Nicholas Meyer

San Francisco, CA . nmeyer@alumni.caltech.edu

I studied physics and computer science at Caltech (B.S. 2018). I am currently a Senior Software Engineer on the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team at Academia.edu - but my background is overall that of a generalist, with experience spanning aspects of cloud infrastructure to full-stack web development.

Experience

Senior Software Engineer (SRE)

Member of the Site Reliability Engineering team. Ensure reliable and efficient operation of the site (proactive arm of work), as well as respond to incidents through on-call rotation (reactive arm of work). Primary recent focus has been optimization and modernization of the data layer, in particular our PostgreSQL databases. SRE team member since Q3 2019, SRE team lead and Senior Software Engineer since Q2/Q3 2021.

2019 - Present

Full-Stack Software Engineer

Member of the Core Product team, the team in charge of growing and maintaining engagement among monthly active users. Deliver improvements to site features such as the News Feed at all layers of the stack, using technologies from React to Ruby on Rails.

2018 - 2019

Web Developer and Administrator

System adminstrator for servers used by Blacker House at Caltech. Maintained and added features to site and services. Assisted Caltech Information Management Systems and Services (IMSS) in resolving network security issues and student issues with Caltech's email or web services.

2015 - 2018

LIGO research intern

Worked in a small team to improve part of the LIGO data analysis pipeline. Evaluated regression methods and tuned hyperparameters to predict properties of merging binary black holes.

Delivered proof of concept module demonstrating an improved fitting routine using Gaussian Processes and Decision Trees.

2017 Report and Final Paper, 2016 Report and Final Paper

Summer 2017, Summer 2016

Summer Research Intern

Fixed bugs and added features to simulation code (written in C) to simulate instrumental behavior of the Planck satellite. Added a python front end.

Summer 2015

Science Olympiad Volunteer

Determined event rules and coordinated with other volunteers for the Game On event in the Science Olympiad competition for high school teams. Gave informational presentations at workshops for coaches.

2015 - 2018

Education

California Institute of Technology

Bachelor of Science
Physics, Computer Science (minor)

GPA: 3.9

September 2014 - June 2018

Skills

Tools, Platforms & Languages
  • Terraform
  • Ansible
  • AWS EC2, VPC, Route53, RDS, ECS
  • Ruby, Rails
  • Python

Unix Tools Experience
  • Linux (various distros)
  • Compiling kernel from source
  • Bash
  • Git
    • I like to use git/vcs as a database to inform myself of the reasoning behind the current state of a codebase
    • And a correlary of this is that when I check in changes, I think of myself as the combination of the database and DBA, balancing velocity against change history readability

Interests

(a non-exhaustive list)

  • Factorio
  • Security
  • Linux distros
  • Writing personal notes down to give my 6-months-into-the-future self a fighting chance at understanding any of my current thoughts, bullet journaling
  • Sometimes I like to code up simulations of well known interview questions.