I am Dan, a software engineer specializing in backend engineering and building robust systems across complex domains.

Reliability and maintainability of the software I design and write is something I am deeply passionate about. I believe that in the age of generative AI, it is more important than ever for engineers to maintain a deep mental model of the entire system. I enjoy knowing what every line of code does under the hood - down to the underlying dependencies - which allows me to make critical, educated decisions necessary to drive a product forward.

Experience

Currently, I am a Founding Engineer at Cortea.

Previously, I spent nearly three years at Getsafe where I was promoted to Staff Backend Engineer shortly before I left. I ensured the reliability of a complex underwriting system processing hundreds of thousands of policies, established the observability stack and SRE practices, and owned the infrastructure. My most notable contributions include designing a Kafka-based event bus, a JWT-based authentication system, and a bespoke transactional outbox. Prior to my platform work, I orchestrated a data migration that resulted in a seven-figure increase in annual gross underwritten premium.

I revel in complex technical work as an individual contributor (IC), but I am also experienced in influencing engineering culture by establishing standards and sharing knowledge through technical writing and workshops. I thrive in high-ownership roles with unbounded impact, whether scaling existing projects or building greenfield systems from scratch.

I self-identify as the Architect and Solver archetype.

What I Enjoy

The challenges and problems I enjoy most involve architecting reliable backend foundations that streamline workflows for other teams while ensuring performance and scalability. I view site reliability practices, comprehensive observability, and actionable alerting as essential fundamentals rather than afterthoughts.

While I prefer simple, out-of-the-box solutions, I can identify when a bottleneck requires a bespoke tool. I have designed sophisticated solutions requiring systems programming to increase correctness, reduce operational burden, and improve developer velocity.

This work could be referred to as Platform Engineering or Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). While I am proficient in DevOps (and the multitudes of YAML-based technologies involved), I favor the software side of these disciplines - codifying “golden paths” in application code to make life easier for product teams and users alike.

I also enjoy Product Engineering when the foundations are solid and the domain is compelling. I am a proponent of Domain-Driven Design (DDD) and believe that a shared understanding between engineers and stakeholders is the key to a successful product.

Favourite Technologies

I am highly proficient in Ruby and Rails. I have contributed to some of the most popular open-source projects in the ecosystem by identifying and fixing bugs, with which I built numerous internal wrappers and integrations, and worked across the spectrum from high-level application development to deep systems programming. Having explored most common architectural approaches, I bring a well-informed (and sometimes very opinionated) perspective to technical decisions with this stack.

In my latest role, I have branched out to Python and am generally comfortable adapting to other languages (save for a few).

My relational database of choice is Postgres: I have extensive experience tuning workloads utilizing it.

I am extremely comfortable with queue, message and background job processing using Temporal and Kafka.

Writing

I do technical writing from time to time. So far I have been primarily focusing on writing technical deep dives on my blog about the software I spent a lot of time operating and working with. My writing has received praise from both the community and industry experts, including authors of said software.

Reach Out

If you want to reach out regarding a potential role, please mention that you have read through this page. You can find a link to my LinkedIn profile and my resume below.