Noah Stride

CV

Posted on Jan 1, 0001

I’m Noah and I’m a product-focussed engineer on a mission to meet users’ needs - whether they be an internal team or a customer. You’ll find me happiest in a role which lets me engage with users and participate actively in the product process, and solve plenty of challenging technical problems!

I currently lead a team that builds products in the workload identity space (an emerging field that’s captured my heart), but over the past few years I’ve worked as a backend engineer and SRE at a variety of startups.

Overview

Let’s get the keywords out of the way! Here’s a list of my top technical skills:

  • Go
  • Distributed systems (microservices etc.)
  • Protobuf and gRPC
  • Kubernetes
  • Product analytics (PostHog and Clickhouse)
  • Observability (OpenTelemetry and Prometheus)
  • Networking protocols: IP, TCP, TLS and SSH
  • Linux
  • SQL (Postgres)
  • Typescript
  • Google Cloud Platform

And my softer skills:

  • Planning and executing the product and technical aspects of an MVP
  • Communicating with customers, providing support and performing interviews as part of product design
  • Incident response and management
  • Writing customer-facing documentation
  • Writing blog posts and delivering talks
  • Team leadership
  • Mentoring engineers

Experience

Teleport | Machine ID Team Lead | May 2022 - Present

Teleport is an open-source platform providing secure and easy zero trust access to infrastructure. You can check out my contributions on GitHub.

I joined Teleport in May 2022 as a Software Engineer L4.

By August 2022, I had taken lead of the Machine ID team. In this role, I had ownership of the direction of Machine ID, planning the future of the product and leading the execution of this. In addition, I regularly engaged directly with customers: joining sales calls to explore implementation options with prospects, providing support for escalated issues, and interviewing customers to guide product direction.

Achievements

  • Achieved strong growth of the Machine ID through a careful product process, basing decisions on a combination of customer interviews, detailed analytics data, and a researched understanding of the product market.
  • Delivered rapport with prospects and customers, resolving their issues and working closely with them to inform the future of Machine ID.
  • Participated in a small working group of engineers who identified technical debt and set out new best practices for the codebase.
  • Discovered and contributed to fixing several high/critical severity vulnerabilities.
  • Delivered blog posts and talks, representing myself and Teleport.

Technologies

  • Go
  • Linux
  • Kubernetes
  • Workload Identity (SPIFFE)
  • gRPC

Krystal | Senior Engineer | April 2021 - April 2022

I joined Krystal to bring Go expertise to a team of already strong Ruby engineers who were interested in branching out to Go as part of their Katapult cloud platform.

Achievements

  • Mentored other engineers on idiomatic Go, using my experience to help engineers experienced with Ruby come up to speed with the language
  • Took responsibility for the Kubernetes PAAS offered on Katapult, building an operator to provision control plane components for customer clusters and a CCM for those clusters to integrate with other products on the Katapult platform
  • Built a bespoke tool for simply managing the deployment of containerised applications onto Linux hosts where the complexity of Kubernetes was unnecessary

Technologies

  • Go
  • Docker, Podman and Containerd
  • Kubernetes
  • gRPC

Cudo Ventures | Senior Engineer | December 2020 - April 2021

I returned to Cudo to take a lead on SRE and Operations matters. I have continued to push for the uptake of Go and microservices at Cudo, using my experience from WalkUp.

Technologies

  • GCP
  • Kubernetes
  • Prometheus, Grafana and Chronosphere
  • Pulumi & Helm
  • Go, Node (Typescript and Javascript)
  • MySQL

WalkUp | Senior Backend Engineer | June 2020 - December 2020

When I started at WalkUp I was the engineer responsible for scaling the backend from handling 40,000 customers per week to in excess of 800,000 per week in just three months. This involved scoping out reliability and scaling issues within a pre-existing codebase and rectifying them, whilst maintaining a balance with the development of new features to improve the service. As the company grew, I took on the mentorship of a junior backend engineer.

Event-driven microservices architecture with a focus on reliability & scalability.

Technologies

  • Go
  • GCP
  • Kubernetes, Helm, Prometheus and Grafana
  • RabbitMQ
  • Redis
  • Firestore

Cudo Ventures | Software Engineer | August 2018 - June 2020

I joined Cudo Ventures as a fullstack engineer straight out of college, working on the NodeJS API, Electron App and Vue web app, but as the team grew my role shifted to focus solely on backend development and infrastructure, eventually providing support and mentoring as Cudo used Go in production for the first time.

At Cudo, I held multiple responsibilites from managing the Kubernetes clusters, infrastructure tools (e.g Prometheus/Grafana) and deployment mechanisms, as well as working directly with customers where they had more unusual deployments of our product into datacenter environments. As one of the engineers with a more in-depth understanding of Linux, networking and datacenter environments, I was able to provide insight and knowledge to other members of the team.

Technologies

  • Frontend: Vue, Vuex, React, Redux, Electron
  • Backend: Javascript (Loopback), Typescript, Go
  • Ops: GCP, Kubernetes, Ansible (Kubespray)

Freelancing & Consulting | November 2016 - Ongoing

Since late 2016 I’ve completed freelance projects for a variety of clients with a focus on quality delivery of a solution that meets the client’s needs. Projects are generally fullstack web applications, but I have also provided consulting to other developers on scaling their projects and deploying them onto cloud platforms.