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
After 7 1/2 years at Atlassian, I was part of the cohort laid off in
mid-March 2023. While I'd initially intended to take some time off before
looking, a number of interesting companies have already been in touch, and
if you're reading this and are looking to hire an engineer with a profile I
might match, please do reach out by LinkedIn or email.
Highlights:
Technical leader with 25+ years of experience in backend development,
distributed systems, and Java/cloud applications, including 4 recent years
as a manager.
Drove platform and developer productivity initiatives impacting 500+
engineers.
Proven track-record of leading large-scale architecture modernization
and accelerating development velocity - reduced build times by 70%, cut CI
cycles from 66 to 20 minutes, and increased release frequency from 9 to 14
per week while maintaining quality.
Expert in monolith-to-microservice transitions, legacy system
modernization, and building scalable developer tooling for large engineering
organizations.
Combines deep technical expertise with a strong focus on mentoring and
establishing engineering practices that improve system reliability and
accelerate delivery.
Objectives
What I'm looking for/open to:
I am open to staff+/leadership IC roles, engineering management
roles, or hybrid TLM roles. During my time as an EM, I remained quite
hands-on.
I am open to either full-remote roles, or hybrid roles locally - where
"locally" is a band from San Francisco to San Jose.
I would prefer to avoid fully on-site/5-day
roles or ones in the East Bay/North Bay, but will consider either one for
particularly interesting roles.
I am open to some amount of travel, up to about two weeks per
quarter.
I am only considering full-time, benefited positions at this time.
Two things I'm not open to:
Please do not contact me about in-person positions outside of the Bay
Area. I have family commitments that mean I cannot relocate
now or in the forseeable future.
Please do not contact me about consulting or jobs related to my prior
employers. I am not, and do not ever expect to be, open to discussing any
position relating directly to any of my employer's products or customers.
WORK EXPERIENCE
Atlassian
Principal Software Engineer, Confluence Cloud
Oct. 2023—March. 2026
Drove monolith re-architecture to enable modular services, faster
builds, and clearer code ownership; continued library/framework
modernization (OSGi retirement; JDK 17 → 21)
Introduced working incremental builds; single-module changes now
build in 10–30 seconds vs. several-minute full builds.
As architect for Confluence's FedRAMP Moderate effort, set
practices for development and deployment inside the FedRAMP perimeter.
Provided extensive mentoring to build monolith and legacy Java
expertise within previously microservice-heavy teams.
Senior Engineering Manager, Confluence Cloud Developer Experience
Jan 2020—Oct 2023
Built the Developer Experience team, driving productivity and
quality for ~500 developers.
Scaled from 2 to 17 engineers across two teams, one of them
indirect.
Temporarily led a third team, totalling 24 direct +
indirect during organization rescoping.
Coached and navigated the promotion cycle for multiple
engineers, including senior to principal and senior to engineering manager.
Drove modernization of library usage and the JDK from 8 → 11 →
17.
Led team as first point of contact for product security,
including driving product-level response to a number of critical CVEs.
Improved developer productivity for Confluence developers:
Reduced local build-restart times from 10 minutes to 4 minutes.
minutes.
Cut CI build/test cycles from 66 minutes to 20 minutes.
More than tripled monolith release frequency (4 → 14 production releases per week).
Reduced merge-to-production times from 90+ hours to under 24 hours..
Promoted to Senior Engineering Manager in
2023.
Principal Software Engineer, Confluence Cloud
2018—2019
Designed and led implementation of internal identity platform
integration — Confluence’s highest-volume platform integration to date; part
of our GDPR compliance effort.
Developed tool to run and debug the Confluence monolith locally
with real staging traffic.
Confluence product representative on company-wide JVM tech stack
working group.
Drove critical functional testing reliability improvements.
Technologies used: Java, PostgreSQL, REST, JSON, SQL, Docker,
AWS services, Maven, Gradle
Zipcar
Software Engineer
2016—
2018
Part of a small team building a new distributed system as the new core
platform for Zipcar.
Back-end development of new microservices and decomposition of the existing monolith.
Built services to process, store, query and geofence high-volume GPS and vehicle sensor data.
Decomposed caching, search, and activity log out of the monolith into their own
services.
Technologies used: Java, Groovy, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, REST, SQL,
Cassandra
Facebook
Software Engineer (E5)
2014 —
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.
Specific project omitted 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
Senior Software Engineer
2006 — 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.
Implemented proximity-search and integration to outside geocoding
services. Maintained the feature through 3 major release cycles. Improved
performance by 10x across releases.
Worked with application developers on all three core products and
platform team to find and fix performance and scalability issues.
Developer for internal "performance harness" application used for
benchmark/scalability tests, cluster management, and performance-test
analysis.
Implemented new information and instrumentation pages to support
internal benchmarking and to allow customer support to collect data for
analysis from the field.
(2011-2014) Technical lead for annual capacity estimates for CI and
performance test systems expansion and hardware replacement; worked with
finance, Engineering, and IT leadership to develop budget requests and
deployment plans.
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-led vendor 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: (expert) Java (through JDK 21)
(comfortable) Groovy, Kotlin, Perl, SQL
(some familiarity) Python, C, C++, C#, PHP, Lua, x86 assembly
Application/Web Server: Jetty, Tomcat, Apache httpd, php-fpm, nginx
Technologies/APIs: Servlets/JSP/Jersey/Spring, JSON, Protobuf/GRPC, RabbitMQ/SQS/SNS,
some familiarity with other J2EE technologies
Development Tools: IntelliJ IDEA, gradle, maven, git/BitBucket/GitHub, Jira, gcc/gdb, Gentoo
portage
Operating Systems: Linux (from SLS & kernel 0.99), Windows
Databases: developed applications on top of Oracle, mysql, PostgreSQL (including RDS & Aurora), MongoDB, Cassandra, HBase, and Redis,
some familiarity with operational aspects of each
Hardware: extensive familiarity with commodity servers and storage hardware;
some exposure to datacenter networking; familiarity with deploying Amazon
EC2
ACTIVITIES & INTERESTS
Fiction writing
Photography
Travel and Frequent Flyer
miles