JOSHUA J. ERB

Writer & Software Engineer

Currently based in Mumbai (मुंबई), India

Experience

Self-Employed | Writer | Aug. 2024 - Present
  • Writing and pitching essays on technology, labor, and my personal experience with both to a variety of established non-fiction outlets (see writing for success stories).
  • Finalizing a 90,000 word literary manuscript dealing with questions of technology, memory, and grief.
Sofar Ocean | Software Engineer | Feb. 2022 - Aug. 2024
  • Stabilized and scaled APIs supporting the generation and retrieval of marine weather data
  • Identified and addressed observability gaps for backend services, implementing preferred solution and guiding adoption among other teams Planned, designed, and implemented multiple features for a marine weather-focused TypeScript library
  • Built and distributed custom tooling to quickly inspect large, 10-day weather forecasts
  • Rewrote all public facing documentation for the marine weather product offerings
Mapbox | Software Engineer | Jul. 2019 - Jan. 2022
  • Maintained operationally excellent service during period of rapid adoption, where daily traffic increased from ~100M requests per day to ~3B requests per day
  • Improved key aspects of service's internal asset fetching in order to support traffic spikes of 1M requests per second
  • Researched, designed, and implemented new feature that allowed customers to modify map styles and data at the time of request
Mapbox | Support Engineer | Apr. 2018 - Jul. 2019
  • Supported the mobile integration and launch of large, medium, and small customers
  • Answered customer questions on Stack Overflow, consistently remaining in the top 18% of users on the site
Excella Consulting | Sr. Consultant | Apr. 2016 - Apr. 2018
  • Maintained, executed, and validated a Big Data model for a consumer loyalty program with +75 million members and +6,000 participating properties worldwide
  • Improved the accuracy of the same Big Data model financial model by +$17 million
M Powered Strategies | Consultant | Jan. 2015 - Apr. 2016
  • Crafted strategic recommendations for the Stakeholder Engagement and Organizational Change Management Division to improve the federal client’s understanding of a software development project’s potential impacts for +32,000 users
  • Optimized data gathering processes to decrease the level of effort on client-facing reports and work products
University of Chicago, Department of Geography | Research Assistant | Sep. 2013 - Sep. 2014
  • Conducted primary-source archival research informing multiple academic projects, including a forthcoming book on the geographic morphology of 19th century breweries in San Francisco, CA

Academics

✱ University of Georgetown School of Continuing Studies | Data Science Certification | Sep. 2016
✱ University of Chicago | M.A. Social Science | Sep. 2014
✱ University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign | B.A. Global Studies, French Minor | May 2013
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