A Little About Me

Hello there. I'm Markus. Welcome to my page.

tldr;
I love the outdoors.
I love to read.
I'm a software engineer by trade.
I'm looking for something new.

I was born and raised in Walnut Creek California, attended De La Salle High School in Concord, CA, and graduated from UCLA with a BS in Computer Science.
From 2017 - late 2022 I worked as a software engineer in a large enterprise setting at Workday (10s of thousands of employees) and then in a more high speed and dynamic startup environment at Sprig (<100 employees).
So far in 2023, I've been traveling, dabbling in investing, reading philosophy, messing with chatGPT, and writing (not even close to exhaustive list). "Exploring" would be a good one word summary.

Now I'm entertaining a career pivot. I've always been interested in transitioning roles from engineering to something a little more people facing, and now that I have some breathing room, I'm opening myself up to such a transition. I'm not giving up on software engineering... just making a conscious effort to see what lies beyond. Some roles I'm considering are Product Manager, Sales Engineer, and Account Executive.
While exploring different adjacent roles and learning from colleagues about their experiences, I'm also honing my engineering skills and staying sharp, exploring side projects that I've tabled in my notes over the last 10 years.

So please peruse. Make yourself at home. Warm yourself by the fire of my page.
Contact me if you think I'd be a fit for any particular roles. I'm mainly looking in SF, LA, and Austin, but my resolve here can be broken with proper persuasion.

Work Experience

• Sprig    Senior Data Engineer     (Aug. 2021 - Nov. 2022)
• Designed, created and maintained an asynchronous data deletion service to keep compliant w/ GDPR requirements (go, kafka, postgres, grpc, k8s, prometheus)
• Designed, created and maintained customer usage data pipelines and accompanying service to asynchronously calculate usage data and serve it via gRPC APIs (go, postgres, grpc, k8s, clickhouse, prometheus)
• Managed BI infrastructure, working with downstream BI analysts to provide data critical to their analysis (go, k8s, snowflake, mozart, fivetran)
• Introduced hightouch reverse ETL solution to pipe salesforce data from snowflake to mixpanel to enable critical funnel analysis (hightouch, segment)


• Workday Inc.    Software Development Engineer I, II, III     (Sept. 2017 - Aug. 2021)
• Created and maintened distributed go/scala/spark master + worker application to ingest & post-process structured log data > 2TB/day (go, scala, spark, hdfs, redis)
• Designed and implemented library for automatic schema evolution detection and queryability across versions (scala, spark, hdfs, elasticsearch)
• Saved days of manual QA work by designing and implementing a user friendly websocket testing framework to replicate non-trivial client interaction flows and integrated into CI/CD pipeline (go, jenkins)
• Presented to performance engineers, product managers, on-call support teams, & others to demo, explain & pitch our internal performance tooling in person
• Took leadership role on the GW leadership board for new hires & interns, specifically on the committee in charge of planning retreat events, curating the technical question bank, and streamlining our interview process


• Workday Inc.    Associate Application Developer Intern     (June 2016 - Sept. 2016)
• Worked as a member of the Payroll Payments team
• Fixed a critical bug in payslips and created associated automation for web services, UI, and printing options
• Created a key feature which will allow customers to purge certain sensitive employee data from their tenant
• Took part in the Agile development process and learned by doing


• Viasat Inc.    Software Engineering Intern     (June 2015 - Sept. 2015)
• Designed, documented, developed, deployed, and tested a REST API and web application using the MEAN stack for presenting key performance indicators (KPI’s) in the continuous integration and delivery of eight software components in four artifact repositories; Learned about CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery) and used various node.js packages
• Created a web scraper tool to expedite the downloading of sensitive data using Python and Selenium
• Worked with Jenkins, Coverity, Fortify, Klocwork, Cppcheck, and Clang to conduct a static analysis tool trade study to decide which tool to integrate into Viasat’s CI/CD pipeline


• Electron Losses and Fields Investigation    Software/Test Engineer     (May 2014 - June 2015)
• Charged with controlling the orientation of the satellite in space through its spin rate and direction
• Derived a precession control law used in the simulation of the satellite’s orbit
• Created a LabView program to simulate the satellite’s magnetometer data


• UCLA Anderson School of Business    Student Technician     (Feb. 2015 - Sept. 2015)
• Charged with troubleshooting technical hardware and software related issues for graduate students and faculty at the UCLA Anderson School of Business
• Configured Laptops, Imaged/Re-imaged desktops
• Dealt with Windows, MacOS, and Linux

Projects

• Javascript Animated Font
• Created my own developer friendly animated font using Javascript
• When a viewer mouses over the font, the words break up into dots and fly away only to realign themselves perfectly when the mouse moves away
• Developer can input font size, color, and opacity
• Mouse over my name at the top to see it in action :)


• Javascript Space Shooter
• Third person space shooter constructed using Web-GL
• Built as a class project for an introduction to graphics class at UCLA
• Try it yourself! (note some textures only load properly in Firefox)


• Basic Javascript Zombie Game
• Very simple but addicting implementation of a zombie survival game using Javascript
• Try to survive as long as you can! (While collecting as many brains as you can!...not your conventional zombie game)
• Try it yourself!


• X1 Robotics
• Together with a few other engineers, I recently co-founded the club X1 Robotics at UCLA
• Currently working on establishing ourselves as an organization and will be applying for funding soon
• The first project we are undertaking is building and programming an autonomously stabilizing quadcopter using a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino Mega
• The quadcopter will be controlled via an iPhone application which I have already created and will respond in real time to user commands as well as make calculations to stablize itself in flight


• iOS Application Development
• Worked with both Swift and Objective C to design and implement some small mini games using the Spritekit Framework
• Currently developing an application which pits friends against friends in a socially competitive environment...more details to come when it gets to the app store
• Created entirely from scratch a 2D iOS mini game using Swift and SpriteKit
• Published on the iOS App Store