William (Liam) Conrad, Technical Architect

• Led the software architecture and engineering of control plane services for an FPGA-based fiber network device that profiles and standardizes network latency across cross-connects.
• Partnered with electrical engineers to harmonize FPGA memory mappings with software accessors, achieving seamless hardware-software integration and functionality.
• Devised and implemented a data smoothing technique to reduce measurement jitter, dramatically improving the accuracy and reliability of latency control and real-time data reporting.
• Developed and implemented a robust communications protocol to streamline interactions between the software plane and attached fiber-optic switches, enhancing device interoperability and performance.
• In collaboration with the CTO, architected a flexible configuration format using protocol buffers for control plane services, and crafted standardized upgrade paths for system configurations, markedly enhancing update processes and system stability.

• Directed team risk management and productivity strategies, ensuring alignment with project goals and timelines.
• Led research and development of technical solutions and best practices, aligning with overarching security and business strategies through targeted PoCs.
• Strategized and roadmapped key technical initiatives, prioritizing based on strategic interdependencies and impact to drive forward company objectives.
• Articulated complex technical strategies and rationales to diverse audiences, ensuring clarity and alignment across technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Excelled in dynamic task management, adapting swiftly to urgent shifts and priorities to maintain operational continuity.
• Championed the adoption of FIPS SP 800-207 compliant zero-trust architecture, leading the technical strategy and implementation phases.
• Pioneered a shift from traditional geospatial querying to Uber’s H3 indexing, enhancing proximity assessments and choropleth data visualization through successful PoC execution.
• Designed a robust secrets management service utilizing EKS, enhancing secure and efficient sharing of sensitive data across the infrastructure.
• Focused on user-centric design principles, integrating user needs and expectations into technical solutions and UX strategies.

• Co-led the greenfield development of a novel social network platform leveraging AWS Neptune, designing a scalable graph database architecture to optimize social interactions.
• Engineered specialized tools to enhance data management in AWS Neptune, including rapid deletion and efficient bulk loading capabilities, significantly improving performance.
• Developed Go-based AWS Lambda functions to maintain real-time data synchronization across services via SNS subscriptions, ensuring data integrity and timeliness in the graph database.
• Authored and executed Scala scripts using Apache Spark for processing large-scale data loads from Parquet files, optimizing data ingestion and processing workflows.
• Utilized Jupyter notebooks to document and expedite the development of Gremlin queries for managing and querying the graph database, enhancing knowledge sharing and operational efficiency.
• Designed and implemented a Go-based service API, facilitating secure and efficient access to Neptune data for mobile and other client services, enhancing user connectivity and data retrieval.

• Combined Role as Security Champion: Led as the Security Champion, bridging the gap between the engineering and security teams, conducting security reviews, and identifying risks during architecture discussions, enhancing project security postures.
• Lead Developer for Major Product Launch: Spearheaded development on a high-stakes, full-stack application using Node.js and React, managing the migration of customer data across complex systems. Collaborated with global teams, playing a pivotal role in the successful launch of a customer-facing product.
• Development and Open-Sourcing of Tools: Authored the cidrtool CLI in response to IP allow-listing challenges, later open-sourcing it to benefit the wider community. Created an internal Node module for OAuth2 MAC authentication, streamlining the implementation of enhanced internal service security.
• Documentation and Conference Leadership: Authored the first Architecture Decision Record (ADR) for Guide Automated Translations, setting documentation standards. Presented internally on protocol buffers, promoting technical knowledge sharing.
• Community and Culture Building: Founded cross-team social groups to enhance workplace cohesion and led initiatives promoting a humanist approach to engineering culture. Actively assisted team members in mastering Git and exploring branching methodologies.
• Help Center and Service Refactoring: Contributed to the redesign of the Zendesk public-facing help center, and led the refactoring of internal services for automated translation, integrating a new vendor and optimizing performance.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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