David

Worked on building and evolving a fully-customized e-commerce platform backed by high-end technologies such as Elixir, GraphQL, and Kafka. Developed with Ruby on Rails applications during the migration to the new platform which used Elixir and Phoenix along with a GraphQL API. Was a part of multiple teams, from feature-focused teams to performance-focused teams.

One of the main features he supported was rebuilding the whole website and apps search experience, connecting the platform with an industry-lead Search tool. His main focus was on their Product Catalog, optimizing it so users could find the right product quicker and easier, given that every product at The RealReal is unique. He also led a team on other Catalog related features, ensuring product and engineering were aligned on key deliverables while unblocking and supporting mid-senior level engineers. Such features were mostly implemented using events through our Kafka cluster.

On the performance-focused team, he worked on optimizing essential parts of the backend, making the Holiday season smoother for the company. He mainly used Datadog for monitoring and metrics and partnered with load test tools to ensure changes were as efficient as possible. improving observability through APM instrumentation was a key part for the success of this project. Every improvement was made behind a feature flag, using a percentage rollout to measure performance improvements. We achieved great results pre-Holiday season and had strong sales during that period of the year.

Helped with the infrastructure transition from Heroku to AWS and Kubernetes. Collaborated with the DevOps team in making the applications conform to the new standards and optimizing them to extract the most of the new build and run systems