🎯 Aim high, 🚀 ship fast, ⚙️ embrace pragmatism

<aside> 👋 I'm a skilled software engineer and leader with experience in backend, infrastructure, mobile, and web. Fueled by the pursuit of high-impact projects, I am eager to shape engineering outcomes and steer teams towards innovative solutions.

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Contact

📧 [email protected]

🌎 markspicer.me

🔗 linkedin.com/in/markspicerjr

👾 github.com/betterengineering

Experience

Tidbyt

Founding Software Engineer – (June 2021 - Present)

• Collaborated closely with company founders in all aspects of bringing the Tidbyt product to market. Responsibilities included product development, sourcing materials, documentation writing, customer support, load testing, troubleshooting, performance monitoring, and manufacturing process optimization.
• Partnered with company founders in strategic business planning, setting ambitious goals, and successfully converting these objectives into tangible engineering outcomes.
• Initiated and nourished a dynamic developer community, growing it from 0 to over 2,000 members. Facilitated the development of an open-source app platform with 400+ community-contributed apps. Implemented effective engagement strategies, created comprehensive documentation, and developed custom developer tools and CI pipelines to support community growth.
• Significantly enhanced the core product by introducing an app store, establishing integrations with Google Home and Zapier, implementing app features like mute/pin, and forging custom features for partnerships with Shopify and the New York Mets.
• Expanded our backend infrastructure to support growth from 10 to 35,000 devices. Led the migration from Google Cloud IoT Core to a custom MQTT setup, while developing monitoring tools, alerts, and dashboards.

Facebook

Production Engineer, Artificial Intelligence – (Nov 2019 - Jun 2021)

• Supported the development of a cutting-edge machine learning stack on custom hardware, guiding it through numerous release milestones. Contributions included advising on release engineering, providing guidance on binary separation, establishing a Service Level Objective (SLO), formulating escalation policies, setting code quality standards, defining on-call expectations, developing comprehensive runbooks, and refining the severity (SEV) incident creation process.
• Collaborated with a Machine Learning framework product team to boost developer productivity by addressing entrenched code health challenges. Initiatives included reducing overlooked PR failures, modernizing dependency management, streamlining redundant tests, enhancing build speed, optimizing target determination, among other efficiency improvements.
  • The implemented solutions necessitated a hybrid approach, where technical advancements fostered cultural shifts in a self-perpetuating manner.

Squarespace

Senior Software Engineer, Backend – (Jan 2019 - Nov 2019)

• Spearheaded the division of the monolithic frontend from the backend:
  • Conducted the migration of the static asset origin to Google Cloud Storage.
  • Optimized build times, reducing them from 25 to 12 minutes.
  • Facilitated independent building and deploying of the two components.
  • Pioneered the implementation of hot reloads for new frontend versions.
• Championed the migration of the monolithic CMS platform to Kubernetes:
  • Collaborated with 7+ teams across multiple quarters, ensuring a coordinated approach.
  • Streamlined production deployment times, reducing them from 50 minutes to just 6.
  • Expedited new instance creation from 2 hours to a swift 1.5 minutes, improving efficiency.

Software Engineer, Backend – (Mar 2018 - Jan 2019)