About
Lar is a platform engineer with ten years of experience helping businesses solve problems with code. A systems thinker, he is most comfortable on cross-functional teams where collaboration across a variety of roles is key to success. Lar spent two years at Hashrocket, one of the top Ruby on Rails shops. He went on to work on projects with respected companies like Cloud City, Thunderbolt Labs and Bendyworks. He’s been developing software professionally since 2007.
Experience
Started the Platform Engineering team and grew it to 5 people supporting a polyglot dev team of 50 engineers. Responsible for uptime and reliability of multi-tenant production environment made up of a large Ruby on Rails backend hosted on Heroku and multiple frontend JavaScript/Next.js clients. Built and maintained internal tooling across the entire software delivery lifecycle, from dev, qa, and production. Planned, prioritized, and delivered multiple large scale projects including:
- Added multi-tenant parallelized end-to-end testing to CI/CD while reducing overall spend
- Centralized configuration and secrets management across multiple platforms to improve security and reduce release failures due to configuration errors
- Planned and deployed a best practices multi-account AWS environment fully managed via Infrastructure as Code and running the HashiCorp suite of tools (Terraform, Consul, Vault, Nomad)
- Scaled e-commerce platform to handle year-over-year growth during Black Friday/Cybermonday events while improving reliability and reducing overall spend
- Adopted a modern Observability stack that enabled the targeted improvements that contributed to a nearly incident free BF/CM event
- Collaborated with IT stakeholders to improve our security and compliance posture
A web development agency specializing in DevOps, distributed systems and product-oriented software development for clients in a variety of industries including retail, real estate, sports analytics & video streaming. As the lead on all development projects Lar helped clients:
- Simplify a tightly-coupled service oriented architecture for a video streaming platform
- Save 60k/year on AWS costs while improving operational capabilities
- Scale and improve reliability of distributed systems
- Define requirements and build products that drive revenue
- Migrate platforms and introduce tools to better meet business need
Worked as an independent consultant on projects for startups and bootstrapped companies including:
- An early version of the Lifebooker booking engine
- A mobile Project Guttenberg ebooks reader for Spreadsong
- A prototype for a niche social network based on exchanging fashion advice
Started at company as a junior developer, ultimately becoming a tech lead working with clients to establish project requirements and build features to meet their business objectives. Worked with emerging technologies like the first large-scale enterprise Mongo DB project. Experienced in a variety of domains and industries including healthcare, ecommerce, sports, and dating. Clients ranged from startup to mid-sized growing businesses. Brought several clients into the company.
First software developer at the company, brought in to build the first version of the company’s platform. Worked with the CEO to set technical priorities, hire, and onboard the engineering team. Shipped two major versions of the product within six months enabling the company to raise $7.8 million Series A.
Responsible for front-end development, UX and UI for Ruby on Rails v1.0 apps. Played a key role in driving the development of client apps for 1-800 flowers, True Value Hardware and the Gift of Life built on the Sympact Dynamic Imaging Platform.