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Justin Abrahms

Justin Abrahms

Principal Engineer | Platform Engineering, Developer Experience, AI Adoption

Principal Engineer at Parloa

Berlin, Berlin, Germany🇩🇪
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I'm a maker of reliable and robust systems with an eye towards ongoing maintenance cost and the scalability of engineering effort. I enjoy working with talented people, hard problems and high standards.Based in Berlin. Writing about what I've learned at https://justin.abrah.ms.

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Career: 17

Principal Engineer

Parloa

Berlin, Germany

Apr 2026 - Present

Principal Engineer, Developer Productivity

Thrive Market

Sep 2024 - Mar 2026

My job was to ask people what's wrong, then mobilize folks to fix it. 80-engineer org. A lot of the work was looking around corners: finding the problems we hadn't hit yet and putting support in place so they were non-events when we got there. Some of what that looked like: • Built Trellis, an internal K8s/GitOps platform for self-service cloud resources. Within two months, people were asking to deploy on it without being told to. • Ran a developer experience survey (getDX) with 100% participation across 5 quarters. Pipeline stability was the top pain point. Flaky tests went from 154 to 2 — we deleted most of them and nothing broke. Deploy success: 76% → 97%. • Cut search latency in half and eliminated 700K unnecessary Elasticsearch queries per hour before BFCM. The fixes were straightforward once we looked: 9MB cache entries in a 512MB cache, synchronous logging burning 35% of thread time, bloated response payloads. 19 PRs in 8 days. • Built a JWT auth service so we could stop proxying everything through the PHP monolith — not because auth was broken yet, but because it would be once we started decomposing in earnest. • Guided the org's approach to adopting LLMs — where they'd actually help, where they wouldn't, and what foundation needed to exist first.

Principal Engineer

Stanza

Apr 2024 - Aug 2024

Early employee, pre-revenue. Did a smattering of ops, system design, python, go, typescript, bash and terraform.

Governing Board / Maintainer

Openfeature

Feb 2022 - Feb 2024

Focused on making OpenFeature a Thing™. I was primarily focused on the specification and the Java implementation.

Early employee, SRE

Subconscious

United States

Jun 2023 - Jan 2024

Worked with Subconscious to shore up some ops work and help them transition to de-risk their infrastructure costs. This work included improving system health (observability/alerting/etc) and migrating to a multi-tenant workflow in Rust.

Governing Board Member

Continuous Delivery Foundation

May 2022 - Apr 2023

Principal Member Of Technical Staff - Architect, Chair of the Open Source Program

إيباي

Jun 2021 - Apr 2023

Launched internal #featureflags tooling as an advisor (or "visionary" in Chetan's lingo) to the program and also implemented the OpenFeature java sdk and open specification there. The result is that we have a home-built system, but based on open standards that should de-risk our future. Built out and ran the open source program with it's accompanied goals. We have hit the vast majority of them and are on much better footing from a security, compliance and developer experience side of things. Thanks to Michelle Martinez as my early partner-in-crime. https://opensource.ebay.com/ is a public example of that work. Worked with a group of leaders to define an engineering career framework/leveling guide. Rolled out DX, a survey tool which seeks to empower leaders across the company to address issues within their teams. This has been a success from all measures so far, achieving a 97% participation rate. Embedded in a few teams in payments to show them how to adopt modern software delivery principles. The whole org has adopted an iterative, learning mindset so my job is now primarily as-needed.

Principal Engineer

沃尔玛

Sep 2019 - May 2021

At Walmart, I built a team to deliver a GraphQL gateway whic served all production walmart.com traffic for web and mobile products. In addition to that, I worked to change how operations are thought of within the context of maintaining production systems. The bulk of my work was around standing up processes to ensure high quality and minimal downtime.

Software Development Engineer

Amazon Web Services

Portland, Oregon Area

Apr 2016 - Sep 2019

AWS Hands-On Labs (used, for example, at re:invent) - delivered a serverless, distributed system for limited resource (AWS account) vending. - guided team through launch preparations with an eye on operational excellence. - Set up org-wide operational improvement meeting to help teams improve their ops posture. (As part of the Elemental Technologies subsidiary) - went from initial commit (first engineer) to re:invent launch of AWS MediaStore, a file store optimized for live video delivery - Built distributed systems to handle large-scale storage & metadata indexing with DynamoDB, Kinesis, and both ec2 and serverless backed compute resources. buzzword bingo: Java, python, nodejs, lambda, AWS, Dynamo, S3, step functions, kinesis, ec2, elb, iam.

Senior Software Engineer

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Boston, MA

Oct 2015 - Apr 2016

I worked with MIT to develop an initial offering in the e-commerce space to sell courseware to teachers. The code was written in Django across three logical services communicating via OAuth2 and RESTful APIs with a React frontend. Beyond these technical tasks, I helped the team get closer to an agile process to facilitate accountability and communication of priorities.

Founder

BetterDiff

May 2015 - Apr 2016

From initial vision to MVP, I built betterdiff.com, a static analysis tool which integrates deeply into GitHub's code review system. This was closed due to the side-project policy of the main job.

Director Of Engineering

Quick Left

Portland Area, Oregon

Jan 2014 - May 2015

Managed a small team of engineers on Sprint.ly. I was primarily responsible for collaborating around business objectives to plan and implement a quarterly roadmap. The goal of this was an increase in key metrics such as NPS, which we achieved. I additionally lead development efforts through code reviews, pairing and general implementation.

Maker (aka early employee)

Sprintly

Portland, OR

Aug 2012 - Jan 2014

My time at Sprint.ly was spent in deepening strategic partnerships with GitHub integration, rewriting our billing system to enable double digit percentage increase in MRR and leading a team who shipped code that made thousands of customers happy.

Builder

Glider

Dec 2012 - May 2013

Helped Glider launch their MVP at Techcrunch Disrupt. I was specifically responsible for: - Schema & architecture design - Core customizable workflow logic - Helping them gather a team of solid engineers to carry the MVP into the future

Software Engineer

Google

Jul 2010 - Jul 2012

I worked on an advertising platform (Doubleclick BidManager) in the real-time advertising exchange space.

Web Developer

Invite Media

New York, NY

Feb 2010 - Jul 2010

Worked on an advertising platform. Company was acquired by Google.

Web Developer

HUGE

Apr 2008 - Feb 2010

Worked on rapid prototyping and full stack development for clients such as Broadway.com and Nutrisystem

Skills: 38

Other

Agile MethodologiesAmazon Web Services (AWS)ApacheBackbone.jsChefContinuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)CSSData Structures
DevOpsDjangoGitGoGoogle Cloud Platform (GCP)Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)HTMLInternet ExplorerJavaJavaScriptKubernetesLarge Language Models (LLM)LinuxMySQLNomadOpen FeatureOpen SourceOpen TelemetryPedanticsPlatform as a Service (PAAS)PythonRubyRuby on RailsRust (Programming Language)ScalabilitySite Reliability EngineeringSpecificationsTechnical SpecsTerraformUnit Testing

Education: 3

Art Institute of Pittsburgh

Education

University of South Carolina-Columbia

Education

2002 - 2008

Clover High

Education

1998 - 2002

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