Pete Keen

Experienced backend software enginner seeking a role to go deep to learn a suite of systems, find the most impactful points of leverage to improve them and move the business forward. Strongly interested in designing, building, and seeing through to deployment greenfield projects and larger enhancements to existing systems, as well as mentoring and level up more junior engineer.

Software Consultant, 2014 - Current

Okapi Consulting, fully remote

  • Debugged low level wifi issues for a small IoT device manufacturer
  • Audited the internal accounting system for a trucking industry bookkeeping system
  • Part-time CTO for a small software development shop specializing in government training software
  • Consulted on a Docker deployment project
  • Assisted getting a PHP application up and running on three different PaaS hosts

Principal Software Engineer, 2022 - 2023

ClickFunnels, fully remote

  • Design and implement the affiliates system for ClickFunnels 2.0
  • Implement a double entry accounting system to support the affiliates and billing systems within CF 2.0
  • Refine internal tooling to make the spin-up and daily development processes for team members easier
  • Work with other PSEs to ensure development is coherent and on-track
  • Mentor senior engineers on system design and organizational interaction

Infrastructure Engineer, 2020 - 2021

Stripe, fully remote

  • Develop and maintain low level interfaces with AWS
  • Work daily with Ruby, Python, Puppet, Terraform, and AWS Lambdas
  • Optimize and enhance internal tools (recent ships: $2mil annual compute savings; 1000x speed improvement during certain incident remediations; one-click React UI to lock puppet across all hosts in the fleet)
  • Plan, organize, and execute large migrations across the engineering organziation (ex: upgrading base operating system version across hundreds of Docker containers)

Software Engineer, 2019 - 2020

Stripe, fully remote

  • Migrated largest single financial partner to event-driven disputes platform
  • Adopted and maintained in-house PDF inspection and generation microservice written in Go

Software Developer, 2014 - 2019

egghead.io, fully remote

  • Lead a small team of junior developers on building and maintaining the core Ruby on Rails backend platform
  • Built the accounting and revenue sharing system that pays millions of dollars to hundreds of instructors
  • Built the Stripe payments integration that processes millions of dollars a year for egghead
  • Directly worked with engineers at Fortune 500 companies to build a SAML service provider into egghead

Software Developer, 2012 - 2015

Kongregate, Portland OR

  • Maintained one of the largest and oldest Ruby on Rails applications in existence
  • Worked across the entire stack, from MySQL query optimization to Ruby and Node.js background jobs to front-end HTML, Javascript and CSS
  • Implemented a lapsed-gamer mailer with customized messages for every user which increased retention by ~5%
  • Re-implemented several payment methods to use async background processing

Platform Developer, 2011 - 2012

Emma, Portland OR

  • Ported the audience management system of Emma into a REST service in Python, PostgreSQL and Redis.
  • Built a search engine that consumes a JSON search description, builds an equivalent SQL query, and executes the query on a sharded PostgreSQL database system.
  • Built Emma's email feedback loop processing application, including a series of heuristics to accurately handle non-standards-compliant feedback messages

Software Developer, 2007 - 2011

Rentrak, Portland OR

  • Designed, developed, and deployed two different demographics overlay systems. These systems overlay postal- and household-level segmentation on top of television remote click events to generate survey-level tv ratings.
  • Developed a SQL-like language that compiles to C++ using Perl and Parse::RecDescent to enable internal users to query the view repository.
  • Designed a new product from scratch. Built a DSL-like system within Perl for succinct summary table definition which allows developers to create new summary tables quickly and with very low maintenance overhead.

Side Projects

  • VMSave, a Rails app for saving voicemail greetings as MP3s. Uses Twilio for telephony services, has been used over 20,000 times to date
  • Mastering Modern Payments, the first book about integrating Stripe payments with Rails.
  • Handle Your Business, a book about what the nuts and bolts backend of a single person consultancy can look like.
  • Docverter, an open source document conversion web service.
  • petekeen.net, my personal programming and tech related blog.
  • Payola, a Rails engine for Stripe. Retired.
  • I have a small homelab where I play with things like Docker, Dokku, Proxmox and Kubernetes

Education

Bachelor of Science in Management Computer Systems

Computer Science Minor
University of Wisconsin - Whitewater
Graduated December 2006

Skills

  • Ruby, Rails, Python, Go, Javascript, React, Java, Shell scripting
  • Agile / Test-driven Development, Pair Programming
  • Puppet, Terraform, AWS, EC2
  • Git, SVN
  • Linux, macOS
  • PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB

Contact