robperson.com

software engineer

Rob
PERSON

 

Objective

Looking for exciting technical challenges

Hi! My name’s Rob. I’m a Senior Software Engineer with over 10 years of professional experience. I currently lead the GraphQL team at Lyft. Over the last 3 years, I’ve helped grow GraphQL at Lyft from a one-off experiment to a critical piece of infrastructure which powers 50+ applications and over 100 million requests per day. I truly enjoy building software at scale and working on problems that have impact for as many people as possible.

If you’re looking for a strong technical leader to help drive mission critical projects, please use the contact form above to reach out!

 

Experience

Lyft, Senior Software Engineer

November 2016 - Present

  • Tech Lead for Lyft’s GraphQL ecosystem; Established GraphQL as the default API gateway for front-end applications at Lyft, saving up to 1 week of developer time per new application by making custom backends for each frontend unnecessary.

  • Drove GraphQL adoption across Lyft and grew usage from one application to over 50 applications serving 100 million queries per day.

  • Planned long-term vision and yearly roadmaps for GraphQL and best practices for service-to-service communication.

  • Designed and implemented a resource-aware, role-based access control framework which protects Lyft’s public GraphQL endpoint from unauthorized data access.

  • Created interactive visual debugger for Lyft’s matching platform, reducing time to diagnose bad matches from several hours to just minutes.

  • Implemented dispatch and matching algorithms for popular Lyft features such as Scheduled Pickups and Commuter Benefits

MIcroSoFT - Online Services Division (bing), Software Engineer

May 2012 - October 2016

  • Improved developer productivity with Visual Parity Test Framework by implementing smarter image comparison to reduce flakiness; new APIs to allow test authors to test interactive features; integration with Microsoft’s internal code review tool (Codeflow); support for handling browser events in tests; and support for asynchronous JavaScript execution.

  • Drove effort to adopt Elasticsearch for logging Bing test automation results and creating a reporting pipeline with Kibana. Saved Bing thousands of dollars per month by repurposing existing Autopilot machines.

  • Implemented a real-time test flakiness detection system, built on top of our Elasticsearch infrastructure, which prevented developers from being blocked from checking in by unreliable tests. 

  • Implemented improvements for Bing’s Performance Test System. Reduced average runtime from 60 minutes to 30 minutes, while adding new tools to debug performance regressions, saving developers hours per week.

Microsoft - Online Services Division (bing), Software development engineer in test (intern)

May 2011 - August 2011

  • Created a reporting pipeline for Bing Mobile performance instrumentation, reduced time to retrieve performance data from several hours to less than a minute.

MICrosoft - OFFICE ONLINE, Software Development engineer (Intern)

May 2008 - August 2008

  • Developed automated GUI Testing scripts for SQL Server 2005 and created a custom Graph Rendering Control which was used in an Excel 2007 add in. Technologies used: C#, SQL Server Analysis Services, Office 2007, Windows Vista

InterestS

GraphQL
Golang
Python
Distributed Systems
TypeScript
React
React Native
C#

Education

Howard University, Washington, D.c.

B.S. SYSTEMS & COMPUTER SCIENCE
Graduated May 2010

 

Howard University, washington, D.c.

M.S. SYSTEMS & COMPUTER SCIENCE
Graduated May 2012

Contact

Email: ROB@ROBPERSON.COM
Phone: +1 (202) 569-2366