/14/twitter-is-testing-custom-timelines-and-first-one-is-about-the-bachelorette/</a>)

During this time I also served as the chair of the Twitter Developer Platform Technical Design Shepherds, which supported engineers of all levels in drafting and review processes for technical documentation. In this role I influenced Twitter's technical design document template (used across the company) to ensure legal and security compliance of the organization.

Twitter

Staff Software Engineer

I served as tech lead for the Developer Platform Web team, primarily responsible for maintaining and enhancing Twitter's developer portal (<a href="http://developer.twitter.com">developer.twitter.com</a>) which helps developers get started with and manage their API access.

Key accomplishments:
-  Leading a high functioning team of up to 10 full-stack engineers in partnership with Product and Engineering leaders.
-  Building external and internal processes and technology to onboard millions of developers to <a href="http://developer.twitter.com">developer.twitter.com</a> and API access.
-  Leading the multi-team rollout of the developer experience refresh of the Twitter v2 API, including launch and rollout planning, testing, and coordination with cross-functional partners.

Senior Software Engineer

During the Spring semester of each year, I work as a TA for the Senior/Grad level course "Big Data Architecture" at the University of Colorado. The course covers key topics in distributed systems, taught by industry professionals.

In this role, I provide technical direction from industry, support 80-100 students in semester long projects, and give 1-2 lectures on key technology topics per semester.

Teaching Assistant

I worked as a back-end engineer in the Developer and Enterprise Solutions organization.

My key roles and responsibilities included:
-  Initially started as a hack-week project, I helped to build Twitter's self-serve Premium API infrastructure and billing systems to support growing businesses at scale.
-  Building and maintaining distributed streaming systems that allow Twitter to serve real-time Tweets to tens of thousands of customers.
-  Building internal tooling to detect and action bad actors on Twitter's API.
-  Interviewing and mentoring junior engineers to help them be successful at Twitter.

- Served as a full-time engineer on enterprise agile team to design and build highly
scalable and fault tolerant real time API in Scala
- Refactored and improved existing Ruby on Rails applications for maintainability
- Optimized engineering effectiveness by creating and revamping deploy tools

Software Engineering Intern

As a member of the Data Ingest team, I was responsible for
- Redesigning an Oracle ingest process in Hadoop Distributed File System across a large Unix cluster
- Writing Syncsort DMX-h jobs to perform ETL on ingested data in Hadoop
- Unit testing, scheduling, and automating QA for the redesigned task

Datalogix

Supported the work of Dr. Ryan Starkey and Nathan Woods in creating a computational fluid dynamics model using a moving mesh fluid grid.  Specifically I
- Fully implemented allowing compiled "C" functions to be integrated in the Open Source Scientific Python library (<a href="https://github.com/scipy/scipy">https://github.com/scipy/scipy</a>)
- Added unit testing and documentation
- Increased integration speeds within the modeler up to 10x

Brian Newsom