Ahmad Abdo
Staff Infrastructure Engineer • Developer Productivity & Internal Tools
technical expertise
Infrastructure & Platform:
AWS (EC2, Auto Scaling Groups, Systems Manager, S3, RDS, CloudFront), Docker, Infrastructure as Code, Distributed Systems, Auto-scaling, Load Balancing
Developer Productivity:
Custom CLI Tools, Deployment Automation, Infrastructure Management Tools, DevEx, API Design, Real-time Monitoring, Incident Response
Languages:
Golang (infrastructure automation, APIs, AI/ML, 7+ years), PHP & JavaScript, Bash, SQL
Operations & Reliability:
System Architecture, Performance Optimization, Disaster Recovery, Monitoring & Alerting, Security
AI/ML Infrastructure:
Production LLM Systems, RAG, Vector Databases, Embeddings
Infrastructure 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 AI-powered internal tools serving editorial teams. Deep expertise in designing and operating reliable systems at scale, with recent focus on productionizing AI/ML workloads. Passionate about building infrastructure that amplifies developer velocity, system reliability, and enables teams to ship faster.
experience
Snopes.com / TVTropes.org
Director of Engineering & Engineer
- Build infrastructure management platform: Author 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.
- Architect AI/ML infrastructure: Design and deploy production LLM-powered internal tools within custom CMS to process user submissions into structured data for editorial workflows, significantly reducing manual effort.
- Developer productivity platform: Create secure development infrastructure supporting rapid iteration on internal tools and public-facing AI products (FactBot RAG system, Story Generator).
- System reliability & operations: Maintain high-availability infrastructure for multiple properties (Snopes.com, TVTropes.org - 22M monthly visitors). Implement monitoring, alerting, and automated recovery procedures.
- Team leadership: Manage engineering team maintaining owned and client sites. Set technical strategy for infrastructure evolution and establish operational best practices including postmortems and incident response protocols.
San Francisco Synthworks
Founder & Electronic Engineer
- 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 & Engineer
- Led datacenter-to-cloud migration: Architected and executed complete infrastructure migration from physical colocation to distributed AWS platform. Designed auto-scaling groups, multi-AZ redundancy, and infrastructure-as-code, achieving zero-downtime cutover for 10M monthly visitors.
- Built deployment & operations platform: Developed custom infrastructure management tooling for automated deployments, configuration management, and disaster recovery. Dramatically reduced deployment time while improving reliability.
- Developer productivity infrastructure: Created internal editorial tools and APIs that streamlined content workflows, reducing manual effort and improving editor productivity.
- System architecture & reliability: Designed and implemented monitoring, alerting, and incident response systems. Improved system reliability while scaling to handle significant traffic spikes.
- 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
Music producer and composer
Aspiring synthesizer designer