Hey, I'm Rod

I'm a backend engineer, ten-plus years in. My favourite kind of work is taking a system that everyone is slightly afraid of and making it boring — scalable, well-contracted, and easy for the next person to touch.

What I've been doing#

Most recently I was at Etsy, shipping APIs and push-notification infrastructure for a marketplace with around 90 million buyers. Before that I ran the e-commerce surface at Kavak — Car Purchase through Checkout — across five-plus countries, growing from IC to leading a team of six.

I'm comfortable owning something end to end: the architecture, the messy migration nobody wants, and the on-call pager that comes with it.

A few numbers I'm proud of#

• A BFF that unlocked a $6M–$16M annualised GMS initiative at Etsy
• 2M+ daily views across the Kavak e-commerce surface, five-plus countries
• An FCM → Braze migration with end-to-end experimentation, for ~90M buyers
• Engineers I mentored into senior roles, on teams of four to six

How I like to work#

I'd rather delete a service than add one. I write the migration plan before the migration. And I think the best compliment a system can get is that nobody talks about it.

Outside of that#

I'm in Mexico City. I collect succulents, with mixed success, and I speak a little Japanese.

Stack#

The things I reach for most: TypeScript, Node.js, NestJS, Go, PHP, Python, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, AWS, Docker and Kubernetes. On the frontend, React and Angular when I need to.