20+ years building products, platforms, and distributed systems that remain understandable as they scale.
Location: Vermont, USA
Remote: Yes, happy to travel
Willing to relocate: Maybe
Technologies: TypeScript, Node.js/Deno, PostgreSQL, Redis, AWS, React, Elasticsearch, Databricks/Spark, FFmpeg
Résumé/CV: <https://en.masher.media/about.html>
Email: [email protected]
I've mostly been a first or founding engineer, owning and evolving end-to-end systems in fast-moving environments. I focus on high-throughput pipelines, messaging platforms, media processing, recommendation engines, and real-time infrastructure.
I also build real-time dashboards and browser-based tooling to observe, debug, and control these distributed systems, using local-first storage and media processing as well as real-time communication workflows. I design systems that remain understandable and resilient under load, retries, and partial failures.
Recent work:
- Built a messaging system delivering millions of emails and push notifications in minutes (retries, deliverability, observability)
- Deployed real-time pipelines and recommendation systems for tens of millions of users
- Launched a browser-based video editing and encoding platform using FFmpeg, Supabase, and AWS serverless
- Scaled event ingestion 100x to power analytics, experimentation, and targeting
I do my best work in small, product-focused teams where engineers stay close to production, communicate early about risks and tradeoffs, and work directly with customers to solve concrete problems.
Currently interested in full-time, part-time, or contract:
- Forward deployed engineering
- Founding or early engineering
- Platform and systems engineering
- Data engineering
Pragmatic about LLMs: effective for exploration, debugging, documentation, and tightly scoped implementation work when paired with strong engineering judgment and rigid testing.