Liam Conrad, Technical Architect

100 S Van Buren St, Stoughton, WI 53589
608.466.0831

Sr Software Engineer Sk3w Technologies, Inc July 2022 - Present

  • Ground-Up rewrite of the software control plane for the BitSpooler product in Golang.
  • Rewrite of the BitSpooler product's optical switch firmware.
  • Architect and implement a communications protocol between the BitSpooler's RLSP and optical switch components.
  • Work closely with the team's electrical engineers to implement software interface for the FPGA.
  • Implement upgrade path for all things config.

Technical Architect Altruize Nov 2021 - July 2022

  • Manage risk and productivity expectations for the team
  • Research and PoC technical solutions and best practices in support of security and business strategies
  • Roadmap technical initiatives based on priority and interdependency
  • Quickly pivot from one task to the next based on urgency.
  • Communicate technical strategies and rationale to both technical and non-technical parties
  • Spearheading technical path-to-adoption for FIPS SP 800-207 compliant zero-trust architecture.
  • PoC for migrating away from zip code and lat/long-based geospatial querying in favor of Uber's H3 indexing for both proximity assessment and choropleth dataviz.
  • Architected secrets management service, backed in part by EKS, for the purpose of secure and performant secrets sharing within infrastructure.
  • Early stages in reimplementing infrastructure in AWS using terraform and kubernetes, with intention to adopt sidecars for service-transparent authentication between internal services.
  • Seek and account for users' needs/expectations as part of UX design and technical solutioning.

Sr Backend Engineer Fetch Dec 2020 - Oct 2021

  • Helped greenfield a social network built around the AWS Neptune graph database.
  • Wrote tooling to initiate fast deletes, and facilitate bulkloads into AWS Neptune.
  • Developed Go Lambdas that keep the graph in sync with user and other data owned by other services through SNS subscriptions.
  • Developed Scala scripts executed by Apache Spark to process bulk load data from parquets.
  • Used Jupyter notebooks primarily as documentation for, and rapid development of the Gremlin statements necessary for querying and managing the graph.
  • Wrote the Go service that provides the client API for mobile and other services to access data in Neptune.

Sr Software Engineer Zendesk Aug 2017 - July 2020

  • Served as the team's Security Champion, acting the as line of communication between our engineering team and the security teams, participating in security reviews, and calling out potential risks during technical architecture discussions.
  • Core contributor to an in-house, full-stack application, written in Nodejs and React, responsible for migrating customer data between two ontologically differing, infinitely configurable systems, requiring close collaboration with multiple stakeholders and engineering teams across the globe for the success of a major, customer-facing product launch.
  • Wrote the cidrtool cli application, listed above, in response to IP allow-listing challenges, and was later granted ownership of the code so that I could open-source it.
  • Performed multiple help center migrations as organizational requirements changed.
  • Contributor to the redesign of Zendesk's public-facing help center.
  • Wrote a node module implementing OAuth2 MAC auth headers for internal services.
  • Refactored Zendesk's internal service responsible for the automatic translation of Guide articles, and implemented its new vendor Memsource.
  • Wrote the team's first ADR for the Guide Automated Translations, providing thorough documentation for both business and engineering audiences, including project best practice examples.
  • Along with others from engineering and recruiting, helped to represent and evangelize Zendesk, as a product and employer, while attending Railsconf 2019 in Minneapolis, MN.
  • Gave a site engineering presentation on protocol buffers covering what they are, when they shine, and walked through a very basic client/server implementation example written in golang.
  • Major evangelist for the "people first," humanist approach to engineering culture, and work culture at large.
  • For the purpose of bringing people together for fun and workplace cohesion, created several cross-team, cross-organizational social groups centered around a number of niche hobbies, including but not limited to the #audio-nerds and #ham-radio slack channels, and greatly evangelized the Madison Whiskey Club.
  • Helped team members get up to speed with git, consider different branch methodologies, and untangle the occasional gordian knot in git by walking them through what happened, how to pick the best resolution, and how to resolve it.

Software Developer FirmGuardian, LLC Apr 2017 - June 2018

  • Spearheaded the development of a multiplatform encryption client utilizing Go and Electron.
  • Assist in the systems and technical architecture planning.
  • UX and Design of client application emphasizing simplicity and purpose within its workflow.

Front End Engineer LeMans Corp. Oct 2016 - Aug 2017

  • Facilitate professional development of the front-end team via weekly presentations of core ES-Next concepts, backed by real-world code exercises relating to challenges solved in the existing codebase.
  • Assist team mates with advanced front-end development patterns.
  • Development of new internal applications to improve business-customer relations.
  • Ground-up rewrite of Arctiva theme.
  • Maintenence of public-facing brand sites.
  • Push initiatives to migrate from SVN to GIT, and modernize the front end.
  • Advocate use of JWT and OAuth2 for user/sessions verification at the REST API level.
  • Communicate frequently and transparently with BAs and product owners to assess design and development goals, and break down any challenges faced in a manner that is both detailed and customer-friendly.
  • Engage directly with the customer to better assess the customer's workflow and process requirements, and generally provide a positive face to support a quality customer-engineering relationship.

Front End Engineer Spredfast Oct 2015 - July 2016

  • Architect and engineer solutions to unify our front-end across multiple siloed products, Javascript frameworks, and distributed product teams.
  • Replace legacy Flash application components with HTML5 equivalents, while maintaining drop-in compatibility.
  • Define code-quality standards which maintain legacy browser compatibility (via build processes) while taking advantage of the latest ECMA and CSS feature sets.
  • Define version control strategies which allow multiple teams to create products which interoperate without conflict.
  • Prioritize feature-sets and implementation methods to achieve successful product launches under strict deadlines.
  • Data modeling across multiple Javascript MVC products.
  • React quickly to resolve high priority customer requests, frequently with same-day turnaround.

Full Stack Engineer and FreeBSD SysAdmin Restore Health Pharmacies Oct 2013 - Oct 2015

  • Architected and engineered, from the ground up, front end solutions to meet the needs of the sales team.
  • Introduced Consul service advertisement behind DNSMasq to facilitate redundancy within and across multiple datacenters.
  • Assisted with the full port of the Perl back-end from the Plack/Mason frameworks facilitating SOAP APIs to a fully asynchronous, non-blocking, RESTful API implemented with the Mojolicious framework.
  • Wrote new REST endpoints as necessary, following the Mojolicious port.
  • Assisted in the management of the VOIP system, including Asterisk server management, and IVR scripting with TwiML.
  • Managed Github repo using the Git Flow model.
  • FreeBSD systems administration, including: ZFS replication, CUPS, jail deployment, server instantiation and discovery over horizontally scaled systems across multiple datacenters.
  • Built small, supplemental products using ReactJS, Angular and MeteorJS. Additional microservices written in Node.js using the ExpressJS framework.

Freelance Web Developer Sunfire Digital, and others Feb 2012 - Dec 2013

Developed, repaired and migrated sites for a number of businesses on a contract and subcontract basis.

  • Server-to-Server Drupal Migration
  • Securing php backends and data storage
  • Development of HTML5 and WordPress sites
  • Implement jQuery and plugins
  • Development of responsive sites
  • UX Design consultation