Christopher E. Lane 849 Corlista Drive San Jose, CA 95128 1-301-270-6524 chris@lane-jayasinha.com Qualifications in Brief: As a technology leader who codes actively, I bring awareness of current details to leadership discussions to ensure that decisions are factual and likely to be useful in practice; to the organization broadly, I bring, eye-ball to eye-ball, a vision and method for melding what is important to the company's long term-success with proven ways of evolving software and systems for higher quality and easier maintainability. I have led and finished many projects once thought impossible, writing code when others cannot or will not. If I don't find large savings or massive improvements in efficiency or reliability, it's a sad year for me. I show others how to stay calm and optimistic under trying conditions - we can do anything, it's just bits on disks. I enjoy working with people with all degrees of experience - whether showing someone their first glimpse of what strace can reveal or talking over various network connection strategies and the subtleties in the system dynamics implications; I have always been a collector and sharer of cool ideas more than a lone typist. I am particularly interested in the continued expansion of the power of software over computer systems; where once a day of work would fix a nice large physical machine, now it can improve the function of hundreds or thousands of CPUs and the networking and storage they need to do their work, without that power being a new opportunity for SPOFs. Specific areas of expertise: * Design: finding the doable large changes to make systems better or cheaper; development and deployment of robust, scalable and highly-available network servers for on-line consumer products. Experienced at translating product features into cost-effective, maintainable and operable systems. Experienced at programmatically managing scarce resources. * Sharing the unix way with newer engineers. * Web protocols: TCP & UDP, gRPC, HTTP, SSL, SOAP. Experienced at development of efficient binary protocols for massive client/server and server/server deployment. Also JSON. Expert at debugging failures/latency of networking. * Code: Go, c, c++, gcc/emacs/gdb environment, Python, R, node.js, and other programming. Threaded and unthreaded (event driven) environments. * Modernization - upgraded a number of old software components (SSL libraries from 0.9 OpenSSL to 1.0.1 OpenSSL, OS (RHEL5 to Ubuntu16) across large and unruly legacy fleet. * Math - I keep investigating numbers, and am often to the first person in an org to see the numbers showing some pattern that makes our next steps blindingly obvious. I am in a pure mathematics Master's degree program at San Jose State University. * Testing: Found many opportunities to enhance managed stage test environment, bringing up reliability from 1 9 to 2 9s. Laid a framework with which the Test SRE team hit 3 9s. * Monitoring: Wrote several data collectors. Part of team that designed and implemented syslog/Kakfa/Spark near-real time monitoring system. * Encryption: Designed and implemented (in various languages and environments) an improving series of encryption protocols and key management schemes for a web gateway. Brought SSL resumption to several areas to decrease latency and latency variability. * DB: SQL programming and DB design (Oracle, Sybase, and MySQL). Much experience with designing in-memory caching for various databases, including delay Qs and other means to protect important but vulnerable back-ends. Deep experience with the implications of dynamic behavior of systems. Have used MongoDB and Reddis and Spanner. * Troubleshooting: diagnosing and finding timely solutions to operational problems in distributed high availability/high volume networking environment. Deep knowledge of UNIX process and network behavior. Diagnosis of dynamically unstable systems (infinite loops, inappropriate retry strategies, irregular latency profiles). Enabled many PayPal releases to be fixed forward rather than rolled-back. Technical Work Experience: Principal Member of Technical Staff, PayPal Inc. October, 2021 - Present As a member of the enterprise data platform team, I helped design a migration plan for legacy ETC/batch jobs (that were basically a lot of cron jobs on physical machines attached to an enourmous NFS server and a few Hadoop clusters and Teradata clusters) to modern cloud environment; built tools to analyze the NFS filer and split it up into containerizable chunks of code; used those tools to remove all Log4J jar files on the filer during that. I then enabled deprecation of an expensive SaaS no-SQL DB by writing my first data store: a distributed fast counting system for rate limiting against DDOS attacks. Written in Go, it has 5x more calls per CPU per second than any other application at PayPal; it is robust enough that randomly stopping 1/2 of the containers will cause about 0.1% outage. As a member of the performance engineering team, I helped design and implement a sidecar nginx proxy that allowed us to remove the custom SSL we use for SSL resumption from the application and into a centrally managed and releasable artifact; I also developed several methods of analyzing call dependency graphs to allow partitioning the datacenters into smaller monoliths for cell-based architecture. Principal Architect, Experian Consumer Information Services. September, 2019 - October, 2021 Cloud Infrastructure: Designed fully automated infrastructure system for AWS using terraform/jenkins/boto3. Wrote and drove adoption for Go transparent proxy to enable flexible default-deny, allow-list based network policy. Wrote and drove adoption for rapid re-encrypter and re-copying S3 tools; what AWS customer support promised in few weeks, I did in 14 hours. Scaled (interviewing and then training in our emerging common vision) AWS infra team to implement the automation system while providing excellent customer service while the medium-term solution is being built. Built and handed-off automated packer-based pipeline for official AMIs. Designed Cloudera CDP based deployment. Debugged many network issues, and fixed in terraform code for good. Wrote terraform parser to allow rewrites