Sam Pierson

GSD

Palo Alto, CA, United States

Details

Experience: 2023 : Present

Mechanical Orchard

Information Security Lead

Built a massive-scale WebRTC based video conferencing and event broadcast platform in Elixir, GoLang and JavaScript.

2022 : 2023

Vex Communications

Engineer

I improved Vicarious' cloud-based infrastructure for training vision models by : rebuilding their GKE Kubernetes clusters using Terraform, setting up GitOps continuous delivery (CD) using ArgoCD, improving their Python and GoLang build pipeline software, improving its management portal (a JavaScript / React app) and building a cloud cost tracking system in Python.

2021 : 2022

Vicarious

Senior Cloud Software Engineer

Built a cloud-native back-end chatbot in JavaScript / Node.js, using AWS Lambda & friends, Google DialogFlow for NLP, communicating with clients over Twilio Programmable Chat and Slack. Improved their DevOps practices, introduced the team to Terraform.

2020 : 2020

Gali Health

Software Engineer

Working in a four organization consortium, we built the Human Cell Atlas, an entirely cloud based, open source platform for ingestion, storage, analysis and visualization of scRNA-seq data.

Designed, created and then led a team that developed the HCA Upload Service, a CLI and API service written in Python, deployed using Terraform and run using AWS Lambda, S3, SQS, Batch, Docker and RDS PostgreSQL.

Drove the formation of, and was the first chair of the HCA Architecture Team.

2017 : 2020

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

Principal Engineer

Company: Mechanical Orchard

About

I create software and lead teams that build software systems. Highlights include: The Human Cell Atlas (humancellatlas.org), the successor to the Human Genome Project (RNA instead of DNA this time), Omada (omadahealth.com), the largest diabetes prevention program to achieve full recognition from the CDC, The Bold Italic (thebolditalic.com), the award winning San Francisco magazine site, and Second Life Marketplace (marketplace.secondlife.com), the largest user-to-user virtual goods marketplace ever created.

I've done everything from embedded development, device drivers and O/S kernels to web applications and cloud native back-end systems. Although I am far along in my career, I still enjoy the creative act of coding. However I excel at technical leadership, or as some call it, cat herding - leading large (often multi-organization) technical teams, being the voice of reason and helping them to find optimal solutions to complex problems.