Jenny Rakoczy

I joined the Go team in 2019 to work on secure releases of the Go Programming Language. I was the team lead of the release and open-source project team for two years.

As part of the Go team, I lead a multi-year project to fully automate releases. Prior to this, releases were a manual and error-prone process requiring precise and patient manual verification to ensure that Go users were getting safe and secure bits for major, minor, and critical security releases for over 35 os/architecture combinations.

I triaged incoming language issues, engaged with users, managed our build infrastructure, investigated OS-level failures, maintained the Go playground (go.dev/play) through a major re-architecture of the sandbox, lead decisions about security releases, designed and implemented the initial go.dev site, and worked on performance and on-call duties for pkg.go.dev and proxy.golang.org.

Prior to the Go team, I worked on the Hire team, recruiting software for GSuite. Hire was written on a custom NodeJS framework with a proprietary database. As an application engineer and team lead, I delivered features to reduce the time for importing customer data from several months to less than two weeks.

On the SRE/Ops team for Hire, I participated in 24/7 oncall rotations, managing the Hire deployment on several Kubernetes clusters on Google Cloud Platform. I designed and built a control plane UI, backend, and API layer using Angular, Go and gRPC to manage our horizontal scaling strategy for Hire. I designed and built a level 7 gRPC proxy in Go for routing API requests to production clusters, routing traffic across our global infrastructure. I developed infrastructure for gradual roll-outs of new code and features. I revamped our metric collection to scale with the thousands of containers in our production environment. I automated our release process, creating push-button deployments for all of our production clusters.

At Signal, I worked on User Activation for a Data Management Platform. Our system was implemented in Go, and sifted through billions of user profiles a day to help target users across advertising platforms.

In addition to writing software, I helped simplify our continuous integration and systems operations infrastructure. I also acted as a technical PM, writing and prioritizing stories for large projects our team was tasked with.

At Pivotal Cloud Foundry, I anchored a team responsible for building Pivotal Network, the website which distributes Cloud Foundry software and updates.

I lead an effort to implement continuous delivery to our production site. I also interviewed candidates, mentored new hires, and helped teach reactive programming principles to the team.

At Hopscotch, I moved a significant portion of their production infrastructure from Heroku to Amazon Web Services. This helped reduce their production budget by over a third, and gave their back-end the room to scale with increasing popularity of their iOS app.

I improved performance and delivered features for a Rails API that backed a popular iOS application. This included push notifications, generating a realtime feed of user activity in the app, and search, performance and stability improvements.

I assisted with product design and planning. I also delivered minor iOS features, improvements, and bug fixes.

I joined Kitchensurfing as the first non-founder on the Product team. I built Kitchensurfing an amazing product team, starting from one engineer to over a dozen people, including design, product, and analytics.

I introduced a product process that allowed us to rapidly test new ideas as the business adapted. Kitchensurfing was able to roll out and sunset new product lines, validate brand and product ideas in production, and launch a consumer iOS app.

I represented the engineering team in board and investment meetings, seeing the company from a Series A through a Series B round. During this time I introduced analytics and weekly reporting, measuring business, product, and engineering metrics.

Redesigned hosting infrastructure for a complex, HIPAA-compliant application.

Created and led API team to develop Groupon's API, powering mobile, front-end, and international applications. Scaled the API to thousands of requests per second. Redesigned order processing system to support new product lines. Grew with engineering team from less than ten engineers to hundreds. Quickly and permanently solved critical, complex production issues. Advised the executive team on behalf of engineering.

Full stack engineer for clients in multiple industries ranging from restaurants to social networks. Implemented pixel-perfect cross-browser compatible web interfaces. Automated application deployment and server administration.

Successfully migrated a monolithic Rails application to a service oriented architecture. Integrated ad campaign tracking with third-party ad servers. Lead team migration from subversion to git.

Developed open-source hardware, firmware, and front-end software for an internationally popular stationary bicycle racing platform. Enabled auto-updating deployments to remote embedded devices. Organized, promoted, and MC’d events using the system in cities nationwide, including InterBike in Las Vegas.

My favorite courses were Operating Systems, Programming Languages, Physics, and Literature.