of 100K terraform code to newer, incompatible versions with minimal disruption. Director, Software, PayPal Inc. September, 2008 - August, 2019 Test Environments: Helped trouble-shooting network and performance issues during migration on premise system to GCP. Made networking more robust (haproxy tuning; SSL-Resumption). Migrated 70K production VMs and test environment from very old OS to modern OS. SSL Resumption to increase performance. Monitoring: Defined requirements to move system towards more statistically sophisticated methods; wrote and handed off several packages to enable data collection endpoints for database, messaging, and networking groups. Worked on new monitoring stack, bringing live a Syslog -> Kafka -> Spark -> Druid stack for realtime monitoring of incoming web/API traffic to the company. Application Security: Worked on encryption agent and then upgraded C++ OpenSSL library fleet wide without availbility hits. Frameworks: Worked on Java frameworks tooling, and then joined the Python frameworks team, hardening the Python stack for server usage. Implemented low level logging, stress tests, high load testing framework and CI setup. Helped a number of Product teams deploy TensorFlow applications to our docker deploy environment. Release Integration: Founded code review/integration department to ensure PayPal code shows the disciplines needed in a distributed environment. Built workflow tools using node.js and python (integrating with trac, Skype, email, CQ, and git). Saved many major releases from being rolled back, through quick diagnosis of operational problems, quick location of code changes responsible, and finding feasible work around. Brought many smart but inexperienced developers into deeper awareness of how unix does work and should work. Fixed various wire protocols to be easier to change. Payment systems maintenance programmer. Provided coding, bug-diagnosing, and consultation services to PayPal development staff on stand-in payment system. Developed a number of monitoring and exploration tools. Evangelized for more robust architectures and implementation methods. Demonstrated using UNIX tools to discover root causes of performance or functional problems. Developed a slew of personal tools to navigate large and poorly isolated c++ code base. Deleted a large number of unused components and code. Learned the payments processing application domain (more strict about eventual reconciliation than the IM space). Principal Software Engineer, AOL, May, 1996 - October, 2005 Designed statistically aware monitoring system for data center early warning system. Created Python/MySQL DB data gatherer and R statistic programming language analyzer. Wrote data loading server to encrypt 100 Million passwords in AIM user database without disrupting normal operation of the database. Implemented code to dynamically convert AIM authentication data from flat file to Sybase conversion; oversaw the conversation process. (I also did a similar project for PayPal now that I think about it; not passwords but other sensitive data in plain text). Architected alerts system for AOL. Implemented core host server matching events with alerts. This project went from my idea in 1999 to a platform that in 2005, delivered about 6000 alerts/second at peak, 10 Million/day, for about 10 distinct AOL products, with about 15 programmers working on various aspects; these products touched a wide variety of legacy data-stores and clients, all of which where exposed in a simple and uniform alerts interface, providing IM to SMS; client pop-ups, reminder emails, breaking news alerts, AOL TV alerts, wireless device alerts. This server provided extensive information about on-line and offline users, filtering of occasionally bad live stock data, graceful degradation in face of failing other servers. Unlike most of AOLs on-line system, this was not simply a request/respond system, it read user preferences ahead of time and matched them against live data feeds and then took configurable action, and also allowed users to sign up for alerts based on certain data feeds at certain times (times specified in user understandable format, not time_t's). Developed several frameworks for load and functional testing. Developed "evil network" testing methodology which supplemented standard networking libraries with code that would randomly alter various bits, bytes or sequences; discovered many bugs in network parsing code, even very old and trusted code. I hold three patents related to the alerts system (7,624,172, 7,496,631 & 7,363,345). Designed, wrote and maintained numerous servers to support the AOL Instant Messenger product and various AOL web products that share the AIM name-space: HTTP server that functions as generic gateway between web and proprietary network, servicing several million hits per day for AOLs first web registration system, web authentication systems, ICQ chat interface and others; very easy API for units with back-end functionality to expose to HTTP aware partners; provided customer engineering support to said partners for registration functionality (up to and including SSHing into their computer to fix their Perl scripts). Back-end server and web UI (including multi-threaded C library implementing a simple file descriptor like API to send/receive delimited messages) to allow security operations to administer AIM database safely and easily. Wrote server to perform all authentication for aol.com logins. Maintained several networking, encryption, and database libraries used company-wide. Performed several re-architectures of crufty systems. Education: Student in SJSU Mathematics department, on track for master's degree in pure mathematics. Enrolled Fall, 2023. Advanced c/Unix programming class and Advanced Programming Languages class at University of Maryland, University College, Spring, 1997. Duke University, Durham, NC. B.S. May, 1990. Major: Mathematics. 11 upper level math classes. Additional course work in Computer Science (Pascal Programming, Digital Design and Artificial Intelligence). Average: 3.5 on a 4.0 Scale in major. Year Abroad at Oxford University, in math. Received College Prize for excellence in studies. Programming incessantly since sixth grade.