Caroline Dawson

S

VP of Engineering at Spindle Works | ex-KPMG

Spindle Works
Seattle, WA · PT (UTC-8)
13+ years experience
Stanford GSB
English
Hiring
Messaging unavailable

Overview

20 years in software engineering, the last 2 at Spindle Works, where I lead the public API team. Shipped a rewrite that took build times from 28 minutes to under 4. Most at home with Redis and Django. I speak at conferences a couple of times a year.

Good reasons to reach out
  • Candidates for the role I'm hiring for
  • Speaking or podcast invitations
Please don't message about
  • SEO and link-building offers
  • Requests to fix your code for free

Travels often; replies within 48 hours

Skills
Redisrate limitingPythonDjangoRESTPostgreSQL
HiringHiring for a role
closes in 3 months

Building out public API at Spindle Works: security engineers wanted in Seattle

Role
Security engineer
Level
Senior
Type
Full-time
Work mode
On-site
Compensation
$154k-$191k + equity
Team
Public API, 15 people
Start
Within two months
Must have
Production experience with PostgreSQL Production experience with REST Good judgment about what not to build
Process
Intro call, technical deep dive, team chat

Comp $150k-$289k. One technical chat and a paid trial day. Message me with one thing you shipped that you're proud of.

Seattle, WArate limitingredisdjango
Open

Experience

  1. VP of Engineering
    Nov 2024 - Present
    Spindle Works · 1 yr 11 mo · Full-time · Seattle, WA
    • Brought on-call pages for public API down from 23 a week to 2.
    • Grew the public API team from 6 to 39 engineers.
    • Led the migration of 53 services to REST.
  2. Director of Engineering
    Feb 2022 - Nov 2024
    KPMG · 2 yr 9 mo · Full-time · Seattle, WA
    • Grew the public API team from 3 to 30 engineers.
    • Shipped a rewrite that took build times from 30 minutes to under 5.
  3. Backend Engineer
    Sep 2019 - Jan 2022
    Zoom · 2 yr 4 mo · Full-time · Seattle, WA
    • Brought on-call pages for public API down from 21 a week to 2.
    • Moved 93% of public API traffic off a legacy monolith without a customer-facing incident.
  4. Principal Engineer
    Jan 2017 - Sep 2019
    Workday · 2 yr 8 mo · Full-time · Seattle, WA
    • Led or co-led 32 investments, 8 of them now at Series B or later.
  5. Backend Engineer
    Sep 2013 - Jan 2017
    Oracle · 3 yr 4 mo · Full-time · Seattle, WA
    • Shipped 13 launches on the public API team without a rollback.

Projects

Write-up: API platforms in practice
2023

A long-form guide to API platforms for people starting out.

Open-source Django toolkit
2022

A small library for API platforms that 485 developers star on GitHub.

References

No references yet.

Education

  1. Stanford GSB
    MBA, Business Administration
    2007 - 2009
  2. University of Washington
    BS, Computer Science
    2001 - 2005

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