Case study
Ten seconds
PLATFORM ENGINEER, API BACKEND · REFINERY29 · JAN 2015 – AUG 2016
The work
Refinery29 was a fashion and lifestyle publication serving 110 million unique page views a week. I was a backend engineer on the API platform team, building for the Discovery and Growth product teams alongside core platform work.
- Discovery — built and maintained the APIs behind the article feed on mobile and desktop web. Contributed to the homepage relaunch, including the search index powering content discovery
- Growth — built backend services for the video platform, which grew video views by over 300% to 1M, peaking at 500K per week. Rebuilt the backend for the beauty section relaunch
- Platform — cut backend latency by 10 seconds through database indexing and query optimization: a 70% improvement in page load time
Ten seconds of latency removed from a page that millions of people loaded every week. No new feature, no redesign — indexes and query plans.
Why it is here
This is the engineering half of the résumé, and it is the reason I can sit with engineers and be useful rather than decorative. It is also where the interest shifted. I joined Reforge's Growth Series in 2016, which was the first time I wanted to decide what was worth building rather than build what was specified.