Colton Shepard

Professional Geek

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Enterprise Products
        Languages: Python, Bash, SQL
        Databases: PostgreSQL (Citus and single-server), BigQuery
Pipelines: Airflow, Fivetran, WAL decoding
        Cloud: GCP, Azure, AWS, Terraform, Ansible

Public Appearances
        
Talk: Loading at HyperScale: Advanced Data Import Techniques for Citus
        Talk: JSONB Tricks: Operators, Indexes, and When (Not) To Use it. (video here)
        Blog: Postgres Tips: How to convert 2 Billion Rows to Bigint with Citus
        Talk: San Francisco Bay Area PostgreSQL Users Group: May 2020 Featured Speaker
        Significant contributor to Azure PostgreSQL labs

Notable Capabilties
        Petabyte-scale serving layer databases and multi-petabyte data lakes
        Complex low-downtime large-scale application and database migrations
        Server automation, management, monitoring, alerting, and scaling
        Multi-cloud massive scale data pipelines
        Product evangelism and developer onboarding

Buzzword Compliance
        Automation, alerting, full stack, UX, microservices
        Cloud hosting, enterprise support, high-availability, business intelligence, AAS, IAAS
        Data pipelines, distributed databases, change data capture
        Massive-scale data, petabyte-scale, analtyics, multitenancy, HTAP
        SaaS, devops, mobile, security, reporting, emergent features
        Massive-scale data, analtyics, multitenancy, HTAP, data lakes, OLAP

Work Experience

Senior Software Engineer   May 2021-present
TRM Labs
        Design, build, scale, and run data pipeline and infrastructure
        Distributed Postgres (Citus) serving layer with over 1PB of disk
        Airflow-orchestrated BigQuery data pipeline with 10+ TB of daily updates
        Operational tooling, alerting, systems design, training, and maintenance
        Serving data for regulatory compliance and forensic investigations

Solutions Engineer / Software Engineer II     May 2018- May 2021
Microsoft, Inc (formerly Citus Data)
        Solutions Engineer for Citus Data pre-acquisition
        Software Engineer II for Microsoft post-acquisition
        Guided customers through building and deploying 500TB or larger PostgreSQL clusters
        Performed low- to zero- downtime cross-architecture migrations at the multi-TB scale
        Built migration, monitoring, update, analysis tools, and best practices
        Product management, account management, community outreach roles

Applications Engineer                         June 2016 - May 2018
Alarm.com (formerly iControl Networks)
        Applications Engineer updating firmware for ADT security systems
        Built processes and tools for device monitoring, analytics, and upgrades
        Production firmware deployments for 1M+ systems and 5M+ devices
        Built monitoring, update, analysis, and reporting tools
        Analyzed stability, responsiveness, and business intelligence metrics

Tier II Support Engineer                        March 2015 - June 2016
Accellion, Inc.
        Maintained and troubleshot on-premise and hosted appliances
        Support, documentation, maintenance, and tools for managed systems

Technical Support Manager                 June 2008 - March 2015
Sutherland Global Services, Blackboard program
        Tier 1/1.5 Technical Support for Blackboard system admins