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Brendan Long

Seattle, WA
linkedin.com/in/brendankblong
Production engineer with 10+ years of software experience seeking to apply deep systems engineering expertise to ambitious interpretability work.

Work Experience

Production Engineer (IC6)

Meta

Nov 2023 - Current
  • Built tooling and dashboards to identify potential configuration improvements, then worked with service teams to implement and verify those improvements, reducing server costs by ~$25M/year while improving service reliability.
  • Started and led a cross-organization project (10+ teams) to load test large (>10k hosts) high-risk stateful services and improve estimates for hosting needs. Used load test results to safely reduce server costs by over $10M/yr.
  • Started projects to improve CPU utilization monitoring to improve load balancing and capacity planning using load test results and simple statistical models.
  • Mentored a summer intern who successfully completed his project and was offered and accepted a post-graduation position.

Staff Software Engineer

Oct 2021 - Oct 2023
  • Led project to build a high-uptime, scalable, low-latency integration with a card processor, designing the data model, REST API and async processing.
  • Technical lead on a project to improve signup funnel completion, reducing errors during signup by 95% and improving overall user onboarding rate by ~10% while reducing system complexity.
  • Led project to migrate database clients from Prisma to Sequelize on a system with millions of transactions and hundreds of thousands of users. Improved performance and reliability. Reduced server costs by ~75%.

Senior Software Engineer

Dec 2016 - Oct 2021
  • Led team to implement high-uptime/low-latency REST and sFTP integrations in OCaml with customers' ATS and HRIS systems (iCIMS, Taleo, PeopleFluent, ADP) with millions of job applications.
  • Refactored an ETL job for processing customer spreadsheets with millions of employment events, improving performance by 2 orders of magnitude while also improving code readability, memory usage, and debuggability.
  • Designed and implemented Dockerized services on ECS with automated deployments to fix biweekly issues with unreliable manual/stateful deployments.
  • Maintained and/or wrote OCaml open source libraries (PostgreSQL database driver, Excel file reader, FreeTDS-based SQL Server library).
  • Mentored junior engineers on career development and technical topics.

Senior Software Engineer

Jan 2012 - Dec 2016
  • Added HTML5 audio, video and text tracks to WebKit (C++) and GStreamer (C). Collaborated with Apple, Google, and others and the HTML5 mailing list.
  • One of the editors for MPEG's "MPEG-DASH Conformance and Reference Software" spec.

Software Engineering Intern

May 2010 - Dec 2011

Education

B.Sc., Computer Science

Colorado State University

2009 - 2011

Technologies and Languages

Languages
Python, TypeScript, OCaml, Java, SQL, JavaScript, C++, C, Hack (PHP)
Technologies
PostgreSQL, MySQL, AWS, Git, Docker, GraphQL, REST API’s, Node.js, Spring
Other
Data structures and algorithms, functional programming