Adrian J. Cruz

Software Engineer, Sometimes Speaker, Always a Learner.

Professional Summary

Product-minded Senior Software Engineer with 15+ years of experience architecting and scaling backend systems and marketplace infrastructure for high-traffic SaaS and e-commerce platforms. Recognized for leading cross-functional teams, driving architectural migrations (monolith to microservices/serverless), and championing observability and performance standardizations

Skills

• Languages: Python, TypeScript, Kotlin, Elixir, Erlang, PHP, Ruby
• Databases & Stores: MongoDB, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, MySQL, Redis, OpenSearch
• Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS (Lambda, MediaConvert, S3, SQS, Step Functions, CDK), Kubernetes, Pulumi, Terraform, Docker
• Architecture & Practices: Distributed systems, Event-driven Architecture, Observability (Datadog), GraphQL, gRPC

Experience

7/2022-Present Sr. Software Engineer, Backend, Webflow, San Francisco, CA (Remote)

• Served as a force multiplier by establishing organization-wide standards for scalability and observability, influencing technical direction
• Acted as project tech lead for backend to build out a new Assets REST API server
• Contributed full-stack to a tiger team focused on performance to implement pagination in Webflow Dashboard reducing initial page load by 50%
• Translated ambiguous enterprise security requirements into a durable Audit Log system using OpenSearch, reducing customer churn risk
• Drove the initiative to migrate Site Backup & Restore system to be asynchronous in SQS with Step Functions, enabling 20x larger capacity-sized site snapshots for customers
• Co-led the Account Recovery initiative, streamlining customer account recovery processes and reducing Customer Support tickets by 30%
• Led Okta Single Sign-on (SSO) implementation for internal Admin application from project scoping, test & rollout planning, to production delivery, improving security posture and reducing administrative overhead for 700+ employees
• Co-led Engineering Backend Guild, a committee to help shape and prioritize backend engineering initiatives
• Prototyped event-driven Kafka framework to parallelize processes with a publisher-subscriber model

3/2021-6/2022 Sr. Software Engineer, Backend, Peloton Interactive, New York, NY

• Implemented monitoring & observability best practices across e-commerce teams, adding improved Datadog dashboards for our Python and Kotlin services
• Established incident response protocols and on-call rotations, improving system uptime and developer accountability
• Improved message queueing in SQS with two engineers adding a dead letter queue reducing 30% of errors
• Owned end-to-end backend services for high-transaction marketplace flows; ensured data consistency and system reliability for 25k orders/day using Kotlin and Python
• Created engineering design docs, runbooks, technical documentation
• Managed Scrum ceremonies (planning, stand-up, grooming, retrospective) for a team of eight partnering with product, cross-functional stakeholders on product requirements docs, feature prioritization

9/2019-3/2021 Sr. Software Engineer, Glossier, Inc., New York, NY

• Led team of six to develop a Cart Service to handle transaction integrity as a serverless backend service built with TypeScript AWS Lambda Functions, DynamoDB, SQS, Kinesis, and API Gateway
• Spearheaded initiative to implement Afterpay, PayPal, Venmo as payment methods, increasing revenue by 30%
• Mentored engineers for observability best practices, systems architecture; facilitate code dojos, demos, pairing, and provide learning opportunities for the team
• Implemented infrastructure as code for cloud infrastructure with AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) and PagerDuty, Datadog with Terraform

7/2015-8/2019 Sr. Software Engineer, Teachers Pay Teachers, New York, NY

• Migrated Search system from CakePHP monolith to a GraphQL API in Elixir with React frontend, decreasing latency by over 60% and supporting 800,000 daily average searches
• Implemented a Tax API service in Ruby to interact with Avalara
• Mentored engineers for coding best practices, systems architecture, instrumentation, data, technical presentations
• Authored technical specifications and wrote code to implement end-to-end, working across engineering and business teams
• Instrumented code, build dashboards & alerts to ensure integrity of services with StatsD, Datadog, PagerDuty
• Maintained infrastructure consisting of Amazon EC2 instances, RDS (MySQL), Kubernetes, Redis
• Architected Python-based ETL pipelines to support data-driven decision making and predictive analytics with Apache Airflow, MySQL, BigQuery

7/2014-6/2015 Software Engineer, HowStuffWorks, New York, NY

• Implemented ETL data pipeline with Python, Luigi, Amazon S3, Hadoop, Hive

7/2008-7/2014 Developer, About.com, New York, NY

• Developed internal tooling, web applications, and services with Python, MySQL, Django, C++, Apache Thrift, Java

11/2004-6/2008 Integration Engineer, SchoolNet, Inc., New York, NY

• Built server systems, Drupal CMS with FreeBSD, PHP & MySQL, automation of data processing jobs

Education

2000 - 2004 Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Newark.

• B.A. Computer Science, Minor: Mathematics