Brown University

Senior Engineering Manager at Better.com

Anthropic

Member of Technical Staff

Worked with early stage companies looking to take their initial infrastructure setup from the first version that got them launched to something that conforms to best practices, is more secure, and is more maintainable without the need for hiring a full time infrastructure person.

Also did various full stack development work as needed along with modifications to applications to make them more observable and reliable.

Self-employed

Technical Consulting

Worked with a group of staff engineers to develop the technical strategy for a renewed focus on automation as well as platform investments to allow technical system reuse across business lines.

Better

Senior Staff Software Engineer

Scaled the team from 3 to 16 hiring a mix of ICs and managers across a range of skill sets (systems/infrastructure, developer experience, full stack engineering)

Prototyped and rolled out a robust system for branch deploys that allows any microservice to be cheaply spun up in around 5 minutes in an isolated environment functionally identical to staging with any necessary dependencies. This is usable both for manual and automated testing.

Developed the strategy for increasing stability across all systems by cataloguing incidents, finding problem hotspots, and applying testing best practices. This framework was applied throughout the company to help teams increase the stability of their systems and led to a large reduction in incidents.

Senior Engineering Manager - Platform

Rebuilt the authentication and authorization system to move it out of our original monolith and into a separate microservice while adding features like new user types and more auditing around what actions internal users were taking.

Shepherded the company onto using Kafka by promoting the architectural paradigms and implementing the needed libraries for inter-service pub/sub communication. This will allow individual teams to send and receive data from other systems in a highly decoupled way which enabled scale.

Overhauled the CI system from the infrastructure though the code interface developers use to run steps for their applications. The entire system runs for 200 engineers doing 100+ deploys per day for ~$150/day total. Granting engineers control also made it far easier to add custom steps and test applications far more effectively.

Migrated the entire Kubernetes stack (95% of all applications run here) onto EKS. This involved completely automating the provisioning through terraform and helm and migrating all infrastructure and applications with a total downtime of under 5 minutes.

Engineering Manager - Platform

Built an entirely new digital homeowners insurance flow and integrated it into the Better Mortgage loan experience from idea to revenue with a team of 5 as the only technical member. This included doing all the software engineering and product management and managing the UX and design work done outside the team.

Redesigned and implemented an overhaul of the existing mortgage homeowners insurance operational workflow for purchase loans to replace a highly manual, custom process with a new, fully structured one. This reduced the number of operations staff needed to manage the process from five to one and sped up overall borrower time spent on insurance by 20%. Rolled this out to an operations team in the US and India with over 100 members.

Structured appraisal reports that contain over 150 fields of ground truth property data into a database enabling them to be queried and easily used to enhance the accuracy of insurance quotes along with a plethora of other uses in the mortgage process.

Lead Software Engineer (Better Cover)

Led a full stack team of 5 including designers, frontend engineers, and backend engineers. Handled technical planning and decisions around architecture and technical debt management. Worked with a product manager to scope out and prioritize projects along with estimating their timelines. Triaged bugs and prioritized them alongside other feature work. Directly managed 2 engineers who were members of the team

Oversaw the technical evaluation and development of a full new set of communication tools (email, sms, and phone) designed to make the sales team more efficient, bring communication data into the product experience, and maintain data availability in the data warehouse for business stakeholders.

Directed the implementation of a relational view on loan data which served as the foundational technology underpinning bringing loan underwriting within the product and continues to power it today.

Team Lead

Created the first automated, requirements based, document collection in the product experience for gathering the necessary number of W2s, paystubs, and tax returns depending on the loan scenario. This was the first step towards fully automating the loan process.

Implemented an external facing API for accepting mortgage leads from various partners and providing a customized landing experience. This allowed for tracking within partners to target specific sub-channels and could handle first, last, and multi touch attribution models.

Organized all 3rd party marketing and analytics platforms to operate through Segment.io
Designed and implemented a set of lifecycle events used to standardize how the product team measured conversion and power a set of extensive new lifecycle marketing campaigns.

Created a data-warehouse that integrated all application data with data from various third party systems. This allowed business stakeholders across the organization to get a full view of the customer journey - From initial page visits all the way through to loan funding

Extensively involved in interviewing new candidates for frontend, backend, data, and full-stack engineering roles. Performed dozens of on-site interviews along with some phone interviews and resume screening.

Senior Software Engineer

Worked in a small team to build and launch the API for a fully new, mobile first product to replace the existing desktop web experience. This included extensive integration with Facebook, handling API versioning for out of date iPhone apps, and some statistics for deciding who was likely to swipe right on whom.

Ran extensive A/B tests and analyzed their results to inform changes to the core algorithms that decided what potential matches each user would see. This data and searching was powered by Elasticsearch and Neo4j.

Oversaw technical interviewing for bringing on new iOS engineers to build the app portion of the new mobile product. Did phone and in-person technical evaluations of candidates for both iOS and backend roles.

Grouper

Software Engineer

Overhauled the system that managed internal states for booked appointments. This drove the entire customer lifecycle including disputes, payment issues, reviews, and email reminders and was critical for the functioning of the business.

Created a new unified API to power appointment booking that consolidated various backend booking systems into one internal interface.

Lifebooker LLC

CS 17 - The first of a two semester introductory course for computer science. Responsibilities included creating programming questions for homeworks and tests, setting guidelines for grading assignments, and managing a team of 20 undergraduate TAs.

CS 167/9 - The operating systems course and optional lab. Responsibilities included giving the lectures for the lab section, being a 1 on 1 mentor TA for several students in the CS 169 operating systems lab, hiring and overseeing 5 undergraduate TAs, and grading projects, exams, and homeworks.

Ethan Langevin