Hi, I'm Levi
I'm an experienced Engineering Manager and Staff Software Engineer with an emphasis on building secure, scalable, and performant web applications. I deeply care about security and reliability at every level of the stacks we rely on and I go out of my way to fully comprehend every detail in the complex systems that we rely on.
I lead an engaged team of engineers that develop and deploy scalable, performant, highly available, secure, and frugal web services that power EatStreet on AWS. I regularly mentor and educate junior to senior engineers on technical skills and personal project management. I'm an effective communicator who raises the bar for lasting cross-team change in organization, software development, deployment, business operations, and security as a business and secured web applications. My leadership has reduced oncall incidents and their impact by 90%, enabled autonomy of multiple teams, and has instilled leadership and responsibility in engineers that report to me. For matters of security and data privacy, I'm the go-to expert in designing, reviewing compliance efforts and cryptography.
Before becoming a manager, I advanced EatStreet to PCI DSS Level 2 compliance, developed the backend for CCPA right to know and right to delete, outperformed F5 Silverline Shape Defense credential stuffing defenses, developed a new vertical that brought 20% more revenue, surgically rewrote and scaled order fulfillment services under pressure to handle 6 fold load at the pandemic onset, released a scalable 3000+ domain HTTPS load balancer with a custom LetsEncrypt integration, secured partner ACH data with Google Tink and AWS KMS, replaced MD5 and 3DES usage, and released an internal fine-grained authorization framework for employees and contractors.
Interests
- Application and Cloud Security
- Protecting data and keeping data private
- Applied Cryptography
- Infosec
- DEF CON
- Platform Engineering
- Authoring safe, secure, and misuse-resistant libraries
Other
- Acknowledged for feedback on Base64 Malleability in Practice (2022), and LATKE: An identity-binding PAKE from lattice assumptions (2023).
- Author of JaneTLS a security primitives library for the Janet programming language using MBed TLS.
- Technical editor of The Rook's Guide to C++