Open to Principal and Staff engineering roles in the US.

Based in Sydney, ready to relocate, visa sponsorship required. Reach me at [email protected].

Fifteen years building the systems underneath products that millions of people use every day. The globally distributed load balancer behind Apple device activations. The real-time backend powering Canva Live. The internal platform that 8,000 Walmart engineers shipped ecommerce on.

I work at the layer where correctness, latency, and cost collide, and I stay hands on. Lately that means LLM fine-tuning, retrieval augmented generation, and agentic workflows alongside the distributed systems work I have always done.

Apple · Principal Engineer, Device Activations

• Owned a globally distributed load balancer sustaining 99.999% availability for device activation traffic
• Led a team of 12 engineers across the activations platform

Canva · Live Collaboration and Search

• Led development of five real-time collaboration products: Canva Live, Talking Presentations, Reactions, Remote Control, and Playlist
• Grew those surfaces to 10M+ monthly active users in two years, on a platform serving over a billion presentations a year
• Scaled Canva Search from 20M to 80M MAU, a 4x increase in served traffic

Walmart · Platform Engineering

• Built core platform systems for configuration management, auto-generated CRUD APIs, and parallel deployment orchestration
• Those systems served an 8,000-developer ecosystem building and scaling ecommerce
• Core contributor to the migration off a proprietary platform onto an open-source stack, part of a program Walmart credited with $100M+ in annual savings

Atlassian · Search Infrastructure

• Architected an active-active load balancer on ZooKeeper fronting Elasticsearch clusters
• Cut search downtime by 20+ hours per quarter and lifted search NPS by 15 points

eBay · Platform

• Built and open-sourced Regressr, a regression testing framework for HTTP services, now maintained under the eBay GitHub organization

Five granted and published US patents in real-time collaboration and distributed platform systems.

• Systems and methods for interactive presentations · US 20230205552
• Storing and replaying presentations with video and audio · US 20230205808
• Remotely controlling electronic presentations · US 20230076902
• Increasing throughput of a PaaS system · US 9342369 B2
• Verification of complex multi-application and multi-node deployments · US 20140109082

Google Scholar profile

• Lessons Learnt from Building Reactive Microservices for Canva Live · Canva Engineering
• Building a Data-Driven Autocorrection System · Canva Engineering
• Introducing Regressr, an Open Source Tool to Regression Test HTTP Services · eBay Tech Blog
• 22 Recommendations for Building Effective High Traffic Web Software · High Scalability
• An Implementation of Consistent Hashing in Java · Personal blog
• Take-Home Coding Tests: Signal or Noise? · Personal blog
• Why Australia Struggles to Build a Thriving Tech Ecosystem · Personal blog

AI/ML           LLM fine-tuning, RAG, LangGraph, agentic workflows, Prefect
Languages       Java, Go, Python, Kotlin, Scala, TypeScript
Distributed     Kafka, Spark, Redis, ZooKeeper, consistent hashing, active-active topologies
Cloud           AWS (EC2, RDS, DynamoDB, SNS/SQS), GCP (BigQuery, Dataform, Pub/Sub)
Frameworks      Spring, gRPC, GraphQL, Temporal, Protobuf
Search          Elasticsearch, Apache Solr at index and serve scale
Infrastructure  Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, Spinnaker, ArgoCD

Also running Tentacle Software, a boutique engineering consultancy, between full-time roles.