Gregory Golberg
Verified Expert in Engineering
Architect and Back-end Developer
Palo Alto, CA, United States
Toptal member since June 13, 2022
Gregory is an experienced technologist who firmly believes that engineering is about using the right tools to solve real-world problems. He is a passionate, hands-on generalist who enjoys wearing multiple hats. Gregory holds a computer science and engineering bachelor's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also an AWS Certified Solutions Architect, a Certified ScrumMaster, and a Sun Certified Java Professional.
Portfolio
Experience
Availability
Preferred Environment
Java, Python, SQL, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Kubernetes, Docker, Go, Scala, Linux, Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
The most amazing...
...project I've implemented from scratch is the ad demand-side platform deployed in AWS. Some writings about it can be found at blog.debedb.com/tag/opendsp/.
Work Experience
Principal Engineer | Tech Lead
DrumWave
- Led the development of the Offers platform, the centerpiece of the company's data ownership platform.
- Proposed, prototyped, and implemented long-running workflows using the Temporal platform to enable easier development of business logic in a distributed, resilient workflow.
- Acted as a subject-matter expert in API development and testing with Postman and OpenAPI. Created documentation, tutorials, in-house training sessions, blueprints, and initial test suites and tools for the microservice-based teams to interoperate.
- Took on various other responsibilities outside the Offers team's duties, including DevOps.
- Proposed, designed, and developed a tool to convert user-defined queries from UI into safe SQL queries to be run against the data lake. Eventually, it was incorporated into the company's BI offering.
Advisor | Consultant
Around.Trade
- Designed the cloud infrastructure for the product based on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Vercel and created a CI/CD pipeline for it.
- Added support for CockroachDB in addition to PostgreSQL.
- Integrated Clerk, an OAuth provider, for authentication/authorization.
Advisor | Consultant
DoubleDoor
- Managed an offshore development team to deliver a website based on Vue and Node.js.
- Consolidated disparate deployment using AWS, which resulted in savings and better latency.
- Migrated Heroku to Fargate and MongoDB from MongoDB Cloud to AWS Fargate.
- Helped to implement the advertising using Google (Ads API, Google Tag Manager, Analytics) and Facebook.
Lead Platform Architect
SteppeChange
- Worked on proprietary ad tech product involving geocoding.
- Owned the implementation of multiple greenfield projects from specification to deployment on GCP.
- Designed and developed a microservice-based system for managing complex ad flows.
Chief Architect
Jobox.ai
- Implemented best practices to improve velocity, code quality, and stability, e.g., CI/CD, automated unit and integration tests, code coverage, observability, monitoring and alerting, on-call rotation, vulnerability detection, load testing, and more.
- Drove adoption of CI/CD, including automated regression tests and promotion, on-call, and monitoring/observability.
- Led design, development, and delivery of new algorithms for efficient dispatching of home service professionals.
- Cooperated with PMS and EMS to balance internal engineering needs (as above) and product-oriented projects. Developed technology roadmap and AWS cloud infrastructure plan to align with the product roadmap.
Principal Software Engineer
AppLovin
- Joined when AppLovin acquired MZ and also integrated MZ's (the acquired company) existing RTB bidder functionality with AppLovin.
- Worked on green-fielding a non-RTB DSP demand-side platform for partners' use.
- Took over ETL/data pipeline projects and associated tooling.
Staff Software Engineer
MZ (acquired by AppLovin)
- Led maintaining and improving a core marketing and growth engineering functionality, real-time bidder (RTB), accountable for millions of queries per second and millions of dollars spent monthly.
- Operated on the architectural guidance within the product and across teams, including introducing regression testing and ad hoc AWS querying to supplement on-premise clusters for business users and data science.
- Accepted some of the previously external operations roles to become complete product owners, including migration from on-premise to cloud (AWS) and adding DevOps automation.
- Created a lakehouse using Glue and Athena to supplement Hadoop (in AWS) and Vertica (on-premises) for business users and data science.
- Liaised with relevant teams such as release engineering, DevOps, ad operations, and data science.
Software Development Engineer 3
Amazon
- Worked on providing forecasts of available advertising inventory for customers who want to run advertising across the Amazon advertising network.
- Implemented forecasting for private marketplaces in real-time bidding advertising scenarios.
- Worked with the data science team to operationalize forecasting models.
Founding Principal Engineer
Pani Networks
- Joined the company as the founding engineer, producing initial prototypes for using Romana as a network layer for OpenStack.
- Developed topology-aware IP address management (IPAM) module.
- Produced and shipped editions from PoC/demos to 2.0, up to date.
Founder | CTO
OpenDSP
- Architected, developed, and deployed the initial version of the real-time bidding (RTB) system for bidding on advertising.
- Scaled the system, through architecture and deployment (AWS) to handle hundreds of thousands of qps.
- Led further feature development and operation of the system by managing several teams, including server, UI application, technical ad operations, ops, and DevOps.
