I'm a Software Engineer turned Consultant/Advisor. I look for opportunities to work with great people at organizations I respect and admire.
I worked at Facebook (now Meta) for almost ten years. I was a founding engineer on the Site Integrity team. I designed and built services to protect people on Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. I helped grow that team to more than fifty engineers, designers and PMs.
Later, I was an early engineer on the small team that designed and built the Summit Learning Platform. In addition to building significant chunks of the product, I also helped it scale two orders of magnitude. Prior to consulting, I also did short stints at CZI (making a de novo genome assembler more memory-efficient and user friendly) and Airtable (improving performance across the stack).
Drop me in for immediate feedback on individual projects, or let me define (and refine) a long term infrastructure strategy for your entire company. I will work with your team to identify the strengths, gaps, and risks in your plans, and guide them towards building systems that are simpler, more reliable, and easier to maintain. Expect lots of "why?" questions to stay aligned with real use cases and your long term product vision.
I have a knack for identifying and fixing performance bottlenecks in software. Experience across the full stack, from browser to network to app server to database means I can read in the whole picture and find wins inside complex interactions. I love making things leaner and meaner, so expect me to share the skills and passion for performance work with other engineers along the way.
No matter what stage your engineering team is at, embed me as a force multiplier and I can help it take the next step. Fair game could be offering pragmatic feedback on tech specs, shaping culture around PR review, modeling technical leadership, mentoring conversations with individuals, or anything else in between.
I have hundreds of hours of experience in designing, conducting, and training the technical interview process. I'll work with you to identify hiring priorities, create job relevant interview questions (no algorithm quizzes!!), and develop training guides to improve calibration and consistency.
I am deeply passionate about privacy on the Internet. As companies push the boundaries on tracking and data collection, there's a surprising amount we can do to protect our privacy online (including but not limited to firewalls with network wide VPNs, DNS, Browsers, Operating Systems, Phones, etc.). I can help you craft a plan. If you prefer, I can implement significant chunks of this plan for you.
I love to talk shop. Give me a "ring" to discuss any software, product, or process problems you have, even if they’re outside the above.
consult <at> bhal · dev
consult <at> bhal · xyz
(For the privacy conscious: This email domain is hosted at ProtonMail. Any email sent to it from another ProtonMail address is end-to-end-encrypted.)
Happy to share as part of initial conversation.