Justin Abrahms
Principal Engineer | Platform Engineering, Developer Experience, AI Adoption
Principal Engineer at Parloa
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Career: 17
Principal Engineer
Parloa
Berlin, Germany
Principal Engineer, Developer Productivity
Thrive Market
Sep 2024 - Mar 2026
Principal Engineer, Developer Productivity
Thrive Market
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
Principal Engineer
Stanza
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
Governing Board / Maintainer
Openfeature
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
Early employee, SRE
Subconscious
United States
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
Principal Member Of Technical Staff - Architect, Chair of the Open Source Program
إيباي
Jun 2021 - Apr 2023
Principal Member Of Technical Staff - Architect, Chair of the Open Source Program
إيباي
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
Principal Engineer
沃尔玛
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
Software Development Engineer
Amazon Web Services
Portland, Oregon Area
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
Senior Software Engineer
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Boston, MA
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
Founder
BetterDiff
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
Director Of Engineering
Quick Left
Portland Area, Oregon
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
Maker (aka early employee)
Sprintly
Portland, OR
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
Builder
Glider
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
Software Engineer
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
Web Developer
Invite Media
New York, NY
Worked on an advertising platform. Company was acquired by Google.
Web Developer
HUGE
Apr 2008 - Feb 2010
Web Developer
HUGE
Worked on rapid prototyping and full stack development for clients such as Broadway.com and Nutrisystem
Skills: 38
Other
Education: 3
Art Institute of Pittsburgh
Education
University of South Carolina-Columbia
Education
Clover High
Education