Randy Pensinger - Software Engineer

Not interested in job opportunities.

Objective

Holistic software engineering.

Primary Skills

Cross-team system architecture — design, guidance, and incident response across ad serving, reporting, identity, integrations, and ML infrastructure
Applied AI — LLM integration, AI workflow design, AI adoption strategy
Team leadership — coaching, mentoring, building engineer autonomy
Rapid application development — hands-on IC and project lead
Database design, modeling, and migration
Event tracking, reporting, and invoicing systems
Incident response, debugging, performance tuning
Code quality and design — test-driven development, code review, architectural patterns
Product thinking — requirements distillation, MVP scoping, business-context-driven engineering
Technical communication — teaching frameworks, documentation, cross-functional alignment
Python, SQL, Perl, JavaScript/React, HTML/CSS, Java

Secondary Skills

Authentication architecture (OIDC, OAuth)
AWS infrastructure (Fargate, deployment pipelines)
Build engineering, CI/CD
React SPA development

Work History

MediaAlpha - Vertical Search Lead Exchange

Senior Principal Software Engineer ← Tech Team Lead ← Senior Software Engineer: March 2016 – Present

Cross-team individual contributor and project guide across the full stack, with direct leadership of the ML/AI engineering team.

ML/AI Team Leadership (2022–present). Lead ML engineering team — coaching, architecture guidance, technical direction. Own ML infrastructure and operational excellence including model serving and training pipelines. Launched a cross-functional working group aligning product and engineering on applied AI opportunities. Authored internal frameworks shaping how the engineering organization approaches AI-assisted development.
Identity & Authentication. Designed and led an OIDC identity provider integration — API, UI, and data model across teams. Leading a major overhaul of internal identity systems.
Event Tracking, Reporting & Invoicing. Deep ownership of the core reporting platform — architecture, performance optimization, summary table design, data integrity, and pipeline reliability. Revenue alerting and monitoring. Cross-team reporting support.
API Design & R&D. Designed and built an internal GraphQL API from proof-of-concept to production application. Prototyped distributed locking systems, AI-assisted tooling, and bidding signal tools.
Database Design & Modeling. Schema design and migration across systems — PII management, storage optimization, table architecture, and cross-vertical data cleanup.
Cross-Team Architecture & Incident Response. Architectural guidance spanning ad serving, reporting, exchange platform, integrations, and security. Led response to revenue-impacting production incidents. Proactive system-wide troubleshooting and triage.
Foundation (2016–2022). Hands-on architectural improvements to the exchange SPA, ad serving, reporting, data privacy, and client integrations. Assisted with M&A technical due diligence. VPC migration and build engineering.

Porch.com - Home Improvement Marketplace

Senior Software Engineer: September 2013 – January 2015

Co-authored Managed Data service (Master data management), Published data service (Aggregates, Search indices, related denormalizations). SQL migrations and query tuning. Optimized landing page performance, search page performance. Assisted in VPC migration, Build & Release engineering, Dev-ops and pager duty.

Education

Stanford University, BS Computer Science Graduated: June 14 2009 GPA: 3.337