Justin Ryan

Summary

I'm ready to deliver first-rate results using my skills in large distributed systems, compassionate mentorship, and leading teams to new heights. I take pride in initiating solutions to large, messy, difficult problems — especially when it's hard to know where to even start — while effectively balancing these technical challenges with the high priority of mentoring and leading my team. I'm considered by my peers to be a driver of change, in technological skill and innovation, as well as intuitively directing teams. Highly skilled in product development, internal tools and infrastructure development.

While at Netflix, I drove three key transformations alongside the massive growth of the company:

• Changed how Netflix builds all backend code
• Distributed the processing of the security layer
• Coalesced user and device identity across Netflix

Each transformation required leading a team to identify the problem and how it affected the business, define a strategy to address the problem, rally support, get the project off the ground, drive the implementation, and find talent to take ownership of the solution.

Experience

Netflix, Los Gatos, CA Nov 2011-Feb 2021

Developer Productivity Oct 2019 - Mar 2021

Researched and explored how the serverless development model could work for Netflix and evangelized the approach to engineering teams.

• Built “sidecars” to offer aspects of a Function-as-a-service (FaaS) experience to traditional non-serverless services.
• Bridged AWS Lambda to Netflix infrastructure, e.g. authenticated identity, logging, and metrics.
• Worked on a distributed build system, built on top of Docker's Buildkit, to build updatable immutable images on behalf of users.

Identity and Access Management Jan 2016 - Sep 2019

Formed and led a team of 4 to consolidate device and user identity across Netflix to address business continuity risk issues. Incubated numerous initiatives that grew into full-blown teams. Collaborated and cultivated long-term relationships with internal stakeholders, including device teams, client teams, product managers and business development. Onboarded and coached new team members, guiding them to design and take ownership of vital systems. Challenged team members to achieve their personal career goals.

• Designed and administered multiple critical systems to be fault tolerant and scalable to ensure 99.999% uptime. Responsible for device booting, device identification, a secure transport layer, and user authentication across every request.
• Distributed and destructured Netflix security protocol at the “edge” in a way to increase insights where unavailable before; reduced average latency by 30% and dropped 99th percentile latency by 20% while increasing resilience across all major edge systems at Netflix.
• Modernized HTTP cookie processing to reduce mysterious errant behavior being seen across the fleet, resulting in the reduction of reauthorizations by 18% and a 25% drop in invalid tokens.
• Captained the transformation of how customer identity was passed around through the Netflix system, increasing insight and adding security. Unified identity across multiple sources (web, devices, partners) to a single patent-pending representation, while preventing a category of VPPA violating identity mismatch faults. Coordinated migration across dozens of teams.
• Initiated a near-real-time logging out of users to alleviate customer pain and customer support load, from a troublesome 8-hour delayed logging out.
• Performed multiple external partner security integrations, including Google Home integration for identity switching and Comcast device identification, which enabled tens of millions of users to better experience Netflix.

Playback Access Apr 2015 - Jan 2016

Charted a path to be closer to the core of the business, by taking on the domain of digital-rights management (DRM) and operating at "Netflix scale."

• Maintained critical systems necessary for secure playback. Created a path to make an unwieldy key legacy monolith system serviceable.
• Operated multiple DRM systems using best practices to keep them resilient.
• Partnered with third-party companies to integrate their DRM and device identity systems.
• Engaged with infrastructure teams to keep their internal offering useful and relevant to product developers.

Engineering Tools Nov 2011 - Apr 2015

Started without any experience with build tools, then went on to reshape how server code was built at Netflix for thousands of engineers.

• Made the bold choice to evolve the build system from a legacy Apache Ant system to the nascent Gradle build system. Oversaw migration of all projects at Netflix to the newer build system. Elevated the Gradle ecosystem by creating dozens of plugins, engaging with the community and speaking at Gradle Summit.
• Took ownership of company-wide dependency management: fixed conflicts, identified problems, and administered external dependencies.
• Introduced infrastructure-as-code to the Jenkins project via the job-dsl-plugin, which modeled Jenkins jobs in a Groovy DSL, allowing the automation of job creation in a space that previously required manual configuration in a UI.
• Created a public presence in the "build" community by speaking at definitive conferences and meetups. Supported the launch of dozens of Netflix's OSS offerings.

Intralinks, Boston, MA Aug 2008-Aug 2011

Performed Technical Team Lead functions while implementing many core features and pushing for new technologies across multiple organizations. Developed features to support Merger & Acquisitions (M&A) and Life Science verticals, while working on adding horizontal features such as security, tagging, localization, two factor authentication, and search.

• Awarded the 2010 IntraLinks Innovation Award. Initiated and led "Sharpening the Saw" sessions to promote cross organizational discussions of tangential concepts.
• Led, as developer and architect, Case Management project to run static business processes in a distributed fashion. Used for Safety Document Distribution by thousands of customers, where delays and defects have actual human impact or legal ramifications.
• Acted as a developer's advocate to standardize and promote effective developer environments. Promoted testing best-practices with workshops, modernized integration tests, adding Spring context validation, singleton concurrency detection, and an in-memory HSQL database.

Sirios Capital Management, Boston, MA Jul 2007 - Jun 2008

Contracted to develop Java EE 5 based financial research application for reporting and bookmarking of external financial services. Coordinated project deadlines and goals.

Technical Skills

Other