Scaling Systems and Teams: My Journey as a Software Engineer

I've spent most of my career working on complex systems. Things like e-discovery platforms and high-throughput job queues. I try to keep my approach pragmatic. I care about shipping code that runs well and is easy to maintain. I’ve worked both as a team lead and as an individual contributor. In either case, I try to strike a balance between abstraction and performance. I rely on a few core practices: fast feedback loops, good tests, clear visibility into infrastructure, and well-defined ownership.

One of the most satisfying projects I worked on involved improving a slow job processing system. The queues were growing out of control, and visibility was limited. I helped diagnose bottlenecks, reworked some of the job logic, and added better monitoring around throughput and retries. It wasn’t a huge rewrite, but the changes made things a lot more stable. That experience reinforced how much small, careful improvements can matter. I try to bring that mindset to every project; focus on the real problems, make things clearer, and don’t overbuild.

I’ve learned that it’s better to ship something small and working than to plan something big and perfect. I try to stay focused on what matters most, keep things readable, and not overcomplicate. If something breaks, I want it to be obvious why. That’s how I try to work and how I like to build things.