Pierce Staab
Senior Software Engineer — Backend · Platform · SRE
Summary
Senior software engineer with 10+ years building and operating distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and event-driven platforms at scale. Specializes in the intersection of backend engineering, platform reliability, and developer tooling — with a track record of owning complex, cross-cutting initiatives end-to-end from Terraform module to production service. Comfortable moving between infrastructure and application layers, and driving systemic quality improvements across large codebases.
Technical Skills
cloud / infra
container platform
observability
backend
data
security
ci/cd
testing
Experience
Field Nation — Minneapolis, MN
Workforce management platform connecting businesses with skilled field technicians
Senior Software Engineer 2025 – Present
- Leading a cross-team event-driven architecture initiative (EDA): designed bounded-context schema registry in Protobuf with multi-language binding generation; implemented Kafka consumers in NestJS microservices; wired outbox pattern events from the PHP monolith across bounded contexts
- Implemented dynamic resource authorization layer in NestJS using custom decorators and guards, enabling fine-grained work-order-scoped access control across microservices
- Drove PHPStan static analysis adoption in the PHP monolith from zero to level 2 compliance, eliminating hundreds of type errors and establishing a continuous type-safety baseline for the codebase
- Proactively used Datadog error tracking to identify and fix production bugs in the monolith — surfacing issues such as read-replica connection leaks causing silent write failures, null pointer TypeErrors from third-party integrations, and session deserialization failures — without requiring incident reports or user escalations
Senior SRE / Platform Engineer 2020 – 2025
- Designed and built a reusable Terraform module that standardized Kubernetes cluster provisioning: automates VPC peering with the data plane, bidirectional routing, and security group rules for all data services (RDS MySQL/Postgres, Redis, Kafka/MSK, RabbitMQ, MongoDB, OpenSearch, EFS) — making new cluster creation a repeatable, self-service process
- Managed the full fleet of Kubernetes clusters day to day, maintaining both legacy hand-provisioned clusters and the new modularized Terraform-provisioned clusters in parallel while migrating workloads toward the standardized module
- Provisioned and operated multiple kOps-managed Kubernetes clusters on AWS; managed cluster services including Prometheus, Datadog, Grafana, cert-manager, Emissary Ingress, and FluxCD via Helm and Kustomize
- Administered core AWS infrastructure across EC2, RDS, S3, VPCs, and ECR, along with the underlying networking — subnets, route tables, VPC peering, and security group rules — required to connect compute, data, and container registries into a secure, cohesive platform
- Owned Datadog observability for the core platform: manually instrumented distributed tracing in the PHP monolith (no auto-instrumentation support), injected trace IDs into logs for log-to-trace correlation, configured database monitoring on key RDS and Aurora instances, and ensured DBM traces were linked to APM spans — providing end-to-end visibility from HTTP request through query execution
- Resolved Aurora connection exhaustion by engineering custom RDS parameter groups to increase max connections, unblocking platform scalability
- Built and maintained self-hosted GitHub Actions runners on Kubernetes; authored two org-wide reusable composite actions — one for Docker build and ECR push with semver/SHA tagging for dev and prod, and one for Helm chart linting (helm lint, ct lint, kube-linter) and S3 chart publishing — standardizing CI/CD pipelines across the engineering organization
- Participated in the on-call rotation, responding to production incidents: triaged and remediated infrastructure-level issues directly, and routed microservice-specific failures to the owning product teams — driving fast resolution and clear ownership
Software Engineer 2015 – 2020
- Assumed acting lead and completed delivery of a TypeScript payments microservice after the original lead's departure; the service has since processed over $1B in transactions
- Executed full PHP 5 → PHP 7 migration of the core monolith: audited and modernized legacy code across the entire codebase, established a validation process to verify behavioral parity on the new runtime
- Delivered day-to-day feature development and bug fixes across the core monolith and supporting services, collaborating with product and QA to ship, review, and maintain code in a fast-moving production environment