Rachel Vecchitto

Checkin

PHP, Laravel, Svelte, AWS

• Built Checkin, a product that allows people to get matched in real-time around common topics for 1:1 video chats, from the ground up.
• Provisioned servers, set up build & deployment pipelines, configured monitoring & observability systems, and handled all maintenance & support for the entire stack.
• Planned, scoped, and managed all engineering work in a fast-paced startup environment.

REI, Adventure Projects

PHP, Laravel, Java, Vue, AWS

• Made Adventure Projects data available to and discoverable by teams at REI that needed it, established standardized ways to share this data between two separate stacks, ensured Adventure Projects sites met REI's SEO & accessibility guidelines, and coordinated all engineering projects involving rei.com.
• Developed a more collaborative engineering culture as the Adventure Projects team grew to five engineers. Efforts included using PRs for increased transparency, holding engineering meetings for free-form topics and architecture reviews, instituting epic owners in Jira to promote code ownership by ICs, and encouraging 10% time for prototyping & experimentation.

• Handled all frontend and backend development, infrastructure, and development tooling for five websites with tens of millions of sessions per year with one other web engineer.
• Overhauled the development process to support multiple engineers, including moving code to github, provisioning local & staging development environments, creating a continuous deployment process, and setting up monitoring & observability systems.
• Led the transformation of 10+ year old spaghetti code into modern web apps. Chose an MVC framework, rearchitected supporting components as necessary, refactored frontend code, and integrated frontend & backend build systems to create a codebase that other engineers could work on enjoyably.

Twitter

Java, Scala, Ruby, Python

• Led a team building a system to send billing & compliance data from new services in Twitter's data center to legacy services in Gnip's data center. Implemented a library for message creation, a server to POST messages from Twitter to Gnip, and a receiving endpoint to enqueue messages for Gnip systems.
• Designed & developed tools used by all engineers to package applications, manage versions, and deploy applications through staging to production.
• Developed an API used by partners to batch submit tweet resyndication and compliance events, allowing Twitter to bill appropriately for network impressions and honor user privacy for hundreds of thousands of tweets.

Etsy

PHP

• Led the migration of about 800k shops from a monolithic Postgres database to MySQL shards, redesigning the schema, teeing writes, and then teeing reads to gradually transition to the new database with no downtime.
• Designed & developed a service to allow uniform access to multiple shipping provider APIs (USPS, FedEx, etc) as part of the original launch of Etsy's shipping services.
• Contributed to many critical site components, including checkout, the listing process, listing currency conversion, shop management tools, and mobile APIs.

Wee Web

Ruby, Rails

• Lead engineer for Wee Web, a website that allowed families to privately & easily share photos, videos, and stories about their children.
• Built all site components from the ground up with one other engineer.

The New York Times

PHP, Context (proprietary)

• Acted as the development lead for moving the article archive out from behind the TimesSelect paywall.
• Managed the development & maintenance of all search-related projects, including article categorization, topic pages, and general search enhancements.