Rocky Warren
A Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) and AWS Certified Solutions Architect and Security Specialty with over ten years of experience shipping and maintaining tested, distributed, secure systems from thousand-line microservices moving billions of dollars each year to multi-million line GPS guidance systems. I deliver customer value utilizing object-oriented, functional, statically-typed, dynamic, and database languages. I lead teams as a Founding Principal Engineer, Architect, Product Manager, and Startup Co-founder.
Skills
JavaScript TypeScript Python Scala React NextJS Java C# Bash Shell Kafka PostgreSQL AWS ECS AWS RDS DevOps DynamoDB Svelte Pricing Strategy Dynamic Pricing Cybersecurity Docker Cloud Security Cloud SIEM Continuous Integration Redis DevSecOps Continuous Delivery REST APIs Distributed Systems
Recommendations
- CEO describing a Fortune 100 company's reaction to a demo I created: "Slam dunk with [Company]! Thank you for all your efforts on this! [Company VP] was visibly and vocally excited. I think his voice cracked a little when he exclaimed, 'how did you do that!'."
- CTO: "Rocky embodies a Principal Software Engineer. He can identify the most important problems, work out different solutions, and choose the most appropriate way of moving forward. He'll then own that solution and see it through to the end. He's also never content with his current skill set and always wants to continue growing. Whether it's books, classes, or certifications, he's willing to put in the work to better himself and the team."
- VP of Product: "If no one is telling you, it's appreciated how intentional you are with growing our collective knowledge and being a champion for training. Thanks for doing this stuff, Rocky. I've also been hearing great things about your contributions and speed-of-delivery. The leadership team is impressed."
- Technical Lead and Manager: "He's a one-man wrecking crew, one of the most productive engineers I've worked with."
Certifications
Experience
Clipboard
Senior Staff Software Engineer Mar 2024 - Present (2 yrs 1 mo)
Remote - Defining and leading execution of Clipboard's AI strategy: Went from 0% AI-created and merged pull requests to 80% (and rising) in months. Tripled deploys and doubled merged pull requests per engineer. Condensed our best practices into AGENTS.md rules with learning feedback loops and shipped them to 30+ microservices across a 3M+-line codebase.
- Marketplace pricing: Re-architected pricing for our $1B+ GSV marketplace to a real-time, per-worker rules engine enabling rapid experimentation that increased margins by multiple percentage points, resulting in 8 digits of additional yearly net revenue. The rules engine library is now adopted across multiple products.
- Notification platform migration: Led company-wide migration from Braze to Knock across hundreds of notifications and 10+ teams, building migration tooling and AI prompts to make the process as painless as possible. Negotiated vendor contracts and contributed to vendor open-source repos to unblock teams.
- CI reliability and code quality: Reduced CI flakiness by 50% and built autonomous agent loops for continued improvements. Added fast agent guardrails, introduced the strictest TypeScript Go configuration, and reduced linting time by 100x, switching from ESLint to Oxlint.
- Platform modernization: Transitioned the company from weekly releases to continuous delivery and trunk-based development across (at the time) 50 microservices.
- Engineering culture and leadership: Defined Staff Engineering at Clipboard and introduced a formal mentorship program pairing senior and staff engineers. Established ADRs, a technical design review process through a senior engineer committee to raise our bar, and engineering-wide best practices. Founded the Security and Staff+ teams, and migrated the company's thousands of documents and processes from Confluence to Notion to improve knowledge discovery and collaboration.
Staff Software and Security Engineer Mar 2023 - Mar 2024 (1 yr)
Remote 
Brale
Principal Software and Security Engineer Aug 2022 - Mar 2023 (7 mos)
Remote - Foster security culture by encouraging and, if possible, enforcing secure best practices such as AWS access via only temporary credentials, password managers for employee secrets, AWS Secrets Manager for software secrets, and hardware security keys for Git SSH access.
- Encrypt sensitive data using 256-bit AES-GCM envelope encryption backed by AWS KMS, random initialization vectors, and tagged ciphertexts to ease quarterly rotation. Searchable fields leverage HMAC SHA-512 hashes.
- Set up ingestion of application, CloudTrail, GuardDuty, VPC flow, Route53, and load balancer access logs into Datadog. Over 95% of cloud security posture management (CSPM) rule findings passing for PCI, SOC 2, and GDPR with plans to reach 100%. Use security information and event management (SIEM) to alert on both new findings and anomalous activity.
- Use Nessus and Burp Suite to scan for vulnerabilities and penetration test applications. Use Slither and Echidna to statically analyze and fuzz smart contracts, reporting on and addressing findings.
- Coordinate company-wide security training and engineering team OWASP Top 10 and SANS Top 25 vulnerability demonstrations.
- Deploy Kandji to company endpoints to gather telemetry, manage software patches, and enforce security rules such as disk encryption and malware protection.
Founding Principal Engineer Jan 2022 - Aug 2022 (7 mos)
Remote - Proposed and implemented multi-party computation (MPC) asset custody solution enabling multi-blockchain custodial wallets.
