Project Solenoid & DevProd

Developer productivity is product engineering where internal engineers are the customers. Project Solenoid and a suite of CI/CD acceleration initiatives transformed how engineers create, test, and operate services at NerdWallet.

Project Solenoid: 1-Hour to Production

Before Solenoid, standing up a new microservice required manually wiring IAM roles, Terraform repositories, ArgoCD deployments, and CI/CD pipelines, often taking days and multiple infrastructure support tickets.

I built Project Solenoid, a unified templating engine and bootstrapping blueprint that combines:

• Standardized Docker Compose environments for local development.
• Native GitHub Actions pipelines pre-configured with security scans and linting.
• Automated multi-account AWS resource provisioning and ArgoCD ApplicationSet registration.

With Solenoid, engineers can bootstrap a brand-new, production-ready microservice with full observability and CI/CD wired in under one hour.

Layered Caching on Ephemeral Runners

Because ad-hoc GitHub Actions runners are ephemeral, they lose cached container layers between workflow executions. I engineered a centralized container build cache layer across shared registry storage, cutting redundant layer rebuilds across product engineering teams.

Content Platform CI Hang Resolution

Investigated silent 20+ minute CI build hangs in the core content platform repository. Isolated duplicate build steps that exhausted container memory limits. The optimization:

• Cut average build times from 7 minutes down to 4 minutes (a 43% speedup).
• Eliminated 75% of intermittent pipeline failures.

Direct Stack Ownership

Replaced operational bottlenecks with safe self-service patterns, empowering product engineers to directly redrive dead-letter queues (DLQs), purge test queues, inspect DynamoDB tables, and track team-level AWS spend without infrastructure team intervention.