Nathan Heller

Chicago, IL [email protected] • hellbhoy.net • github.com/helle253

Summary

Engineer with 8+ years building and modernizing commerce, loyalty, and operational systems supporting $15M+ in annual revenue. Delivered measurable gains in reliability, delivery speed, and infrastructure cost through platform consolidation, zero-downtime upgrades, cloud migration, and data replatforming across Rails, AWS, and web/mobile stacks.

Experience

Blue Bottle Coffee — Senior Software Engineer

Oakland, CA - 2019–Present

  • Led re-architecture of the mobile order-management backend, consolidating three services into a single Rails platform and reducing long-term operational complexity.
  • Replatformed 25,000+ subscriptions representing $12M+ in annual revenue into a new order-management platform through migration scripts and operational workflows.
  • Led infrastructure migration into a federated AWS account and moved ECS workloads to Fargate, cutting AWS spend 25% (~$36K/year).
  • Reduced CI/CD build times from ~30 to ~12 minutes and cut flaky pipeline failures 80% through GitHub Actions optimization, deployment simplification, and test-suite hardening.
  • Implemented observability and on-call tooling that reduced checkout incident detection from 1–2 hours to 15–20 minutes and reduced ticket-printing operational noise ~60%.
  • Delivered backend functionality for a cross-platform Flutter app launched in six months, contributing to 40% mobile revenue growth.

Abbott Laboratories — Software Verification Engineer

St. Paul, MN - 2017–2019

  • Authored automated verification scripts and internal QA tooling in a regulated environment, using Bash automation to accelerate manual validation workflows.

Projects

Agorascope

  • Built a production full-stack TypeScript application in a Yarn monorepo across React, Node/Express, PostgreSQL, and Cloudflare services.
  • Developed a distributed ingestion pipeline for article and feed processing with Cloudflare Workers, queue-based processing, and downstream embedding and indexing workflows.
  • Designed end-to-end type-safe APIs and shared types with Express, tRPC, Drizzle ORM, and Zod, and used coding agents to accelerate implementation across product and infrastructure work.

pi-peon

npm - Source Code

Published open-source extension for the Pi agent harness, enabling integration with OpenPeon and custom agent workflows.

Wikimedia Bot

Bluesky - Source Code

AWS Lambda + DynamoDB bot that posts high-quality Wikimedia Commons images to social platforms.

Core Skills

  • Languages: Ruby, TypeScript, SQL, Python, Dart, HTML/CSS
  • Backend: Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Express, REST APIs, tRPC, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB
  • Cloud / Infrastructure: AWS (ECS, Fargate, Lambda, CloudFormation), Cloudflare Workers, GitHub Actions, CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, observability, PagerDuty
  • Frontend / Mobile: React, Vite, Next.js, Flutter, Sanity
  • Integrations: Paytronix, Square, Yotpo, Algolia
  • Architecture / Delivery: platform consolidation, system integration, data migration, internal tooling, agentic development workflows, cross-functional technical leadership
  • AI / Agentic Development: Claude Code, Codex, Copilot, embeddings, prompt-driven workflows

Education

University of Minnesota — B.A. in Computer Science, 2017 German Minor