Let's Build Together
Summary
- 15 years of expertise building maintainable, scalable systems using Node.JS, Elixir, and other backend languages, and frontend frameworks like React (including React Native + React Native Web)
- 7 years leadership experience
Top Skills
- Training, mentoring and leading teams
- Architect-level systems development (frontend and backend)
- Organizing projects
- Data-driven roadmaps
- Documentation
- End-user and internal staff UX
Passions
- Bridging gaps between operational, support, product, design, QA teams, clients, and leadership
- Productivity tools for teams or clients
tl;dr
Jack of all trades; Breadth of knowledge across
- Software engineering
- Platforms/devops/site reliability
- QA
- Product and project management
- Escalated support issues
- Data-driven metrics and forensics
- Ops and strategic planning
I believe in flexibility, autonomy, transparency, collaboration, and a strong work ethic for succeeding in any role.
You can find my work history on my résumé.
Individual Contributor
Top contributor on main repositories in last 3 organizations (I love building solutions that help people).
In my leadership roles, my primary focus is on the health and growth of the organization and my teams, however, staying involved at the technical level is critical to helping mentor my teams and helping them grow in their career.
Specifically, I have a place in my heart for productivity tools to help teams scale themselves.
I have witnessed Jason go above and beyond countless times, genuinely caring about the people, product, users, and company... Jason is also very talented technically and has produced countless side projects and proofs of concept that have grown into core services. -VP, SmartRent
Jason Walsh was shipping functional code so fast that I initially suspected him of hiring external engineers without telling me - Co-Founder, Mangrove
Code Stewardship
Philosophy when building systems: "Write the code, code comments, tests, and PR documentation such that a junior or senior engineer that has never worked in this system could immediately take ownership and contribute."
As a mentor, Jason inspires those around him to aim high and work towards ambitious goals. He is an excellent teacher, and his commitment to sharing his knowledge and expertise has helped to shape the careers of many aspiring software engineers, including myself. - Director, SmartRent
Public Speaking / Training / Mentorship
Attend / present at local meetups; comfortable leading meetings with various audiences (engineers, operations, support, etc.).
Helping educate clients and staff about how systems work and behave, how to navigate them, and what to do if there are problems.
With his teams, I have seen Jason mentor, teach, and grow incredible teammates and leaders. I have learned so much from Jason over the years, and I can't thank him enough for his positive influence as a guide, mentor, and friend. - VP, SmartRent
Project Management
Wrote thousands of stories to move projects along as well as report bugs and vulnerabilities.
An incredible problem solver and leader, Jason approaches each challenge with a critical balance of both his own precision to detail, while listening carefully to team members and taking all needs into consideration. - Director, SmartRent
Documentation
Contributed to hundreds of documents to help Engineers, QA, Ops, Support, Product, and Marketing teams as well as client-facing API and how-to documentation.
Telemetry and Forensics
Built dozens of dashboards and monitoring/alerts to help teams maintain systems; visualize when systems need TLC or intervention, identify critical failures that require immediate action.
Operations And Processes
Improved operational processes. Example of evolution of loading firmware onto hubs:
Values And Philosophies
Connected services, connected people
Software is about enriching lives.
Life is too short to focus on the wrong things; we must make do with the time we have. How we spend our time and where we focus our efforts can help touch others' lives and in doing so we learn and grow ourselves.
We, as people, walk many different paths, but everyone deserves to be treated with dignity and respect. Equality and in embracing our indiviudal and collective identities is key to cohesion and growth. No one should have to live in fear or be ashamed of who they are.
