Jurawa Hallen

Senior DevOps & Infrastructure Engineer with 10+ years of experience building creative, sustainable web applications and architecting their supporting infrastructure. Arrived here by way of philosophy, event planning, graphic design and full stack development. Enthusiastic about reliability, enabling collaboration, agile principles and learning new tech.

Professional Experience

20222020

Senior Software Engineer

Better.com Remote / New York, NY
  • Led the migration of 200+ microservices to Spinnaker to increase CD reliability, improving release confidence and enabling advanced deployment strategies: blue/green, canary, and smoke tests with auto rollbacks.
  • Built custom Helm Chart templating libraries and Terraform modules to ensure simple yet customizable infrastructure configuration across all services, while ensuring consistency in cloud resource usage, monitoring, ephemeral testing environments and CI/CD.
  • Created and maintained AWS infrastructure including: 6 Kubernetes clusters running thousands of service instances on EKS, 100+ RDS instances, Route53 / Cloudfront / Traefik for networking and MSK & AMQ for messaging. Configured autoscaling, observability and alerting in Cloudwatch and Datadog, participated in on-call rotations.
  • Enhanced developer experience for over 400 engineers: created, documented, presented and provided support for tools to automate and streamline development and deployment.
20202019

Senior Full Stack Engineer

b8ta (acquired Brickwork Software, January 2019) Remote / New York, NY / San Francisco, CA
  • Implemented and ensured reliability for infrastructure powering 25+ retail stores, the b8ta.com
    e-commerce engine and partner SaaS portals. Built on GCP using Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Build, Datastore, Pub/Sub and BigQuery.
  • Developed backend API on Rails, frontend client-facing apps using React, and supporting services for authentication, asset management, integrations and analytics.
  • Created internal CLI tools to increase developer productivity and code consistency; integrated with Google Cloud Build, Kubernetes, GitHub, PostgreSQL, Cloud Datastore.
20192016

Senior Software Engineer

Brickwork Software (acquired by b8ta, January 2019) Remote / New York, NY
  • Built a SaaS platform enabling increased online to offline conversion for retailers via appointment booking, event management and data syndication. Clients included Nike, Saks Fifth Avenue, Chanel, J.Crew and Urban Outfitters.
  • Planned and executed re-architecture of a monolith Rails app into over 15 microservices to increase scalability, provide separation of concerns, and speed deployments.
  • Converted platform to implement infrastructure as code using Ansible for configuration management on AWS, Docker for containerizing apps and Jenkins for CI and CD.
20162012

Full Stack Web Developer

True&Co San Francisco, CA
  • Developed and maintained trueandco.com, across all layers of the stack: DevOps / systems administration, server-side & front-end development, DB management, and UX/UI/graphic design.
  • Architected cloud server infrastructure on Joyent using Ansible and Docker to grow from 1 to 20+ servers, directed release cycle, managed development, staging, test and production environments.
  • Implemented encapsulation of business logic using state machines, custom payment integrations (Stripe / Paypal), authentication (Authlogic / Devise / OAuth 2.0), internal administration (Active Admin), search (Elasticsearch / Searchkick), and external API integrations (third-party logistics / Facebook Login / FedEx).
20142010

Contract Web Developer

Jurawa Design New York, NY / San Francisco, CA
  • Designed and developed custom CMS based websites: focus on efficacy, simplicity, style and UX. Projects included: Learned Evolution, Job Fusion, Orchard Lounge & The Meta Agency. Portfolio: jurawa.com/portfolio
  • Managed client IT needs: server implementation and configuration, web hosting.
  • Collaborated with design firms and managed independent designers & developers.
20122008

Coordinator, Web Communications and Graphic Arts
Events and Communications Coordinator

The New York Stem Cell Foundation New York, NY
  • Managed web presence: technical development, hosting, content supervision, email marketing and social media.
  • Produced and coordinated graphic design across 5 departments: in-house design for web and print, managed relationships with freelancers and vendors.
  • Executed full-site redesign and CMS upgrade in-house: savings exceeding 30k.
  • Planned and produced 10+ events per year, including the NYSCF Annual Translational Stem Cell Research Conference, an internationally recognized scientific meeting drawing over 400 delegates.

Education

20072003

The George Washington University

Washington, DC Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy
20062005

University of Otago | Accademia Italiana

Dunedin, New Zealand | Florence, Italy Study Abroad Programs: Philosophy | Graphic Design, Photography, Fine Arts