8 years in leadership with 5 years experience managing a team of 10 engineers including 1:1s, mentoring, coaching, and recruiting
Passionate about creating an inclusive, diverse, kind, and supportive engineering culture
Experienced in creating a cohesive team, encouraging collaboration, and ensuring the team ships complex projects on time
Comfortable bridging the gap between technical, product, and sales teams and able to communicate effectively with non-technical stakeholders to properly explain architectural considerations and advocate on behalf of the engineering team
Software Engineering
16 years experience in software engineering with a broad understanding of full stack technologies
Hands-on technology architect capable of designing large complex systems with the comfort to jump in and code
Extensive knowledge of programming languages, frontend frameworks, backend architecture, distributed systems, and data pipelines
Ability to bring a big-picture focus across all parts of the technology stack to identify novel capabilities and effectively productize them
Experience
United Talent Agency
CTO at MediaHoundJune 2020 - Present
MediaHound
Chief Technology OfficerMay 2017 - June 2020
VP of EngineeringJune 2016 - May 2017
Lead iOS EngineerMay 2014 - June 2016
Led the engineering team in all aspects including planning, architecture, deployment, security, testing, and best practices powering personalized entertainment discovery
Completed hands on full-stack development of core systems including data ingest pipelines orchestrated with Airflow, content-based recommender systems, and user-facing dashboards
Coached and mentored team members through 1:1 meetings, team building, peer programming, code lessons, and fostered a healthy code-review culture
Worked directly with partners, gathering requirements, generating documentation, and participating in sales pitches
Prototyped, tested, and refined advanced personalization features including algorithms, clustering, and NLP metadata enrichment
Analyzed the impact that new features and changes had on server resources, bugs, regressions, and technical debt to ensure speed, reliability, and scaling of services
Notable Achievements
Conceptualized and developed DateNightMovies.com, which has served over 10 million recommendations and won two Webby awards
Helped sell through into some of the largest Smart TV manufacturers, talent agencies, movie studios, and streaming services
Led the transition from traditional VMs to a self-managed Kubernetes cluster on AWS with monitoring, ingress, autoscaling, IaC using Terraform and Kops, and continuous deployment with ArgoCD, which reduced infrastructure costs by 90%
Re-engineered the recommendation engine into a Rust-based single-purpose executable to improve request per second by 100 fold
Migrated legacy flaky data pipelines to an efficient and fault tolerant Python-based pipeline with RabbitMQ, which resiliently processes tens of thousands of titles per day
Performed critical migrations and upgrades of the Neo4J database minimizing down-time, ensuring compatibility and service availability
Instituted a seminar series where team members give short presentations to share expertise and foster community
General Assembly
InstructorNov 2014 - Sep 2015
Taught the inaugural iOS Development with Swift course for motivated entry-level students, preparing course materials, teaching lessons, and mentoring students 1:1, which helped bring new talent into the field
Student feedback put me among the top instructors at General Assembly Los Angeles
“Dustin's combination of deep industry knowledge and approachability are are winning combination, and his efforts to make the learning scaffolded for the students is evident.” - GA Administrator
Airstrip
Senior iOS EngineerSep 2013 - May 2014
Worked on iOS apps to enable healthcare professionals to remotely monitor patient EKGs
Shipped interactive graphical EKG experiences and in-app chat for confidential direct-to-patient communication
Microsoft
Software Development EngineerJune 2011 - Sep 2013
Worked on the Windows Phone Developer Platform and shipped Windows Phone 8
Gained experience in API design, app compatibility, advanced debugging, design specifications, working with large codebases, and cross-team collaboration at a large corporation
Contributed to the Windows Phone Toolkit, Silverlight Framework system controls, and Native SDK for C++ Apps and DirectX Games
Shipped the Windows Phone Local/Push Notifications feature on the WinRT platform and collaborated extensively with counterparts in Windows and WNS
Received the Excellence in Execution Award - Windows Phone Division
Shacked
Co-FounderNov 2009 - Dec 2011
Developed and brought multiple iOS products to market
Created Flickpad, an immersive photo sharing app for iPad, was featured by Apple under New and Noteworthy and was written up in MacWorld, Wired, The Huffington Post, amongst other media outlets
Education
Rice University
B.S. in Computer Science2011Computer Science Club Co-PresidentResearcher under Dr. Dan WallachTeaching Assistant