- Worked on the company's acquisition by Social Reality.
CTO
Adotube
- Developed initial versions of the company's innovative video ad serving platform.
- Grew the technical team to 30+ people, assuring running ad serving and technical support to customers on a global scale.
- Led the technology aspect of a successful acquisition by Exponential Interactive (now VDX.tv).
Founding Engineer | Team Lead
SnapLogic
- Developed initial version of the GUI, enabling users to create data pipelines.
- Introduced and maintained best engineering practices, such as CI/CD, code coverage, and more.
- Played key roles in shipping releases 0.1 to 3.0 as well as pre-and post-sales support in the company's initial stages.
- Took initiative in prototyping and demoing features I thought would benefit the product, including data pipeline debugger with the ability to step through data flow, and had them included in subsequent versions.
Senior Software Engineer
P&H Solutions
- Worked on porting the Windows-based ASP and C++ web cash management system to the Jakarta EE platform.
- Developed and open-sourced tools for automating similar projects, for ASP and JSP and VBScript and Java conversions.
- Created, working closely with the chief architect, release engineering processes for these new products.
- Developed a reproducible development environment to allow convenient IDE features to work with production-like deployment, thus improving engineers' experience.
Experience
OpenDSP—Real-time Bidding and Data Management as PaaS
https://blog.debedb.com/tag/opendsp/Without the need to maintain the infrastructure to handle the traffic, this architecture allows users to load the user models into DMP and plugin pricing formulas, as Groovy scripts, and we take care of the rest.
Acquired by Social Reality: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/srax-acquires-opendsps-demand-side-platform-300528934.html
Romana Project
https://github.com/romanaThrough Romana's topology-aware IPAM, endpoints receive natively routable addresses: no overlays or tunnels are required, increasing performance and providing operational simplicity. Because IP addresses are assigned with network topology in mind, routes within the network are highly aggregated, reducing the impact on networking hardware and allowing more secure configurations. It supports Kubernetes and OpenStack clusters, on-premise or on AWS.
Wildboard
https://blog.debedb.com/2014/06/07/a-post-mortem-of-a-project-wildboard/Dbdb | Cross-Language Debugging Framework
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Cambridge, MA
Certifications
Certified Scrum Master
Scrum Alliance
AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate
AWS
Sun Certified Java Developer
Sun Microsystems
Skills
Libraries/APIs
REST APIs, Python API, Asyncio, Apache Lucene, Node.js, Vue 2, Vue, Google Ads API, Facebook SDK, Stripe API, Stripe, Salesforce API
Tools
GitHub, Cron, MySQL Performance Tuning, Eclipse RCP, Git, Jira, LaunchDarkly, Apache Airflow, NGINX, Amazon Athena, AWS Glue, Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR), Postman, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon EKS, AWS Fargate, NPM, Facebook Ads SDK, Amazon Cognito, RabbitMQ, Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR), Docker Compose, AWS IAM, Terraform
Languages
Java, SQL, Python, Go, PHP, Scala, Lua, Groovy, C, Active Server Pages (ASP), C++, Visual Basic, Python 3, JavaScript
Paradigms
ETL, Back-end Architecture, Lambda Architecture, DevOps, Microservices, Scrum, Agile, Business Intelligence (BI), Management, REST, Dependency Injection
Platforms
Amazon EC2, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Java EE, Linux, Algolia, Kubernetes, Docker, Apache Pig, AWS Lambda, OpenStack, Oracle, Eclipse, Android, Heroku, Google Ads, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Firebase, AWS ALB
Storage
MySQL, Databases, JSON, NoSQL, Relational Databases, Cloud Deployment, PostgreSQL, MySQL Server, Vertica, Redis, Amazon DynamoDB, CouchDB, Redshift, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), MongoDB, Google Cloud Datastore, Google Cloud, Cloud Firestore, CockroachDB, IBM Db2
Frameworks
Spring, Swagger, Spark, Hadoop, Adobe Flex, Jakarta Server Pages (JSP), Spring Boot, PhoneGap, Next.js, OAuth 2
Other
Software Engineering, HTTP REST, APIs, AWS Cloud Architecture, Architecture, Cloud, CSV, Scalable Architecture, Software Design, Cloud Architecture, Software Architecture, Distributed Systems, Back-end, Orchestration, Data Feeds, Technical Architecture, API Integration, Web Servers, System Architecture, CTO, AWS Certified Solution Architect, Team Leadership, Technical Leadership, CI/CD Pipelines, Amazon RDS, Computer Science, Scrum Master, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), Streaming Data, Data Engineering, Windows 10, Advertising, Windows 10 Touchscreen, Touchscreens, Digital Kiosks, Cordova, Facebook Ads, Advertising Technology (Adtech), FastAPI, IT, IT Project Management, Lambda Functions, Solution Architecture, OAuth
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