Rachel Goldberg Principal Engineer
San Mateo, CA • rachel.goldberg@gmail.com • +1 650-555-0142
Profile Summary
- Principal Engineer with 12 years of experience shaping cloud data platforms across data warehousing, query execution, and storage engines, specializing in multi-team technical strategy, force-multiplier engineering, and senior-IC mentorship.
- Solid technical background across languages (Go, Rust), system patterns (distributed systems, event-driven), cloud (AWS), and data and messaging (PostgreSQL, Kafka) with strong fundamentals in trade-off thinking, written design proposals, and a deep code base.
- Deep expertise in multi-team technical strategy, system design at scale, force-multiplier tooling, and senior-engineer mentorship, relied on for written design proposals and design-review facilitation that ship coherent, durable, and well-instrumented systems.
- Engaged collaborator working cross-functionally with Engineering, Product, and Infrastructure leadership in senior-IC-track engineering orgs, contributing to architecture review boards, exec trade-off forums, and post-incident retrospectives with a pragmatic, ownership-first mindset.
- Senior IC who raises the technical bar and protects a culture of written design rigor and on-call discipline through design reviews and code-review coaching, while running staff-engineer cohort sessions and authoring widely adopted RFCs and paved-road templates.
Technical Skills
- Languages:
- Go, Rust, Java, Python, C++, SQL, TypeScript
- Systems & Patterns:
- Distributed systems, event-driven, microservices, query engines, columnar storage, sharding, CRDTs
- Cloud & Platform:
- AWS (EKS, Lambda, S3, Aurora), GCP, Kubernetes, Terraform, service mesh, OpenTelemetry
- Data & Messaging:
- PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Cassandra, Redis, Kafka, Pulsar, Apache Iceberg, Apache Arrow
- Engineering Practice:
- Design proposals, RFC authorship, design reviews, on-call leadership, incident command, code-review culture
- Technical Leadership:
- Multi-team strategy, staff/principal mentorship, hiring loops, technical-ladder calibration, exec-level briefings
- Observability & Reliability:
- SLOs, error budgets, distributed tracing, profiling (pprof, perf), chaos engineering, postmortems
Education
Carnegie Mellon University
M.S. in Computer Science
Work Experience
Snowflake
Principal Engineer
- Own multi-year technical strategy for the Warehouse Runtime serving 9,000+ enterprise accounts, shaping direction across query execution, columnar storage, and data sharing as the senior IC for 180+ engineers and 12 teams.
- Lead system design at scale around a vectorized query engine built on Apache Arrow, sharded storage with cross-region read replicas, and back-pressure on the planner-to-executor path, anchoring 40+ services at 220k queries/min steady state.
- Run cross-team technical leadership through a cross-team RFC review, shared design office hours, and an unblock-the-room operating rhythm, aligning 7 teams on a multi-quarter roadmap and shipping a GA cutover on schedule with zero customer-visible regressions.
- Built force-multiplier tooling, including a shared query library, a paved-road template for new services, and a benchmark harness wired into CI, adopted by 9 teams and cutting new-service ramp-up time from 3 days to 4 hours.
- Stay deep where it matters, leading incident response on the most consequential outages, including a metadata-service outage that required a from-scratch failover redesign, with mean recovery time on tier-1 incidents going from 42 min to 6 min across the runtime fleet.
- Raise engineering excellence through SLO-driven review, a shared coding-standards doc, and a code-review rubric used in design reviews and on-call handoffs, lifting tier-1 availability from 99.92% to 99.99% over four quarters.
- Act as the senior technical advisor to engineering leadership, running a quarterly tech brief for VP and CTO, defending the 3-year platform bet and shaping hiring rubrics that landed 8 senior-IC hires onto the runtime team.
Square
Senior Software Engineer
- Built influence without authority through written design proposals and design-review presence across the payments org, including a payments idempotency standard adopted by 22 services and folded into the new-service launch checklist.
- Ran a sustained mentorship practice via weekly 1:1 mentorship, design-doc coaching, and code-review feedback for cross-team engineers, mentoring 14 engineers and supporting 6 promotions to senior or staff.
- Owned high-stakes technical decisions through weighted trade-off doc authorship and structured option analysis, including a datastore migration that shipped in production with zero rollbacks and is still the reference doc cited in the team's design handbook.
- Partnered cross-functionally with Payments, Risk, and Platform Engineering teams across 5 product surfaces on roadmap trade-offs, on-call handoffs, and senior-engineer hiring rubrics, authoring 11 platform RFCs that shaped the org's technical-design standard.