Resume for Nathan Keir Edel

Thank you for your interest!
The best way to contact me about my resume is via LinkedIn. Email or voicemail is fine too, but both are more likely to get lost in the shuffle if I'm not able to reply immediately.

PDF for download/printing - note that these are not kept perfectly in sync.

Latest News

I've been at Atlassian for 4+ years and am really liking it here. I have transitioned to a management role. I am not seeking or particularly interested in other opportunities, although I would not rule an interesting remote or local remote-first hybrid position out of hand.

I found during the pandemic that I strongly prefer remote-first work; I am leading a geographically distributed team, and am in-office for for one week each quarter for an on-site gathering and an odd day here and there, but do not regularly work on-site. I would not, at this point, go back to a multiple-days-every-week on-site requirement, although that could change in the future.

Moreover, please do not contact me about positions outside of the Bay Area unless they are 100% remote (with at most 2 weeks per quarter travel); I have family commitments that mean I cannot relocate now or in the foreseeable future.

Lastly, please do not contact me about consulting or jobs related to my current or prior employers. I am not, and will never under any circumstances be, open to discussing any position relating directly to any of my employer's products or customers.

Highlights:

20+ years of Software Engineering and Engineering Management, primarily with Java enterprise and back-end web applications

Extensive experience with

infrastructure, back-end and business-tier development in Java applications,
performance tuning and debugging performance problems in Java applications,
internal tooling, and infrastructure for CI/CD/performance tests
running Linux as user, developer and administrator.

Other highlights

Good at making commodity storage hardware perform well under large database workloads,
Academic and some startup experience working with file systems, low-level storage, and kernel/VFS.
familiarity with server and storage hardware, including some purchasing/benchmarking/tuning experience.

WORK EXPERIENCE

Atlassian
Jan 2020—
Engineering Manager
Team lead for Confluence Cloud Developer Experience team (acting Jan-May 2020). Grew team from two engineers to 17 in two squads, one of them reporting indirectly.
Jun 2018–Jan 2020
Principal Software Developer
Back-end developer on Confluence Cloud Backbone team.
Technologies used: Java, PostgreSQL, Docker, maven, Bamboo

Zipcar
Software Engineer
Mar 2016—Jan 2018

Part of a small team building a new distributed system as the new core platform for Zipcar.

Back-end development of services in Java and Groovy, in particular extracting smaller services from a monolithic (Grails) fleet management application and writing new services to support broader Zipcar use cases.

Built a caching and search service used by the web UI and mobile apps.
Technologies used: Java, Groovy, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, REST, SQL, Cassandra

Facebook
Software Engineer
Oct 2014 — Dec 2015

Back-end development, primarily in Java.

Wrote code supporting internal applications moving from an old internal fork of an open-source infrastructure project to the mainline open-source version.

Contributed bug fixes and minor feature enhancements to the mainline open-source version of that project.
I'm being intentionally vague about the specific project not because it's secret, but because I'm not an expert at it and don't want it to show up in keyword searches. Feel free to ask.
Technologies used: Java, distributed databases, containers

Guidewire Software
Mar 2006 — OctMar 2014
Guidewire builds software for the global property/casualty insurance industry. Their core systems for claims, policy, and billing are deployed at 100+ companies, including some of the world's largest insurance carriers.
2012 — 2014: Suite Performance team
2006 — 2011: Product/Platform teams
Implemented proximity-search and integration to outside geocoding services. Maintained the feature through 3 major release cycles. Improved performance by 10x across releases.

Built a "review" feature, which allowed users to author surveys, collect replies, and analyze the results. This project required a substantial integration between multiple existing products.

Worked with application developers on all three core products and platform team to find andfix performance and scalability issues.

Developer for internal "performance harness" application used for benchmark/scalability tests, cluster management, and performance-test analysis.

Implemented many new information and instrumentation pages to support internal benchmarking and to allow customer support to collect data for analysis from the field.

Responsible for a major expansion of shared storage for performance testing Guidewire'applications at large scale on Oracle RAC; wrote requirements and budget request, co-leadvendor evaluation and deployment.

Selected specifications and performed hardware/storage benchmarking for the application performance test practice.

Ordered, deployed and tuned Guidewire's first SSD-based database servers for performance testing. These systems accelerated two separate major proof-of-concept scalability tests, on two different products, each by more than a month.

Technologies used: Java, Linux, SOAP/REST, Tomcat, Servlets/JSP, Oracle, RAC, SQL, Perl, SSH, Virtualization, iSCSI, NFS, CIFS, Apache httpd, SSD, RAID

See PDF for older experience

EDUCATION

University of California, Santa Cruz
M.S. in Computer Science

Thesis: "MRAMFS: A Compressing File System for Byte-Addressable NVRAM"

Advanced seminars included Operating Systems, Storage Systems and Archival Storage

TA for CMPS115 Software Methodology, a senior level software engineering course

Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH

B.A. in Anthropology. Computer Science Minor.

PUBLICATIONS
Nathan K. Edel, Deepa Tuteja, Ethan L. Miller, and Scott A. Brandt, " MRAMFS: A Compressing File System for Non-Volatile RAM," Proceedings of the 12th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS 2004), Volendam, Netherlands, Oct. 2004

Nathan K. Edel, Ethan L. Miller, Karl S. Brandt, and Scott A. Brandt, "Measuring the Compressibility of Metadata and Small Files for Disk/NVRAM Hybrid Storage Systems," Proceedings of the 2004 International Symposium on Performance Evaluation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (SPECTS'04), San Jose, CA, Jul. 2004

RELEVANT SKILLS

Languages:

(proficient-to-expert) Java

(comfortable) C, Kotlin, Groovy, bash, Perl, SQL

Application/Web Server: Tomcat, Jetty, Apache httpd
Technologies/APIs: Servlets/JSP, Linux kernel APIs (VFS especially), XML/DOM, REST/SOAP/WSDL/web services, some familiarity with other J2EE technologies and with GraphQL
Development Tools: IntelliJ IDEA, maven, gradle, git, Jira, gcc/gdb, git
Operating Systems: Linux (nearly 30 years from SLS & kernel 0.99), Windows (end-user)
Databases:JDBC, Perl DBI, postgresql, mysql/mariadb, some familiarity with Redis, MongoDB, Cassandra, and with major non-open source RDBMs servers

ACTIVITIES & INTERESTS

Photography

Travel and Frequent Flyer miles