John Ewart

 Snohomish, WA
(209) 648-9857
john@johnewart.net

Education

Ph.D in Environmental Systems (incomplete) @ University of California, Merced

Advisor: Dr. Thomas Harmon

2004 - 2008

  • Research was in the field of embedded sensor networks and 1-D flow modeling
  • Coursework in: hydrology, environmental statistics, contaminant fate and transport, geochemistry, organic chemistry and modeling of environmental systems

B.Sc. in Computer Science @ California State University, Stanislaus

Work Experience

Staff Software Engineer @ Ethyca

November 2025 - Present

Staff Software Engineer on privacy, consent, and governance infrastructure, focused on scaling the platform for enterprise customers.

  • Increased service throughput from 400 to 6,000 TPS per core (15×), enabling the platform to support larger enterprise customers
  • Tasked with ensuring the platform scales to meet growing enterprise customer demand
  • Modernized CI/CD pipelines, developer tooling, and engineering workflows
  • Resolved complex enterprise integration issues through hands-on customer engineering
  • Improved AI-assisted tooling for developer productivity and product delivery

Principal Engineer @ Microsoft

April 2022 - July 2025

Principal engineer and engineering manager across Dapr open source and Azure Container Apps.

  • Reduced Azure Container Apps cold-start latency to under 250ms
  • Increased workload density by 40%+ on the Container Apps virtualized pod fabric, improving security, elasticity, and infrastructure efficiency
  • Shipped on-demand GPU launch for customer LLM inference and training at scale
  • Architected Dapr pluggable components and workflow engine; elected to the Dapr Steering and Technical Committee
  • Led team as engineering manager through a transition, shipping Dapr-on-Azure features and native Aspire support in Container Apps
  • Drove launch of Dapr-integrated Azure services and customer-facing Container Apps capabilities

CTO & Co-Founder @ YourBase

March 2019 - January 2022

Co-founded and led engineering for build-acceleration technology used in customer CI/CD pipelines.

  • Reduced build and test times from 2 hours to 15 minutes using eBPF tracing, runtime hooks, and dependency-graph analysis to skip unaffected work
  • Deployed with engineering teams at Venmo, Gusto, Instacart, and Intuit
  • Led an 8-engineer team through invention, productization, and customer integration at a 12-person startup
  • Raised $5M in seed funding
  • Delivered acceleration tooling for Ruby, Python, and Java codebases

Performance Lead, Well-Architected @ Amazon Web Services

September 2018 - March 2019

Owned the Performance pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

  • Defined the Performance pillar guidance used by customers worldwide to evaluate and improve workloads
  • Authored training and reference content on application and infrastructure performance on AWS
  • Presented performance and scalability sessions at AWS re:Invent

Senior Solutions Architect @ Amazon Web Services

June 2017 - September 2018

Solutions architect for research and healthcare organizations adopting AWS.

  • Advised large nonprofits and research institutions—including Fred Hutch and Seattle Cancer Care Alliance—on AWS architecture and operations
  • Delivered training, reference architectures, proofs of concept, and hands-on implementation support

Senior Software Engineer @ Amazon

July 2016 - June 2017

Senior engineer on Alexa Entertainment, expanding music, video, and third-party device integrations.

  • Designed and launched the Alexa Video Skill API and Video SDK used by partners including DishTV
  • Led Alexa engineering for FireTV voice control, including the FireTV Cube
  • Contributed to Echo Show launch and owned the platform services behind the video API
  • Drove cross-org delivery with FireTV, Prime Video, and Amazon Music teams
  • Shaped architecture for Alexa music and video experiences; contributed to voice routing, API review, and acquisition due diligence

Senior Software Architect @ Expedia

October 2015 - July 2016

Senior architect guiding platform modernization and cloud adoption.

  • Led service-oriented architecture migration and AWS cloud transition
  • Established API consistency standards and technology adoption review process
  • Rolled out Terraform/Chef automation and advanced CI/CD pipelines across teams
  • Built prototypes, trained engineers, and advised leadership on technical direction

Senior Software Engineer @ Amazon

January 2015 - October 2015

Engineer on Goodreads catalog and tracking, serving Kindle and web readers.

