Nicholas Tarnek

Staff Software Engineer

Executive Summary & Candidate Overview

Nicholas is a highly skilled software engineer with a history of success in developing innovative solutions and driving product excellence. With expertise in technical leadership, architecture design, and system productionization, he brings valuable experience to any engineering team. Nicholas is now seeking new opportunities to leverage his skills and contribute to impactful projects in a dynamic environment.

Accomplishments and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Led the Express Drive Engineering team through two major rewrites of pricing and billing systems at Lyft, resulting in improved scalability and operational efficiency.
Designed and implemented zChannels features at Zynga, contributing to increased user engagement and reduced server costs.
Engineered a complete multi-colo Address Book BCP solution at Yahoo, ensuring global scalability and nearly zero downtime for the Address Book Platform.
Developed protocols and drivers for USB Mass Storage-based LeapFrog devices at Leapfrog Enterprises, enhancing device management and usability.
Designed and implemented a switch and wireless access point control layer at Lockdown Networks, integrating support for over 30% of the layer two switch market into the network access control product.

Work Experience

Staff Software Engineer Lyft | San Francisco, CA (October 2014 - April 2024)

Served as Technical Lead for Express Drive Engineering, defining optimal software architecture and leading major rewrites of pricing and billing systems.
Played a critical role in productionizing the Express Drive product and building software to facilitate the growth of the Lyft driver base.

Principal Software Engineer Zynga | San Francisco, CA (August 2012 - October 2014)

Designed and implemented zChannels features to retain and shift DAU between games, reducing server costs for the Games with Friends suite.
Developed a user registration and authentication system for zynga.com, contributing to the site's production readiness.

Senior Software Engineer Yahoo | Sunnyvale, CA (August 2008 - August 2012)

Led the Address Book Platform team, designing and deploying a multi-colo BCP solution with nearly zero downtime.
Developed a RESTful API for retrieving contact data, adopted by many third parties, and brought the Platform up to Yahoo! engineering standards.

Software Engineer Leapfrog Enterprises | Emeryville, CA (June 2006 - August 2008)

Designed protocols and drivers for USB Mass Storage-based LeapFrog devices, enhancing device management capabilities.
Developed embedded system modules and applications for the Fly Pen version 2.0, utilizing C++.

Software Engineer Lockdown Networks | Seattle, WA (May 2005 - January 2007)

Engineered a switch and wireless access point control layer for network access control products, integrating support for a significant portion of the switch market.
Provided customer support during product deployment, debugging networking issues and software flaws.

Location and Travel

Open to: Remote Roles, On-Site Roles.
Remote Roles: Open to discussing remote opportunities based on position and requirements.
Compensation Seeking: Competitive salary aligned with industry standards and role expectations.
Position Seeking: Senior Software Engineering roles.