Brown University

Engineering Manager at Plaid

EM for the Core Services group of 15 engineers, which runs much of the core Plaid product infrastructure.

Plaid

Engineering Manager

EM for the Update Pipeline team of 8 engineers, which runs the core Plaid product onboarding and update flow.

EM for the Product Success team, a remote team based in the US and UK.
* Managed Plaid's API infrastructure and several other core services to achieve a high standard of reliability.
* Built several new key platforms for product teams, including config management and an async task system.
* Grew team from 3 to 6 engineers via high touch recruiting.

Engineer on the Data Infrastructure team.
- Proposed and built our internal data lake into a useful platform for product teams to build data products on; within a quarter of its release, six new features or products were in progress using it. These data-powered products are crucial to Plaid's future success, but it was extremely difficult to build them prior to this system.
- Led our 2021 planning and wrote the 2021 strategy for our team of 8; resulting pillars address our stakeholders' team needs by improving core quality while continuing to build our data product platform
- Improved our service reliability: improved oncall process to decrease pages/week from 100 (!) to 14; solved Redshift scaling issues; moved Airflow instance from a single bespoke EC2 instance to a reliable Docker/Kubernetes deployment
- Hosted a successful intern who received a full-time offer; mentored new members of the team.

Also led some cross-team engineering efforts, including:
- Creation of backend architecture principles to guide backend service development at Plaid
- Created a popular PR-status Chrome extension to speed up code review cycles
- Created and tested new, more realistic interview questions to hire better candidates and give them a better view of Plaid in the process.

Software Engineer

Tailor (meettailor.com) - an internal startup in Google's Area 120
Built a number of key backend systems, including:
 - Stylist pay model (increased in-app purchasing over 100% through better incentives)
 - Structured user style taste profile
 - Referrals and credits systems
 - User notifications and messaging platform, including integrated experiment ability

I was also a leader in analytics for the team:
 - Built out analysis and dashboards of our conversion funnel
 - Ran numerous experiments to determine what types of outreach and notifications were most valuable
 - Analyzed customer lifetime value data, then generated and led projects to improve it by 20%
 - Taught 8 teammates SQL

Google

Senior Software Engineer

Project Fi:
- Project Fi switches between multiple cell carriers; I designed and implemented the first algorithm and pipeline for Fi's intelligent switching.
- Iterated on many different coverage map algorithms and tweaks; ran A/B experiments to determine which ones led to higher connection rates and LTE uptime.
- Worked on pipeline reliability and analysis for large (>200T) datasets and pipelines

• Created, implemented, and tested an algorithm to keep Project Fi users on the best cellular network
• Used a variety of Android techniques as well as the Google Play Services library

Software Engineering Intern

Initially performed maintenance on existing mobile site by fixing bugs and reporting security vulnerabilities. Soon moved into larger projects, including: 
  -Added "Helpful" and "Report" buttons to mobile hotel reviews page
  -Made new native Android TripAdvisor app usable with disability accessibility features
  -Added new functionality to the internal API

TripAdvisor

Software Engineer Intern

• Teaching assistant for a variety of classes, including Intro to Computer Science, Software Engineering, and Advanced Algorithms
• Edit course assignments and style guides
• Help students at office hours
• Run weekly lab sessions
• Grade assignments

Teaching Assistant

• Implemented color-coded error message highlighting in WeScheme, an online programming environment
• Worked with Javascript, Racket and CSS
• Updated lessons for Bootstrap, a curriculum to teach algebra and programming to middle schoolers

Mike Rowland