{ "basics": { "name": "Vanessa Nicole Naff", "label": "Backend software engineer (Go) · mentor, educator, community builder", "email": "hello@sourcekitten.com", "url": "https://sourcekitten.com", "summary": "Strongest where correctness is the product: privacy tooling that never moved customer data, event pipelines that kept GPS data in order at 100M+ requests a day, and compliance-critical ETL over tens of millions of records. Most recently, live sports streaming infrastructure at Warner Bros. Discovery.", "location": { "city": "Seattle", "region": "WA" }, "profiles": [ { "network": "GitHub", "username": "axiomista", "url": "https://github.com/axiomista" }, { "network": "LinkedIn", "username": "vanessanaff", "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/vanessanaff" } ] }, "projects": [ { "name": "PII scanning that never moves the data", "entity": "Preclusio (YC S19)", "startDate": "2019-10", "endDate": "2020-12", "description": "A scanner that found personal data in customer databases and showed CISOs where it flowed, shipped as a Go binary that ran beside the data, so the data never left.", "highlights": [ "Built a data-source scanning service that sampled schemas, detected PII and privacy risks, and surfaced findings, including downstream consumers, to CISOs.", "Shipped it as a containerized Go binary installed alongside customer data stores, so data never left the customer environment.", "Built a React schema visualization mapping database fields with sensitive data highlighted, plus install scripts and in-app guidance that diagnosed network and port configuration issues." ], "keywords": [ "Go", "containers", "React", "privacy engineering" ] }, { "name": "Keeping GPS data in order at 100M+ requests a day", "entity": "Glympse", "startDate": "2018-03", "endDate": "2019-10", "description": "Helped replace a Python 2 monolith with microservices, choosing Kafka for its per-partition ordering so GPS data stayed correct at 100M+ requests a day.", "highlights": [ "Co-designed the microservices architecture replacing a legacy Python 2 monolith; chose Kafka for strict per-partition ordering to preserve GPS data integrity.", "Profiled and benchmarked REST and gRPC APIs handling 100M+ requests/day; reduced latency through connection pooling and caching.", "Led design meetings and wrote specs for new services with SRE and Customer teams; standardized handlers across a multi-repository codebase to speed onboarding." ], "keywords": [ "Kafka", "gRPC", "REST", "microservices" ] }, { "name": "Compliance-critical ETL at 20–60M records", "entity": "Garden City Group (now Epiq)", "startDate": "2015-10", "endDate": "2018-02", "description": "Automated the ETL behind legal and financial data under federal court compliance requirements, over data sets of 20–60M records per project.", "highlights": [ "Automated compliance-critical ETL on client data sets of 20–60M records per project, for legal and financial data under federal court compliance requirements.", "Designed parameterized data objects for calculation, evaluation, and reporting.", "Built microservices, Angular/TypeScript front-end components, and deployment scripts; mentored the team in T-SQL best practices." ], "keywords": [ "T-SQL", "ETL", "Angular", "TypeScript" ] } ], "work": [ { "name": "AutoBridge Systems", "position": "Developer Community Lead (contract)", "startDate": "2025-10", "summary": "Sample applications, API integrations, documentation, and training curriculum for developers building on an agentic AI platform for government and enterprise, including starter code for an \"Advent of APIs\" developer event." }, { "name": "Rosie Match", "position": "Fractional Software Engineer (contract)", "startDate": "2025-10", "summary": "Bug fixes and reworked user flows and state management in production React/TypeScript applications." }, { "name": "Warner Bros. Discovery (iStreamPlanet, WarnerMedia)", "position": "Platform Software Engineer", "startDate": "2020-05", "endDate": "2024-06", "summary": "Owned the playback position tracking service for live sports clients serving millions of daily users, and led load testing ahead of events including Copa América. Built Go tooling for zero-downtime node handover on live streams and extended Datadog APM tracing end to end across team services." }, { "name": "Preclusio (YC S19)", "position": "Founding Software Engineer", "startDate": "2019-10", "endDate": "2020-12", "summary": "One of two engineers at a Y Combinator startup building GDPR and CCPA compliance tooling; co-owned the full product lifecycle through the company's wind-down." }, { "name": "Glympse", "position": "Backend Software Engineer", "startDate": "2018-03", "endDate": "2019-10", "summary": "Backend services and APIs carrying GPS data at 100M+ requests a day." }, { "name": "Garden City Group (now Epiq)", "position": "Data Engineer \u0026 Full-Stack Developer", "startDate": "2015-10", "endDate": "2018-02", "summary": "Data pipelines and enterprise software for legal and financial data under federal court compliance requirements." } ], "volunteer": [ { "organization": "Seattle Tech Communities", "position": "Meetup Organizer / Committee Chair", "startDate": "2018-04", "summary": "Refactoring Tech, Papers We Love Seattle, Seattle Go User Group, Latinos in Tech Seattle.", "highlights": [ "Procure venues, recruit speakers, and organize panels; build spaces where engineers share skills and grow together, focused on increasing access and opportunity in tech for people with underrepresented identities." ] }, { "organization": "Ada Developers Academy", "position": "CS Fundamentals Tutor", "startDate": "2018-10", "endDate": "2020-02", "highlights": [ "Guided new developers one-on-one through a computer science curriculum and software projects, with a professional mentorship component." ] }, { "organization": "Girl Develop It", "position": "Data Structures \u0026 Algorithms Instructor", "startDate": "2018-10", "endDate": "2018-12", "highlights": [ "Taught and created class materials for early-career developers identifying as women or non-binary people." ] } ], "education": [ { "institution": "The University of Arizona", "area": "Mathematics, minor in Biochemistry \u0026 Biochemical Engineering", "location": "Tucson, AZ" } ], "skills": [ { "name": "Languages", "keywords": [ "Go", "Python", "SQL (various flavors)", "JavaScript/TypeScript", "Node.js", "C#", "Java", "shell" ] }, { "name": "Backend \u0026 Systems", "keywords": [ "API and services design (REST, gRPC)", "microservices", "system design", "event streaming", "database implementation", "privacy \u0026 security" ] }, { "name": "Video", "keywords": [ "live streaming", "real-time transcoding and re-encoding", "stream monitoring", "playback services", "live-event load testing" ] }, { "name": "Infrastructure \u0026 Observability", "keywords": [ "Kubernetes", "Helm", "Argo CD", "HashiCorp (Nomad, Consul, Vault)", "Docker", "Kafka", "RabbitMQ", "Elasticsearch", "GitLab CI/CD", "Datadog (APM, dashboards, alerting)", "AWS (S3, EC2, Lambda, CloudFront, SNS, SQS)" ] }, { "name": "AI \u0026 Agents", "keywords": [ "agentic API design", "MCP servers", "LLM-assisted development" ] } ] }