The way Jason leads his teams is exactly what you want— he is kind, patient, and leads by example. - Director, SmartRent
Skillsets
- Using telemetry to measure system efficacy, observability, logging and forensics, and improving application performance through reviewing callstacks for optimizations as well as significant experience directly with Postgres
- Directly building or guiding teams to build complex systems from scratch
- Data modeling, database design, and API design
- Writing tests and documentation
- Improving engineering productivity
- Keeping teams in sync and help articulate the vision, the strategy, and the tactics to get to the end-goal
His experience as a software architect and tech executive have given him a deep understanding of software development principles, design patterns, and coding best practices. - Director, SmartRent
Systems I've Worked On
Productivity Tooling
- Simplified client-facing API documentation using minimal-effort tooling
- Compatible with OpenAPI spec
- Internal support interfaces integrated to Ticketing Software to pre-populate client data quickly and facilitates getting support staff to pages designed to help them troubleshoot common issues
- Revamped authorization suite to allow staff the ability to provide rudimentary client support as well as a client support authorization platform, where clients grant elevated access to their data for escalated support needs
- Enhanced auditability of internal staff actions to end-users (What is this company doing with my data? What can they see? Is my PII exposed?)
- Saves approximately 30s per support ticket operation, utilized ~30k times/month and has estimated time savings of 250 hours/mo
- White-glove tooling so our staff can onboard and serve customers faster
- Projects reduced from 400 personnel-hours to 1-5 hours
- Better logistics and operational insights of customers and their needs
- Faster internally navigation to clients' portfolios and critical data while on calls
- Metrics that track reliability, scalability, and security
Optimizations
- Switch from bloated, generic cron-executed queries that would unnecessarily check for work at great load to the database to event-driven architecture, helping to reduce Cloud costs
- Example: Checking every minute for if any of one million smart devices have a schedule that needs to be ran in that minute is not performant, instead during schedule setup, trigger a delayed job to execute when the scheduled operation should run and have that operation trigger future operations.
- Sped up dev-environment on primary repository by 1-3s per page load
- Sped up dev compilation time by 20-60s per full recompile by transforming compile-time dependencies into runtime dependencies, cutting out bloat and unused code, and optimizing architectural designs (when switching branches and/or where dependencies changed)
- Help maintain dependencies to keep us up to date with security patches and enhancements to the core architecture
- Sped up testing framework by 2x from 30 minutes to 15 minutes to promote local testing (and reducing friction around adding tests)
Jason has a strong grasp on all things front end and backend— we have worked together building tiny one-off apps— along with massive systems that needed to scale across the world. -Director, SmartRent
Security
- Helped maintain Bugcrowd program to facilitate and promote responsible disclosure (and reward) for identified vulnerabilities
- Assisted with onboarding, facilitating, managing and resolving vulnerabilities detected by internal and external pentest audits
- Found and fixed SQL injections, XSS, Remote Server Command Execution and DNS Discovery, Indirect Object Reference, Improper Authorization, Privilege Escalation, and more
I've even attended Defcon, which I believe every engineer should do at least once. (I did not hack that slot machine, nor was that ethical unless permission was granted to the security research. This is a great eye-opening example of how important security is)
Auth
Authentication
- Email/password, SSO, OAuth 2, SAML, service-to-service communication
- Bearer auth (JWT; symmetric and assymetric), HMAC signature checksum verification, and more.
