Ahmad Abdo

Staff Software Engineer • Infrastructure & Developer Productivity

San Francisco, CA • github.com/murdinc • linkedin.com/in/ahmad972

technical expertise

Languages & Frameworks: Golang (7+ years - infrastructure automation, APIs, microservices, distributed systems), PHP, JavaScript, Python, Bash, SQL
Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS (multi-region deployments, EC2, Auto Scaling Groups, Systems Manager, S3, RDS, CloudFront, Lambda), Docker, Kubernetes, Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), Distributed Systems, Active Directory, VMware, VPN Technologies
Content Delivery & Caching: Akamai CDN, Fastly CDN, CloudFront, Varnish, Memcached - design and optimization for high-traffic sites
Data & Backend Systems: Elasticsearch, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, Vector Databases, Production LLM Systems, RAG Architectures, Data Processing Pipelines, REST APIs
DevOps & Operations: Custom CLI Development, Deployment Automation, CI/CD Pipelines, Monitoring & Alerting (Nagios, Icinga), Incident Response, Disaster Recovery, Performance Optimization
Security & Compliance: PCI Compliance, SAS70 Standards, Security Controls, Audit Procedures, High-Availability System Design

Software engineer with 13+ years building developer productivity platforms, internal tooling, and scalable distributed systems. Led 3+ large-scale infrastructure projects including datacenter-to-cloud migrations, custom deployment platforms, and intelligent automation tools serving editorial teams. Deep expertise in designing and operating reliable systems at scale, with focus on infrastructure automation, developer experience, and backend data processing systems. Passionate about building infrastructure that amplifies developer velocity, system reliability, and enables teams to ship faster.

experience

Snopes.com / TVTropes.org

Director of Engineering

2019 – Present
  • Built infrastructure management platform: Authored and maintain core infrastructure tooling (Crusher2 - open source on GitHub) used daily by engineering team for automated deployments, configuration management, and incident response across distributed AWS infrastructure serving 22M monthly visitors.
  • Developed intelligent automation systems: Designed and deployed production backend services using LLMs and RAG to process user submissions into structured data within custom CMS, significantly reducing manual editorial effort through automated data extraction and classification.
  • Developer productivity platform: Created secure development infrastructure supporting rapid iteration on internal tools and backend automation services. Built APIs and data processing pipelines for content workflows.
  • System reliability & operations: Designed and implemented comprehensive monitoring, alerting, and automated recovery procedures. Maintain high-availability infrastructure across multiple properties with focus on performance optimization and uptime.
  • Team leadership: Manage engineering team maintaining owned and client sites. Set technical strategy for infrastructure evolution and established operational best practices including postmortems and incident response protocols.

San Francisco Synthworks

Founder & Electronic Engineer

2022 – Present
  • Design and manufacture circuit boards to modify and upgrade vintage analog synthesizers and drum machines.
  • Provide repair and upgrade services for a major synthesizer manufacturer.

Salon.com

Director of Engineering (2018-2024), Backend Developer (2014-2018), Systems Engineer (2011-2014)

2011 – 2024
  • Led datacenter-to-cloud migration: Architected and executed complete infrastructure migration from two bare-metal servers (that went down nightly for backups) to distributed AWS platform spanning three regions globally. Designed auto-scaling groups, multi-AZ redundancy, and infrastructure-as-code, achieving zero-downtime cutover while traffic more than doubled to 10M+ monthly visitors.
  • Built deployment & operations platform: Developed custom infrastructure management tooling and dev-ops tools for automated deployments, configuration management, remote development, and disaster recovery. Dramatically reduced deployment time while improving reliability.
  • Backend development & API design: Rewrote JSON API supporting mobile and web applications. Created internal editorial tools and APIs that streamlined content workflows, reducing manual effort and improving editor productivity.
  • Content delivery optimization: Engineered Akamai and Fastly CDN solutions for content caching and media delivery. Achieved major decreases in response time while scaling to handle significant traffic spikes.
  • System architecture & reliability: Designed and implemented monitoring (Nagios), alerting, and incident response systems. Improved system reliability to achieve record uptime levels.
  • Engineering team leadership: Hired, trained, and managed engineers. Established technical standards, code review practices, and operational procedures that enabled rapid iteration on infrastructure and internal tools.

beyond code

Analog synthesizer designer

Music producer and composer