Principal Software Engineer · Durham, NC
I'm a dad in perpetual training, a curious software engineer, a Marine Corps veteran, and a consummate bro.
I'm a Principal Software Engineer at Clever, where I work on systems that handle millions of daily logins for K-12 students. I focus on resiliency, authentication infrastructure, and making sure things don't break when traffic spikes.
My career has been about building systems that work at scale. At Clever, I've helped push our SSO systems to 99.977% uptime while processing over 100M authorizations per day. I've built platforms for storing audit logs, established technical standards across engineering teams, and worked on infrastructure that needs to be reliable because downtime affects millions of students trying to access their learning apps.
Before Clever, I built real-time transit tracking systems at TransLoc, worked on health economics simulations at RTI International, and created ETL pipelines for real estate data. Each role taught me something different about distributed systems, performance optimization, and designing for reliability.
I'm drawn to problems that require both technical depth and practical thinking. Database optimization, high-availability architecture, distributed systems design — these are the challenges I find interesting. I also spend time mentoring engineers and running workshops on observability and database performance. Building systems and helping people grow are equally important parts of the job.
I maintain a public knowledge base of notes on distributed systems concepts: databases, fault tolerance, observability, algorithms, messaging, and more. It's how I think through and retain complex ideas.
dkrichards86/distributed-brain
A guide to how I work, communicate, and collaborate. Useful if we're going to work together.