- Post-acquisition, built service for 100k+ end-users to link their individual user accounts across products together
- SPA and Server-Side Rendered
- Brute force protection + Account lockout
- Multi-factor Auth
- Forgot Password / Change Password flows
- OTP Verification Codes
Authorization
- Permissions systems that prevent privilege escalation and are easily testable
- Waterfall-style permissioning
- Security-focused tests to prevent indirect object references or manipulation of unauthorized data
IoT
Pipelines
- Responsible for maintaining and scaling critical pipelines that ingest 100k events/minute using technologies such as SNS, SQS, RabbitMQ, Redis / Elasticache, Tools for batch processing such as Broadway, Kinesis, Kafka, and IoT Core (MQTT)
Performance
- From 2022 to 2023, I've had a strong focus on speeding up installation times. Even with 2x output from 2022, through a lot of collaboration with firmware and software teams, we've made 1.5-4x speed enhancements (lock pairing went down to 13 minutes on average from 56 minutes)
Reliability
- Despite the amount of device commands growing 2x in scale from 2022 to 2023, myself and my team have helped improve IoT device command reliability by 6% year-over-over
- Through detailed black-box testing, we've identified and created reproduction steps to critical firmware issues on hubs and devices we support through our Partner / Affiliate programs and worked with external teams to create better firmware that has higher reliability for our clients
Uptime and Handling Sensitive Information / Time-Sensitive Events
- Critical stability of systems include: security handling of "digital keys" (access codes) to homes of residents living in apartments or single family homes outfitted
- Manage event-driven system to move in and out residents automatically based on incoming data from Property Management Syncs
Workflow Management
- Some events in the IoT and Leasing callstacks can create a variable, branching amount of side effects: two systems include the Move In/Move Out system and the Device Pairing workflow. Both run on state machines managed by job queueing services to that use event-driven hooks to check if new jobs should be created based on the results of pre-existing jobs that finished
- Build operational tools to assist with upgrading hardware and pre-configuring hubs / devices within our warehouses before shipping to properties to speed up installation times.
Managing Data
- Created and built strict data retention policies within Postgres to keep database from getting overwhelmed
- Assisted with building and rollout of partitioned tables (essentially sharding in Postgres)
- Efficiently handle ~3-5 million records per day
Activity Logs, User Data, and PII
- Manage resident privacy by creating activity logs that have tiered-permissions for access to activity logs
- Compliance with various state laws such as Miya's Law, CCPA, GDPR, and more
Search
- Utilization of systems like Elasticsearch and Opensearch and previously SOLR to create a smooth end-user search experience. Led and assisted with index designs optimized for speed
- Document sizes range from a few million to hundreds of millions of documents
- Architectures focused on keeping database and search-engine data in sync with playbooks for fast, full re-indexing in case of emergency
Third Party Integrations / Vendor Integrations
Led or assisted with launching over 50 backend and frontend integrations ranging from:
- CRM solutions
- Leasing + lease ledger software
- Prospect applications
- Salesforce
- Accounting software
- Maintenance work order 2-way data syncs
- Inbound / Outbound Webhooks
- Camera app SDKs
- Amplitude, GA, DataDog, OpenTelemetry, and other metrics / logging tools
- Push Notifications
- ETL software + Data normalization
- SmartHome providers
- Property access + property intercoms
- Mapping solutions
- Identity check / verification
- Billing
- Email + SMS
- Geolocation
- Security systems
- ISP resellers
- Zendesk
- Slack + slackbots
- Github, CI / CD, Release management
Rebranding Tooling
- Built numerous systems across companies that handled rebranding of clients in emails, on webpages that the clients could build and design, and APIs to allow re-skinning of mobile applications and marketing sites to match client themes
More Testimonials
Here are some things that team members have wrote about me and my work:
When we were evaluating different vendors, we chose SmartRent because your knowledge and passion set you apart from other companies.
I've never seen someone so high up at a company be such an advocate and mentor for engineers
You have a very compassionate and empathetic posture when wanting to get things done for not only yourself but for others. I mean it when I say it. It's rare in this environment that we are in.
I can't even begin to explain the relief you've brought to the [redacted] issues. These kind of issues are hard to solve and require, the time, dedication, and deep understanding of the system to address. Thank you for rolling up your sleeves and digging in.
I really appreciate all that you and your team do. SmartRent would not be the same without you, it is evident in all the help you provide literally everyone.
Great presentation on [redacted]. The teams really enjoyed hearnig about these items and you're able to explain it in a way that they can understand.
I had a few shirts made and left one in your office... Just wanted to let you know you're appreciated.
I just wanted to say that discovering this [Confluence] space made my day!
May 5th is my birthday. This [productivity tool] is a great present