Juan Gutierrez

About

I'm a software engineer and architect who likes the whole arc of a system: sketching it, building it, scaling it, and keeping it calm at three in the morning. These days that mostly means APIs, identity, and security: deciding how systems talk to each other, who they trust, and why.

I care as much about how teams work as how code works. I work from my home in Vermont on a team that has been fully remote for more than five years, and I've learned that remote teams run on trust, clear writing, and paying attention to people. I've never wanted to be a manager, but I'm often who teammates come to when they're stuck, whether the problem is in the code or between people.

This year I finished my M.S. in Computer Science at Columbia Engineering, studying part time and remotely while working full time, twenty years after my B.S. from the same school. Away from the keyboard, you'll find me playing music, cooking, or reading about philosophy, psychology, and politics.

Experience

1. 2026 M.S. in Computer Science, Columbia Engineering, Software Systems track

   Completed part time and remotely, while working full time.

   After taking Fundamentals of Distributed Systems, I came back as a course assistant for it, working with Prof. Roxana Geambasu.

2. 2010 – present Applications Architect, Ordergroove

   Joined as one of the first engineers at a seed-stage startup and grew with it into a subscription commerce platform, becoming its first tech lead and then its first applications architect.

   • Built request tracing into our APIs: correlated logs per request, plus p95/p99/max latency views that catch what our APM misses.
   • Find and tune the slow database queries that surface when a client's data reaches serious scale.
   • Built and maintain the platform's auth service, from service-to-service auth in GCP to third-party SSO, including how principals are modeled (users, services, AI agents).
   • Lead how we protect sensitive data: searchable encryption for PII at rest, encrypted credentials, and TTL-based retention. Earlier, drove our PCI Level 1 work.
   • Helped build, scale, and support the order placement system that processes hundreds of thousands of orders for our clients.
   • Helped build and support the webhook and event notification system that keeps third parties in sync with our platform.
   • Built the end-to-end integration testing framework for the core platform.
   • Mentor engineers across the team, on technical problems and the human ones that come with them.
   • Co-invented a patent-pending IoT device that tracks product consumption.
3. 2007 – 2010 Software Engineer, Optimost (Autonomy)

   Built features, integrations, and reporting for a multivariate web testing platform.

4. 2007 B.S. in Computer Science, Columbia Engineering

Graduate work

• Distributed training on commodity hardware

  A study of how data, tensor, and pipeline parallelism and DeepSpeed ZeRO actually perform on PCIe-connected GPUs without NVLink, across models from 10M to 1B parameters. We found that only data parallelism and ZeRO Stage 1 scaled meaningfully on two GPUs, and that communication overwhelmed every strategy at four. Written with Can Kerem Akbulut and Rakene Chowdhury for Scaling LLMs: Systems, Optimization, and Emerging Paradigms, Fall 2025.

• Spotlight

  A decentralized, Reddit-style community where creators earn a reputation token from upvotes that slowly decays over time, so newcomers get their turn in the light. Built on Solidity contracts with a Next.js front end and paywalled posts. I was the system architect on a team of five for Engineering Blockchain and Web3 Apps, Fall 2024.

Coursework

• Advanced Systems ProgrammingSpring 2025

  Built a memory allocator that grows from a bump allocator into segregated free lists, a multithreaded grep fed by a bounded ring buffer, a chat server that hands live client sockets to other server processes, a ptrace debugger with breakpoints and stack backtraces, a static linker that emits runnable ELF executables, and a rootless container runtime built on namespaces, cgroups, and seccomp.

• Programming Languages and TranslatorsSpring 2024

  Designed a programming language with a team and built its compiler, from scanner and parser through semantic checking and code generation.

• Operating SystemsSpring 2023

  Worked inside the Linux kernel: a system call that inspects another process's open files, a round-robin scheduler with multi-CPU load balancing, a page-table walk that reads and writes another process's memory, and a filesystem driver with directories and hard and symbolic links. In user space, I grew a web server from forked processes to thread pools to a pre-forked pool that passes sockets between processes.

• Fundamentals of Distributed Systems

  Took the course, then came back as a course assistant.

Open source

I contribute upstream when I can, usually after running into something in my own work.

• MongoEngine

  Contributed a fix for atomic increment and decrement updates, plus work on transaction support.

• OAuthLib

  Contributed a change that shipped in the 4.0 release.

Over the years I've also contributed to Django REST Framework and Celery, and given talks at PyGotham and the Burlington Python Meetup.