Hi, I'm Ryan

Backend engineer from Chicago who builds scalable systems by day and hunts for the perfect pizza by night

About Me

My journey from data analyst to backend engineer happened naturally as I discovered what truly excited me about working with technology. I discovered that I preferred building solutions to problems rather than analyzing the data they produced. My background in data gives me unique insights into what makes systems efficient and scalable.

When I'm not optimizing infrastructure to save companies $600k annually or processing 50 million messages per day, you'll find me exploring Chicago's food scene or planning my next culinary adventure around the world.

When Coleen said yes in San Diego

Pizza from one of my favorite places in Chicago (my head for scale)

Not the best ramen I had in Japan, but the view was great

Eating my bodyweight's worth of food at one of Taiwan's night markets

Enjoying Scotland's highlands and scotch

Sun, sand, and a wedding in Cabo San Lucas

The very sweet and sleepy Bear

Languages & Tools

Technologies I use to build scalable, efficient backend systems

🐹

🐍

Python

☁️

AWS

Lambda

🐳

ECS

📨

Kafka

📢

SNS

📬

SQS

📄

DocumentDB

🗃️

DynamoDB

💾

Redis

🗄️

Work Experience

My journey from analytics to backend engineering, building scalable systems that handle millions of messages

Senior Backend Engineer

Fetch

October 2024 - Present

Decreased cost of the social activity pipeline by over $600k per year through infrastructure and data management changes
Served as a subject matter expert on an event-driven social activity pipeline, guiding engineers in project planning and implementation
Implemented fault-tolerant recovery logic for Kafka consumer client, enabling automatic HTTP fallback and background reconnection attempts to eliminate service startup dependencies and improve system reliability

Backend Engineer

Fetch

April 2023 - September 2024

Used Apache Kafka and AWS Lambda to process 50 million messages per day with a pipeline average latency of 1.5 seconds
Built an event-driven microservice for aggregating social activities into time-based groups using Apache Kafka and AWS ECS
Enhanced backend service stability to 99.999% by improving logging, monitoring, and resolving root causes of errors

Data Engineer

Fetch

June 2022 - March 2023

Led a team to improve the usability of our data pipeline load testing tool and increased throughput from 50k/s to 200k/s
Evangelized data quality tests and monitoring through designing, implementing, and presenting easy-to-use tools
Productionalized a PoC backend for running data quality tests using Python and FastAPI

Analytics Engineer

Fetch

October 2021 - May 2022

Designed and built a Python and Airflow data pipeline to export Snowflake data to S3, streamlining integration for partners
Eliminated the reprocessing of terabytes of data per day by using dbt and SQL
Built a data quality test generator script using Python to easily bootstrap tests for existing data assets in Snowflake

Business Intelligence Developer

Expeditors International

June 2019 - September 2021

Designed and implemented reliable, documented, and tested ETL pipelines using Python and Apache Airflow
Automated over 1,000 hours of work per month through data-entry scripts, data pipelines, and Excel workflows
Implemented a SQL Query Generator tool using Python that reduces the time to write SQL queries by 70-100%
Summarized and presented quantitative data with Power BI dashboards to facilitate data-driven decision making

Personal Projects

Side projects that showcase my passion for building full-stack applications and solving real-world problems

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Education

Master of Science in Analytics

Georgia Institute of Technology

2019 - 2020

Bachelor of Science in Statistics

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

2015 - 2018

Send me a message!

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