Engineering leader, excellent communicator and data visualization expert.

Experience

Yahoo Director, Proactive Engineering

December 2020 – Present

As the Director of Proactive Engineering, a pillar within Yahoo's security team, the Paranoids, I lead a 30 person team that has one mission: make the safe choice the easy choice through a combination of empathy and user centered design. We challenge dangerous assumptions, build technical assumptions and drive measurable behavior change to defend Yahoo against the most pressing attacks we face as a company.

The team consists of Yahoo's red team, cybersecurity engineering team and its security awareness team.

It works like this: the red team finds an attack path, usually utilizing tools created by our vulnerability research team. Then, our security awareness team catalyzes behavior change using behavioral science methods to block that kill chain. Finally, where possible, our engineering team makes those attacks impossible through targeted development of technical security solutions.

Highlights

• After log4j, drove the creation of a container scanning pipeline and kubernetes webhook that signs and scans tens of thousands of containers every single day to ensure that dangerous vulnerabilities don't end up in production. The system was adopted by thousands of Yahoo engineers without a major incident.
• Led our push to switch our SSO portal to phishing resistant webauthn, with over 90% of the company voluntarily adopting; similarly, for consumers, created a program to encourage 2SV adoption with 5 million users adopting the feature in 2024.
• Created the Paranoids government relations program.
• Created an executive protection program to ensure our executives are not personally vulnerable to targeted harrassment.

Turntide Technologies Senior Software Engineer

September 2019 – Present

As a Senior Software Engineer at Turntide, I worked with my colleagues to reduce the environmental impact of air conditioning systems in an effort to do our bit to help slow climate change. It was a rewarding position at the crossroads of embedded devices and cloud computing. I built distributed systems using Kafka, Go, and GraphQL. I investigated equipment failures and performance issues with my knowledge of machine learning and statistics. And I developed customizable dashboards to help measure reliability and monitor running systems.

Highlights

• Extended the existing frontend dashboards to allow for custom extensions and visualizations using Typescript, React and Material UI.
• Refactored and improved an external api for customers so that they could gather alerts and metrics about their installed systems.
• Provisioned infrastructure using Pulumi, Kubernetes, Skaffold and Helm.
• Developed an internal dashboard to monitor reliability metrics to help the company improve its product.

The Markup Managing Editor

April 2018 – April 2019

I cofounded The Markup, a nonprofit publication illuminating the societal implications of emerging technologies. With my colleagues, I created newsroom policies including a data style guide, privacy policy and The Markup's data ethics guide. I worked with outside firms to create our online identity and public messaging. I wrote the editorial vision, created an editorial pitching process and oversaw the editorial calendar. I managed a team of seven journalists and motivated them to do their best work. I also wrote a lot of code.

Highlights

• With my co-founders, successfully raised $23 Million from Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the Knight Foundation, the MacArthur foundation and others.
• Wrote a privacy-preserving analytics system using differential privacy in TypeScript on the frontend and Rust on the backend.
• Provisioned infrastructure on AWS using Terraform and Kubernetes.
• Created a hiring process that was the envy of the media industry and led our diversity efforts.

ProPublica News Applications Developer

August 2009 – April 2018

For almost a decade, I was an award-winning developer and data journalist at ProPublica, a nonprofit news organization in New York City. I worked hard with my colleagues to create compelling visualizations and informative articles while meeting the deadlines of the news cycle. As a technical leader, I was an evangelist for our open source efforts, an expert in geographic information systems and mapping for the web, and a mentor for my colleagues. As a data scientist, I used machine learning and statistics to investigate political targeting, racially biased car insurance pricing, and discriminatory advertising on Facebook. As a reporter, I was a member of the team reporting on the Snowden leaks, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, winner of the Livingston award for promising young journalists, and a peabody award for Hell and High Water.

Highlights

• Developed an open source server-side mapping framework using GDAL written in C, and a frontend framework for SVG mapping. Developed dozens of performant interactive GIS visualizations using WebGL, Leaflet, SVG and D3 on deadline.
• Developed a browser extension to crowdsource and identify political ads from Facebook. Wrote a backend in Rust that collected millions of ads. Wrote a classifier with scikit-learn that correctly predicted if an ad was political more than 90% of the time. Wrote a frontend in React and Redux that displays more than 100,000 political ads.
• Reported on the Snowden Leaks with journalists from the New York Times and the Guardian. Wrote a Java application using Apache Tika, Lucene and JavaFX to search through millions of documents.
• Developed ProPublica’s Prescriber Checkup tool that tracks prescribing patterns for almost 1 million doctors in Medicare. Wrote a system to detect doctors with abnormal prescribing patterns.
• Analyzed a risk algorithm used by criminal courts around the country using R and found that the algorithm was biased against African Americans for a series called Machine Bias.
• Analyzed millions of car insurance quotes using general additive models and found troubling evidence unfair pricing for minority communities.
• Created and continue to maintain open source projects in use at newsrooms around the world. Developed dozens of production-quality web applications with Ruby, Node, PHP, Python and Rust.

Columbia University Assistant Professor

September 2016 – December 2016

I taught a class on analyzing geospatial data to nine journalism students as part of the Journalism school's Lede Program. We covered the basics like coordinate systems, QGIS and the Open Geospatial Consortium's simple feature geometry object model. We advanced to web mapping with GeoJSON, SVG, D3 and Leaflet. Then, we covered advanced topics like processing shapefiles in the python library fiona and analyzing and color correcting raster images with rasterio and numpy. Finally, we built a logistic regression classifier using statsmodels to classify public parks. It was a rewarding and fulfilling experience.

The Nation Online Director

September 2007 – August 2009

W.W. Norton Editorial Assistant

September 2007 – August 2009

Group 301 Media Assistant Film Editor

June 2005 – June 2006

Education

University of Santa Cruz Bachelor of Arts, English

2002 – 2005

University of Santa Barbara Computer Science Major

2000 – 2002