dave van.

senior software engineer on the acuity platform team at squarespace. backend systems, developer tooling, and platform engineering across a fleet of services.

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01

experience

chronological · most-recent first
may 2022—present
remote · maryland

senior software engineer, acuity platform

squarespace

building go-based SOA on EKS that powers 5 production services. author of 19 ADRs/RFCs spanning architecture, observability, and incident response.

platform architecture & infrastructure

  • architected the production backstage template (EKS, CI/CD, monitoring) and foundational ESO secrets layer for the acuity SOA platform — reached GA, now powers 5 production go services.
  • spearheaded the opinionated go service template and local-dev tooling giving product teams a repeatable path from `service init` to staging deploy.
  • productionized the SOA DB provisioning lambda, drove ULID adoption as the primary-key standard, authored the foundational service architecture RFC.

developer experience & enablement

  • spearheaded service creation day across 2 sessions for 17 engineers from 8 product teams — 94.1% reported increased platform confidence, 100% rated experiment-service creation as easy, walkthrough rated 4.47/5.
  • partnered with 5 SOA service teams (email unsubscribe — first production SOA service — commerce, text customization, forms, waitlist) as embedded technical advisor.
  • mentored a new hire and an internal transfer onto the SOA platform; sole go reviewer for the initial acuity-commerce service.

observability & operational excellence

  • architected acuity's tracing standardization via a custom go instrumentation library and the acuity custom instrumentation ADR — now followed by every SOA team.
  • established the datadog champions program — a network of team-level datadog experts built through bi-weekly deep dives, labs, and Q&A.
  • migrated the statsig event-log queue to a go-backed sidecar, decoupling event delivery from monolith deploys.

security & incident response

  • deployed AWS WAF targeted bot control during a live spam incident — eliminated ~25% above-normal traffic, rule promoted to permanent block mode.
  • spearheaded incident tabletop exercises for 37 cross-functional responders — +1.48 avg competency gain (2.93 → 4.41), 9.03/10 exercise effectiveness, 100% rated overall quality ≥ 4/5.
  • architected acuity's dedicated transactional email domain (route53/ACM/ALB + sendgrid with SPF/DKIM/DMARC), isolating client traffic and protecting sender reputation.
// selected ADRs / RFCs · 19 authored, 2022–2026
acuity service architectureSOA secrets management (ESO)ULID for SOA primary keysAWS WAF targeted bot controlacuity custom instrumentationincident tabletop exercisesdatadog champions
// stack
goaws (eks, lambda, sns/sqs)kubernetesterraformdatadogaurora mysql
jan 2020—may 2022
fulton, MD

engineering manager · tech lead · senior software engineer

kion
  • architected an AWS EC2 reserved-instance dashboard tracking usage across many accounts sharing reservations — enabled finance teams to right-size commitments (go / angular 2+ / mysql).
  • productionized a cloud compliance scanning feature surfacing policy violations across customer AWS accounts.
  • contributed to the cloud custodian open-source project (python) — unblocked azure govcloud support for enterprise customers.
// stack
goangularpythonmysqlaws
mar 2014—jan 2020
rockville, MD

software engineer sr.

lockheed martin · space systems
  • engineered PHP application features for space systems mission tooling, supporting cross-program operations at scale.
  • authored technical writing and security review documentation (HP fortify) adopted across the program for compliance.
// stack
phpmysqlhp fortify
// B.S. Computer Science · UMBC · December 2013
02

skills

what i reach for
languages
gophppythontypescriptsql
cloud & platform
awsekslambdasns/sqskuberneteshelmargocdterraformdrone cibackstage
observability & incident
datadogpagerdutyrootlySLO / MTTD / MTTR
ai tooling
claude codecursorcustom skills & slash commandsMCPs
patterns & infra
SOAmicroservicesevent-drivenRESTdocker
email & identity
sendgridSPF / DKIM / DMARCstripetwilio
03

selected work

side projects
7 projects
shippedgo · react · neon postgres

beta cards is a trading-card / RPG-character-sheet for climbers: one identity, a stat card per discipline, and XP earned by logging real sends. there is no public feed, no search, no directory — you see someone's card only if they hand it to you, and that's enforced at every read path in the API rather than just hidden in the UI.

go + react on a strictly-$0 stack — cloud run, neon postgres, cloudflare pages, all scale-to-zero. it was also the experiment: 265 PRs merged in five weeks, written almost entirely by agents running a seven-phase pipeline i built. the interesting part isn't that agents wrote it, it's what had to be true for that to hold — decisions locked in ADRs, a codegen-drift gate in CI, and 54 real-browser playwright specs against the real API, because mocked tests let wire contracts drift and agents never notice.

live ↗
// merged PRs265
// hosting$0/mo
// shipped2026
04

contact

for recruiters, collaborators, or anyone shipping something interesting

open to conversations about senior backend roles — happy to talk shop about distributed systems, developer tooling, or side projects.

i'll get back to most messages within a day.

email meview resume ↗