Ryan Tuck

Over ten years of backend tech startup experience at all stages of growth, I've developed an in-demand skillset that's likely to provide a positive return to your organization. If you let me, I'll maintain your production app, manage your team, coach your engineers, stand up your cloud from scratch, containerize your infrastructure, automate your deploys, run your analytics workloads, minimize your complexity, firefight your outages, and lead your people.

Horizon3.ai

Engineering Manager, Backend

Cybersecurity, B2B

2022 - Present

  • Grew from senior engineer to formally managing team of seven engineers and oversaw all aspects of backend application development for hundreds of clients on our autonomous penetration testing platform
  • Maintained production GraphQL API, PostgreSQL database, data warehouse, and orchestration framework in AWS
  • Coordinated with Attack, Systems, and Frontend team leads on shipping all major product features
  • Containerized main data pipeline orchestration tooling in preparation for full migration to Kubernetes
  • Handled day-to-day support and occasional production outage-fighting
  • Consolidated repos and CICD flows to monorepo, reducing complexity, and simplifying development and pipelines
  • Architected data lake to support rapid analytics on identifying breaking N-day vulnerabilities discovered in the wild

Songspace

Tech Lead, Data Exchange

Music, B2B

2020 - 2022

  • Led Data Exchange team, responsible for onboarding all new record label clients onto the platform
  • Built serverless infrastructure using lambda capable of massive parallel throughput for parsing tens of thousands of audio and image files
  • Wrote custom EDI parser for standard ancient music industry rights data format (CWR)
  • Performed complete migration and deprecation of legacy infrastructure to infrastructure-as-code for team resources

Warby Parker

Tech Lead, Business Intelligence

Fashion, D2C

2015 - 2020

  • Grew from junior engineer to senior engineer to tech lead of team of five BI engineers serving hundreds of corporate users
  • Taught regular SQL 101 courses to 100+ colleagues over a few years
  • Led design and implementation of core data model rebuilds and Looker restructure, to take advantage of consistent dimensional modeling techniques
  • Wrote lookmlint, the first open-source linter for LookML
  • Architected original python orchestration framework and importantly transitioned workloads to Airflow

LIT

Founder

Wearables, D2C

2012 - 2014

  • Created the LIT Halo, an LED headband with sophisticated audio-response, for raves
  • As part of a two-person team, oversaw all aspects of hardware development, circuit board design and manufacturing, C++ software development, website and marketing efforts, and LLC formation
  • Raised $17000 on Kickstarter in May 2014 to launch, falling short of necessary goal amount

Wisdom

Complexity is the velocity killer. Premature optimization is the root of all evil. Code is meant to be read by humans and only incidentally executed by machines. Don't be smart, just restart. Stop duplicating state, network is fast in the cloud.

Python

You probably actually want to use setup.py but are using requirements.txt because you read to do that online when you set up your deployment two years ago and don't understand why you're seeing dependency issues with pip. Also, pandas is overkill.

SQL

Not every problem calls for a relational database, CTEs help readability, Postgres is a fine choice, UPDATEs are an antipattern for large workloads, online alembic migrations are painful at times

AWS

Good default cloud, IaC is the ideal, battle scars from RDS, DynamoDB, S3, Lambda, EC2, Fargate, IAM, API Gateway, etc etc etc, GCP is the same thing with a prettier interface

Localdev

vim, make, jq, xargs, unix pipes is a fine toolkit

Docker

Containers are virtuous if you can get Docker installed on your machine correctly, k8s is probably overkill

BI

BigQuery, dbt, Looker is a sweet stack, dimensional modeling and Kimball are probably overkill, spreadsheets are the lingua franca of data, pivot tables are cool

Hardware

I went from dabbling with Arduino and Raspberry Pi to raising thousands of dollars on Kickstarter for a hardware product I built from scratch, unleaded solder is harder to work with

LLMs

I read Bostrom in 2015, am abreast of the latest developments, open to using professionally, no interest in using this grotesque technology in my personal life

Northeastern University

Physics and Philosophy

Bachelors of Science

2007 - 2012