Aaron Evans

Software Engineer with experience building, scaling, and operating complex systems. Currently leading revenue initiatives at Cedar AI, developing software for the railroad industry. Previously spent a decade at Amazon (AWS EC2) focused on EC2 deployment safety and monitoring. Passionate about operational excellence and maintainability.

Experience

Cedar AI

2021 - Present
  • Build and launched a system enabling railroads to integrate with the Interline Settlement System (ISS) and Rate EDI Network (REN), growing it from an initial prototype to a 250K+ LOC production system.
  • Built a comprehensive test harness for validating the ISS system without access to a real ISS system or other carrier messages in a pre-production integration environment.
  • Created a novel approach to processing X12 EDI using protobufs. Brought all of the benefits of protobufs (e.g. declarative model, multi-language bindings, efficient encoding) to the ancient X12 EDI format.
  • Led the migration of services from AWS Lambda to gRPC/Kubernetes by establishing build and deployment infrastructure.
  • Designed and implemented a data ingestion pipeline in Go for railcar equipment data.

Tableau

2020 - 2021
  • Owned web services managing Tableau Online Site lifecycle operations.
  • Defined a target architecture for transitioning from a monolithic system to a workflow-based orchestration system.

Amazon

2015 - 2020
  • Owned and maintained the customer-facing the EC2 DescribeInstanceStatus API, one of the most frequently called and most critical APIs in EC2, along with its underlying data collection and ingestion pipeline.
  • Resolved a critical scaling bottleneck that required rearchitecting parts of the EC2 instance health data ingestion process.
  • Led key improvements to the EC2 hypervisor deployment process, reducing customer-impacting outages by proposing, gaining leadership buy-in, and coordinating implementation across multiple teams.
  • Conducted 1,200+ technical interviews as an Amazon Bar Raiser, playing a key role in maintaining high hiring standards.

Two Sigma Investments

2014 - 2015
  • Worked on an alpha capture system.
  • Re-designed and implemented login and session management across multiple sites.
  • Automated a release and deployment process using Ansible. Took a manual, multi-step process and transformed it into an automated, single-step process.

Amazon

2009 - 2014
  • Designed and implemented a system to automate multi-region tasks across AWS
  • Lead/founding developer on a team that built systems to standardize the infrastructure hardware ordering process. Helped grow the team from 3 to 15 developers in a year.
  • Designed and implemented RESTful web services for Amazon's server provisioning system.
  • Added support for EC2 capacity into the server provisioning system to allow teams to adopt AWS and EC2.
  • On-call support - carried a pager and was first-responder for critical services. Involved in various large scale events.

Education

Master of Arts and Science, Computer Science
Bachelor of Science and Engineering, Computer Engineering