Herval Freire

We're building the future of productivity for Facebook Engineers by providing instant cloud-based development environments, tailor-made to make coding/testing/debugging fast, efficient and FUN. We support the end-to-end experience of on demand development servers, from IDE integration to scaling infrastructure.

Drove strategy and aligning 4 squads on the Developer Platform mission, focused on driving costs down while improving productivity for all WeWork engineers.

As part of the Developer Platform organization, my role was to manage a set of teams focused on building a scalable, multi-cloud, secure and easy to use Kubernetes-backed platform for all 1200+ engineers at WeWork. My teams included Observability (a SRE/SWE team, focused on operating all our monitoring/logging/tracing stack), Developer Tools (building tooling to simplify the utilization of the underlying Kubernetes infrastructure), Messaging (email gateway for transactional and marketing email) and Cloud Management (employee onboarding, resource allocation, automated management of SaaS and internal tooling access control).

Led the Core Reliability Tools team, responsible for Twitter's reliability stack (stress testing, microservices performance tooling, hardware and software remediation automation). Grew the team from 1 to 7 engineers and built tooling that automates hundreds of thousands of hours of manual operations per year. Defined the roadmap, hired and managed the newly created Capacity Planning team. Responsible for managing hardware capacity, supply chain and planning process at Twitter scale, and built tooling that saves the company millions of dollars a month in CAPEX. One of my teams was awarded the "Focus Award" for best execution in 2019.

Tech lead of the Social Graph team, one of the 3 core services that handle the majority of Twitter's traffic. Researched, planned and coordinated resource optimization efforts, proposed and executed major code improvements and developed new services to improve scalability and fault-tolerance of the Social Graph. Led the development of Twitter's profile migration pipeline and contributed to performance improvement projects that led to a 30% reduction in operational costs on multiple services. Actively contributed to Presto (a SQL engine for Hadoop) and Apache Zeppelin, including many contributions back-ported to the open source project.

Built the services that power the majority of traffic on SoundCloud site & apps - activity feed and social graph. Developed and maintained microservices in Scala (mainly using the Scala/Finagle stack), Ruby, Javascript, and contributed to the mobile app (Objective-C). Product and Team Lead in different projects around the Stream (activity feed) and growth-related products (notifications, email engagement, Google Cast support). Conducted proofs of concept of new technologies on SoundCloud stack, including replacing legacy Rest/JSON services with Thrift and enabling the replacement of old monolithic services into microservices owned by different teams.

Ruby on Rails, Javascript and Objective-C developer, worked in high visibility web and iOS apps for startups and Fortune 500 companies. Main responsibilities also included mentoring teams into agile practices and TDD, helping clients with their hiring and training efforts.

Responsible for all initial functionality of ISSIntel (issintel.com.br), an e-gov system for Brazilian Electronic Invoices. Analysis and implementation of several different business areas of the system as well as infrastructure work and reports (Ruby/Rails, with heavy usage of MongoDB's map/reduce).

Through the years, I acted as an independent consultant on many different projects and startups. My specialties include migrating legacy systems, improving codebases (large refactorings, rearchitecting for scalability), training & hiring teams and coaching on best practices. Relevant clients include: - sonicpayments.com (2015) - cryptocurrency payment integration with multiple providers - invisionapp.com (2015) - developed the first iteration of Dropbox sync and new generation asset upload pipeline - officedrop.com (previously pixily.com, acquired by Neat, 2012) - worked on the first version of the system (a Ruby on Rails frontend and a Java backend for OCR/document processing) - palpiteros.com (2012), the leading soccer social network in Brazil - led architecture of the first version of the site, including live chat and integration with real time game stats; staffed the initial engineering team - biggerpockets.com (2008), one of the biggest real estate social network/forums in the US - shotcode.com (2007), a proprietary barcode format for low resolution cameras with mobile and web support - voxblue.com.br (2004) - implemented the mailing & CMS platform, a JavaEE system (Jboss/Tomcat/James) for email marketing manamenent, used by high volume clients in Latin America - Intermundi Travel Management (2003), travel agency/integrator from Brazil - migration from a legacy Informix system to JavaEE

Developed and launched Novelo, a Social Shopping experience for Facebook & Twiter. Invited to Startup Chile's first round (2010) and finalist on TechStars NY. Raised $40k, grew the product to over 100.000 monthly active users, positioning it as the 3rd most popular Social Commerce app on Facebook.

Launched BlooBox.tv – a Digital Signage service that allows business users to setup and operate their own indoor TV networks with an easy to use control panel and a one-click install runtime. Besides leading development, also oversaw sales and product placement strategies, hiring, fund raising and related tasks. Successfully sold the company operations to our biggest customer by the end of 2011.

Developed a reference implementation of server-side JavaEE software and embedded software for a Javachip-based handheld auditing device, in use by Casa da Moeda do Brasil and other government/industrial customers. Oversaw the deployment, equipment procurement, server configuration and back-end development of a high load production tracking system for the pharmaceutical and tabacco industries, handling billions of transactions a day. Also participated on the purchasing process, installation and configuration of Oracle servers and large server racks.