Abram Clark - Resume

About Me and Objective

I live in Seattle with my wife and cats - currently passionate about building AI tools, biking, and building prototypes with 3D printing. After 7 years in shipping logistics, I automated myself into redundancy, then was caught in a 50% downsize. I'm now looking for new problems to solve and learn from involving:

Machine learning / ANNs / AI
Data analytics and pipelines
System architecture and schema design
Building search engines and data visualization tools using document vectors, LLMs and knowledge graphs

Work Experience

Backend Senior Software Engineer

EasyPost
April 2017 - Jan 2025

Developing scalable and reliable API services with Python, MySQL, Rust, Ruby, Kafka, and many other tools.

Led the design and implementation of an in-house address verification system that replaced a slow, unreliable, and expensive external API call. The final service was implemented in Rust, runs 50x faster and has had no service level outages, and resulted in large annual savings.
Designed and implemented multiple extractions from an overloaded monolith and DB. They were completed on time with no break in service or changes in API behavior. This included rigorous testing and careful migrations.
Participated in design and implementation of the back end for new API products: carbon offsets, insurance purchases, and analytics tools for customers. The last also powers a web based analytics tool, and continues to perform well for real-time queries as we grow.
Teach architecture, schema design, and language concepts to junior developers.
Improvements to developer experience, build scripts, and CI/CD system. Used industry standard tools and practices: TDD, CI/CD, VMs, AWS, Github

System Architect / Virtual CTO Consultant

GlasFunds
Dec 2021 - Feb 2022

Senior Consultant for a private equity funding platform

Handled live database migration from overburdened Airtable MVP to PostgreSQL with zero downtime.
Designed and implemented schema for handling the intricacies of a 2 sided bidding market and the enterprise needs of financial compliance
Consulted with the web development team to correctly implement the most complex and critical data model code. Specifically ensuring:
- Accuracy and security of financial transactions
- Overall data security, transparency, and correctness
- Correctly handling the many interrelated many-to-many relationships in an immutable DB that also needed to track updates to many models
Used Django, Docker, TDD, and Github

Cofounder, CTO

NewHive
August 2009 - 2016

Conceived of and created a social media creativity platform.

My responsibilities: UX design, architecture, the majority of programming, hiring technical team, management, and some business development.
Developed full stack using Python, MongoDB, JavaScript, AWS, GCP, Git, and Google Analytics. The core of this was a sophisticated web based drag and drop design tool, coupled with a social frame that handled tagging, feeds, and comments.
Managed and grew the platform to millions of users (analytics shows 115 countries as well).

Lead Software Engineer

Internet Community & Entertainment Corp.
2006 - 2008

Designed and developed backend of auction system using PHP and PostgreSQL, including test framework to verify consistency of auction transactions.
Developed and refactored UI code in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.

TA for UWEO Web Technology Solutions course

ISchool, University of Washington
2003 - 2007

Designed curriculum for emerging front-end web technologies (e.g. JQuery and AJAX methodologies).
Gave lectures on JavaScript.
Helped students one on one with assignments and final projects in the 3 class course, which also included server side programming and database design.

Developer

ISchool, University of Washington
2003 - 2006

Developed and refactored department tools using ASP.NET, C#, and MS SQL Server.
Linux system administration for faculty research projects.

About Me

I've been fascinated with programming since teaching myself QBASIC starting in 4th grade. Even after 21 years of experience in the industry, I still find designing and implementing successful software very satisfying

For Fun