  • Migrated catalog and tracking from a monolith to service-oriented architecture
  • Built bookshelf data services for 30M+ readers and billions of tracking events across web and Kindle
  • Improved deployment practices and mentored engineers to increase reliability and delivery speed

Senior Software Engineer @ Chef

July 2014 - January 2015

Core contributor to Chef’s infrastructure provisioning platform.

  • Co-built Chef provisioning and drivers for AWS, Docker, Azure, and PXE bare-metal
  • Owned roadmap, documentation, and contributor onboarding for chef-metal

Senior Software Development Engineer @ Amazon

May 2013 - July 2014

Engineer on Amazon’s global software deployment platform.

  • Scaled internal deployment infrastructure to nearly 1M hosts and millions of releases per week worldwide
  • Improved reliability, regionalization, and architecture of retail-critical release systems
  • Built backend services for early public AWS offerings and cross-platform build tooling
  • Mentored engineers and delivered deployment-system training across Amazon teams globally

Freelance Developer and Consultant

2002 - 2012

Selected projects included:

  • Infrastructure configuration, management and scalability using Chef and AWS
  • A geospatial application framework using Django, PostgreSQL, PostGIS, HTML5, OpenLayers and Backbone.js
  • Geospatial applications for customers ranging from government entities to fishing enthusiasts
  • An iOS application for location-aware, automated, time tracking
  • High-performance Flash charting components for radio spectrum testing equipment
  • Geographically distributed data-collection and alarming system for wireless sensor nodes using cellular networks
  • Large-scale sensor data processing using Hadoop, Pig and Hive
  • Enabling customers to better manage software development, deployments and infrastructure with tools such as Chef, Jenkins and GitHub

Software / Infrastructure Architect @ UpCity

October 2012 - May 2013

  • Re-architected a monolithic Rails application to use a service-oriented architecture
  • Oversaw monitoring, infrastructure planning, and capacity management
  • Built data and web-services and APIs using Ruby, Java, Riak and MySQL
  • Automated system provisioning and infrastructure management
  • Increased visibility into application performance
  • Performed day-to-day systems administration

IT Manager @ Superior Court of California, Merced

March 2012 - October 2012

  • Oversaw a team of support staff who were responsible for desktop support, networking, technology infrastructure, e-mail and A/V support
  • Managed department budget and consulted with court executives on technology projects
  • Procured equipment and software for new and existing projects
  • Led requirements gathering, architecture, and development of in-house applications to help optimize day-to-day court operations
  • Managed technical operation of virtualized infrastructure
  • Automated deployment of software and provisioning of systems
  • Participated in state-wide projects designed to set the technical direction for the Superior Court of California
  • Hired and trained new employees

Senior Software Engineer / Architect @ Cramer Development

March 2010 - February 2012

  • Architected, developed and maintained Ruby on Rails applications
  • Provided technical direction for internal projects as well as client-based projects
  • Performed system administration and operations tasks using Chef, Ganglia, Munin and Nagios
  • Oversaw hiring of new technical talent
  • Mentored other engineers

Software Engineer @ Front Porch Communications

April 2007 - March 2010

  • Developed, maintained, and supported a WiFi HotSpot appliance used at over 3,000 locations across the US and Europe
  • Wrote a GRE-encapsulation bridge driver for the Linux kernel
  • Developed API clients and libraries in C# and Perl

Research Experience

Research Assistant @ UC Merced

January 2004 - December 2006

  • Research assistant to Dr. Thomas Harmon on a variety of projects pertaining to soil moisture, groundwater, and surface water quality
  • Work included developing embedded sensor networks to retrieve data for analysis by mathematical models to understand the nature and behavior of pollutants in environmental systems
  • Projects spanned agricultural, riparian, groundwater-, and wetlands-related problems

Teaching Experience

Lecturer @ Northeastern University

January 2016 - July 2020

  • Developed and taught courses part-time in the NEU computer science department for students in the graduate degree program, with a focus on software engineering practices and skills
  • Topics included building software as teams, web services, service-oriented architecture, continuous delivery and deployment, API design, and building software at scale

