# Justin Abrahms (@justin.abrah.ms)

Profile: https://sifa.id/p/justin.abrah.ms
Headline: Principal Engineer | Platform Engineering, Developer Experience, AI Adoption
Location: Berlin, Berlin, Germany

## About

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.

## Experience

- **Principal Engineer, Developer Productivity at Thrive Market** (2024 – 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 at Stanza** (2024 – 2024)
  Early employee, pre-revenue. Did a smattering of ops, system design, python, go, typescript, bash and terraform.
- **Governing Board / Maintainer at Openfeature** (2022 – 2024)
  Focused on making OpenFeature a Thing™. I was primarily focused on the specification and the Java implementation.
- **Early employee, SRE at Subconscious** (2023 – 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 at Continuous Delivery Foundation** (2022 – 2023)
- **Principal Engineer at 沃尔玛** (2019 – 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 at Amazon Web Services** (2016 – 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 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology** (2015 – 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 at BetterDiff** (2015 – 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 at Quick Left** (2014 – 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) at Sprintly** (2012 – 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 at Glider** (2012 – 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 at Google** (2010 – 2012)
  I worked on an advertising platform (Doubleclick BidManager) in the real-time advertising exchange space.
- **Web Developer at Invite Media** (2010 – 2010)
  Worked on an advertising platform. Company was acquired by Google.
- **Web Developer at HUGE** (2008 – 2010)
  Worked on rapid prototyping and full stack development for clients such as Broadway.com and Nutrisystem
- **Principal Engineer at Parloa** (2026 – present)
- **Principal Member Of Technical Staff - Architect, Chair of the Open Source Program at إيباي** (2021 – 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.

## Education

- **University of South Carolina-Columbia** (2002 – 2008)
- **Art Institute of Pittsburgh**
- **Clover High** (1998 – 2002)

## Skills

- Platform as a Service (PAAS)
- Large Language Models (LLM)
- Go
- Open Feature
- Nomad
- Kubernetes
- Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
- Terraform
- Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
- Rust (Programming Language)
- Open Telemetry
- Site Reliability Engineering
- Data Structures
- Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)
- Specifications
- Technical Specs
- Python
- JavaScript
- Git
- Linux
- Django
- CSS
- Java
- Ruby
- Chef
- Open Source
- DevOps
- HTML
- Backbone.js
- Agile Methodologies
- Apache
- Scalability
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Pedantics
- MySQL
- Internet Explorer
- Ruby on Rails
- Unit Testing