- Drive DevOps culture with automated identity and access management (IAM) and resource provisioning across multiple AWS accounts using AWS Organizations and AWS's Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool, CDK.
- Architect and build cost-efficient, secure, and performant cloud infrastructure utilizing managed and serverless services running in multi-account, multi-region, multi-subnet VPCs protected by WAFs.
- Author ERC-20 compatible Solidity smart contracts, coordinate external code audits, and build automated multi-blockchain deployment infrastructure.
- Rolled out SAML single sign-on company-wide with phishing-resistant FIDO hardware security key multi-factor authentication (MFA) and automatic identity provider (IdP) user provisioning.
- Build continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipelines to ship customer features on each two-person controlled software merge.
- Protect against supply chain attacks with Renovate dependency updates and automated Dependabot and Docker container security alerts.
- Maintain employee onboarding and offboarding through scripted application install, SSH configuration, and IAM provisioning/deprovisioning.
- Built secure by default CDK constructs (e.g., least-privilege policies, private S3 buckets, encryption at rest) to ease development.
Vertex Software
Principal Technical Lead and Product Manager, APIs & SDKs Aug 2020 - Jan 2022 (1 yr 5 mos)
Remote - Managed and mentored developers. Team strongly focused on customer satisfaction and ease of on-boarding with regular customer interviews, step-by-step guides, interactive demos, command-line interface (CLI), and automated, always up-to-date API code samples.
- Performed product discovery and regularly prioritized to ensure team quickly delivered the right products at the right time. Furthered this by implementing "No Meeting Wednesday" and asynchronous stand-ups to increase focus time.
- Created uptime and availability tests with automatic rollback and alerting, confidently enabling continuous delivery of services.
Principal Software Architect Sep 2019 - Aug 2020 (11 mos)
Remote - Hired as Principal Engineer responsible for leading public REST APIs. Built it from scratch to OpenAPI, JSON:API, and CloudEvents specifications. Inter-service communication via Kafka and gRPC. Code coverage >90%.
- Created and owned core libraries and build plugins to reduce duplication, improve security, and multiply engineering team's productivity.
- Architected and implemented distributed, streaming, event-driven systems capable of sub-second bill of materials (BOM) and scene updates on CAD models with hundreds of thousands of BOM lines.
- Search over hundreds of millions of pieces of CAD metadata using combination of Elasticsearch and Postgres full-text search.
Dwolla
Principal Software Engineer Jun 2016 - Sep 2019 (3 yrs 3 mos)
San Francisco, CA - Transitioned most business-critical database table from mutable to immutable, enabling point-in-time user balance queries, robust statements, and snapshots. Snapshots led to 200x faster database queries and 75% reduction in overall database deadlocks.
- Migrated webhooks to serverless Lambda functions, scaled to millions of daily messages, reduced peak delays from hours to minutes, cut costs by 50%, and launched with zero downtime.
Lead Developer Jul 2014 - Jun 2016 (1 yr 11 mos)
San Francisco, CA - Led development of API responsible for moving billions of dollars per year while decreasing partner "time to first API call" from hours to minutes with step-by-step guides and SDKs.
- Led Instant Bank Verification, cutting account verification times from three days to a few seconds via 3rd party integration. Built as containerized, auto-scaling microservice.
Senior Software Engineer Jul 2012 - Jul 2014 (2 yrs)
Des Moines, IA - Led company's foray into microservices with Dwolla Credit, integrating credit provider to inject millions in buying power into network. Mitigated partner downtime with caching and fault-tolerant background processes.
- Won internal hackathons by reducing ACH clearing times and allowing account creation via API. Each influenced what are now best-selling products.
Crucible Commodities
Co-founder Jul 2014 - Dec 2016 (2 yrs 5 mos)
San Francisco, CA 
John Deere
Technical Lead Jan 2008 - Jul 2012 (4 yrs 6 mos)
Des Moines, IA - Led CommandCenter project development, an in-cab self-driving GPS guidance display. Now factory installed in all large-scale John Deere vehicles worldwide. Two million+ lines of code, released on schedule, with all known defects closed.
- Led fortnightly meeting of 25 tech leads across all guidance displays comprising over 150 developers.
- Organized company's first Hackathons. After votes from 200+ employees, won both with customer analytics, predictive keyboard, touch screen gestures, and Tetris! Demoed results to CEO and staff.
Software Engineer Intern May 2006 - Jan 2008 (1 yr 8 mos)
Des Moines, IA 
University of Iowa
Software Developer Aug 2006 - Dec 2007 (1 yr 4 mos)
Iowa City, IA 
Collins Aerospace/Raytheon
Software Engineer Intern May 2005 - Aug 2005 (3 mos)
Cedar Rapids, IA Education
University of Iowa
Bachelor of Science, Computer Engineering Aug 2003 - Dec 2007
Iowa City, IA - Minors in Computer Science and Business