Lecturer; Computer Science @ University of California, Merced

January 2007 - December 2012

Developed and delivered courses on topics including:

  • Java
  • C++
  • C and UNIX systems programming
  • Data structures and algorithms
  • Machine organization

Adjunct Faculty; Computer Science @ Columbia Community College

January 2008 - December 2009

Developed and taught courses including Introduction to Programming, Introduction to UNIX and Linux, and Advanced Web Topics

Teaching Assistant @ University of California, Merced

January 2006 - December 2007

Assisted with teaching Operating Systems, Data structures using Java, and Exploratory Computing / Data Analysis

Lecturer; Computer Science @ California State University, Stanislaus

January 2004 - December 2006

Taught courses on programming using C++, and basic computer / Internet usage skills including Microsoft Office, basic database development and web-page development

Books, Publications and Presentations

Books

  • Chef Essentials — ISBN: 978-1-78398-304-9, published 2014
  • Managing Windows Servers with Chef — ISBN: 978-1-78398-242-4, published 2014
  • Instant Parallel Processing with Gearman — ISBN: 978-1-78328-407-8, published 2013
  • Instant Chef Starter — ISBN: 978-1-78216-346-6, published 2013

Publications

  • Yeonjeong Park, et al. — Adaptive Management of Irrigation with Feedback Control to Avoid Groundwater Pollution by Nitrate (2006)
  • Nithya Ramanathan, et al. — Embedded Networked Sensing of Subsurface Water Quality Calibration, Fault Detection and Feedback Control (2006)
  • Thomas Harmon, et al. — CENS Contaminant Transport Observation and Management Research Overview (2006)
  • J. Eric Haux, et al. — Development of the Soil Pylon System for Observing Subterranean Processes (2005)
  • David A. Turner, et al. — Allocating Resources in Storage Cooperatives with Pseudo Currencies (2003)

Presentations

  • Automating your Infrastructure with Chef — O’Reilly Webinar; August 6, 2014

Awards and Achievements

  • 2004: Student of the year, Computer Science, CSU Stanislaus
  • 790/800 GRE Mathematics score
  • Scored on the Putnam exam

Professional Development

  • Construx Project Management Bootcamp
  • Award 3G/4G Wireless systems development training

Skills

  • Programming Languages: C, C#, C++, Java, JavaScript, Objective-C, Perl / Perl-OOP, PHP, Python, R, Ruby, Scala, Shell, SQL
  • Concepts: SOA, OOP, Networking, Database Modeling, Modular Software, UML, Embedded systems, Statistical computing, Teaching, Unit testing, TCP/IP Sockets, Linux kernel development, MVC programming, CGI/Servlet programming, REST, GIS, Spatial databases, Performance profiling / analysis (network, application and database), A/B testing
  • Tools: GNU compiler suite, GDB, Valgrind, vi, CVS, Subversion, git, mercurial, bzr, rvm, gems, CPAN, standard UNIX build tools (automake/autoconf, libtool, pkg-config, make, etc), RPM, .deb and .ipkg packaging
  • Networking: DPI, HTTP, TCP/IP programming and administration, BGP, IDS, DNS, DHCP, IPv6, WiFi, Packet filtering & analysis
  • Scientific / Geospatial: Mapnik, OpenLayers, PostGIS, scipy, numpy, Matlab, numerical models
  • HTTP / Load Balancing: HAProxy, nginx, Apache
  • Databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, pgPool, MongoDB, CouchDB
  • Distributed Computing: Hadoop, HBase, Gearman, RPC
  • Frameworks: Django, .NET, Mono, GTK, mod_perl, Ruby on Rails, jQuery
  • Deployment and DevOps: Chef, capistrano, deprec, fabric, Puppet
  • Testing: Rspec, cucumber, Selenium, testunit2, BDD, TDD, functional testing
  • Markup Languages: HTML/CSS, Textile, Markdown, XML
  • Operating Systems: Linux, MacOS X, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, Windows
  • Virtualization: Xen, VirtualBox, VMWare