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Nat Welch

Site Reliability Engineer

nat@natwelch.com +1 707 799 8675

Based in Beacon, NY, I am a Software Developer, Technical Lead and Manager. I have been writing software for the web professionally since 2005. I have two passions in software. The first is building beautiful tools for people to share knowledge, advice and experience. Second is creating reliable infrastructure that is easy to use and maintain. Outside of building systems, I love growing team culture and helping folks grow in their careers.

Outside of the tech-world, I am an Eagle Scout. I enjoy contributing to open source projects, writing, reading, fishing, listening to music and wandering through cities and countrysides. I maintain a personal website at natwelch.com.

Experience

Author & Speaker

Open Source Developer

I am the former lead of the open source project fog-google (~75 million installs), am the lead maintainer on danluu/post-mortems and also contribute to a bunch of other small projects.

Nat Welch Consulting

Sole Proprietor 2016 to present.

Laurel (fka Time by Ping)

Engineering Manager November 2024 to Present.

Principal Software Engineer, Cloud Platform Lead November 2020 to November 2024.

Google

Senior Site Reliability Engineer November 2018 to November 2020.

First Look Media

Lead Site Reliability Engineer March 2017 to October 2018.

Migrated three services from Colos to AWS. Maintained Terraform config and AWS for company. Improved deploy reliability and automation, wrote new features for most services and refactored entire ECS infrastructure. Mentored engineers around infrastructure, reliability and architecture design. Automated capacity planning, started a postmortem culture, and improved performance and reliability of our CMS platform. Wrote Go and Node.js with extensive work with a GraphQL API.

Hillary for America

Staff Site Reliability Engineer January 2016 through December 2016.

Promoted reliability in both our web serving infrastructure and data analytics pipelines. Built tools and infrastructure to prevent humans from making mistakes while sleep deprived. Survived constant attacks with minimal external visible downtime the entire campaign.

littleBits Electronics

Technical Lead August 2015 to January 2016.

Google

Site Reliability Engineer III April 2012 to March 2015.

Software Engineer II August 2011 to April 2012.

I worked on Punchd, Google Offers and Google Local.

Punchd

Software Developer January 2011 to September 2012.

Maintained backend app. Migrated to AWS. Acquired by Google.

iFixit

Software Developer April 2009 to April 2011.

Built and launched Answers. Greatly improved wiki and image processors. Wrote the first version of the oManual specification.

Pseudoweb Contracting

Software Developer 2005 to 2009.

I was a software developer contractor dealing mainly in web design and Linux systems management.

Adobe Systems Incorporated

Dreamweaver Quality Engineering Intern Summer 2007 and 2008.

BSA Camp Oljato

Nature Director Summer 2006.

Camp Counselor Summer 2002, 2003 and 2004.

Education

Computer Science, B.S. California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. Fall 2006 - Spring 2011.

Recurser Recurse Center, New York. Spring 2015