Daniel F. Berger
dberger(at)oubliette.org
London N19
 
Summary: Internationally experienced systems engineering generalist, technical leader, and articulate communicator seeking a technical leadership or senior contributor position in a passionate team, with opportunities to learn and mentor, and the potential for personal and professional growth. Amenable to international opportunities.
 
[06/22 - Present] Sr. Staff Engineer, Axon, London, UK
 
[01/22 - 06/22] Sebbatical
 
[01/18 - 01/22] Principal Engineer, Amazon Prime Video, London, UK
      [07/20 - 04/21] Scout, London, UK
      [06/19 - 07/20] Alexa Shopping, London, UK
      [01/18 - 06/19] Alexa Shopping, Seattle, WA
 
[06/06 - 10/17] Software Engineer, Valve Corporation, Bellevue, WA
Software Engineer, Valve S.a r.l., Luxembourg, Luxembourg [12/12 - 08/14]
  • Distinguished systems engineer focused on Steam client, server, and cross-platform infrastructure and automation across Win32, macOS, Linux, and Mobile (iOS, Android) platforms in a dynamic, managerless organization.
  • Member of the Steam Core DevOps team responsible for the physical, network, compute, storage, database, and software (C/C++, Python, PHP) infrastructure enabling Steam's growth from 250k concurrent to over 15M concurrent users.
  • Full lifecycle responsibilities - from product/project management to post-delivery support.
  • Direct partner facing responsibilities, second tier partner support/enablement and platform evangelization.
  • Digital security incident response and forensics, liaison with federal law enforcement.
  • Technical liaison and resource to in-house and outside counsel.
Notable achievements:
  • Member of a small team that planned, delivered, and supported Steam and the Valve game catalog release on macOS, including studio-wide cross platform development tools, build and test automation, and client-side crash reporting/telemetry. (C/C++, Python)
  • Member of a small team that designed, delivered, and supported the Steam Mobile Application on iOS and Android (Objective C/C++, Java, Python)
  • Infrastructure design, planning, implementation and support for a geographically distributed compute and content delivery network.
  • Selected from internal applicants to be the sole engineering resource in Valve's first international office (Valve S.a r.l., Luxembourg).
    Responsibilities included partner support and enablement, platform evangelization, recruiting, ongoing product engineering and planning for future international expansion.
[10/04 - 05/06] Principal Engineer/Director of Software Development, RealNetworks Inc., Seattle, WA
  • Equal parts technical line management, mentor, trouble-shooter, technical analyst, and technical resource of last resort.
  • Tactical and strategic technical resource to the General Manager of Media Applications and Platform Services and CTO.
  • Direct management and mentoring of a small team of senior engineers.
As Principal Engineer reporting to the General Manager of Media Application Platform Services, supported Real's tactical and strategic initiatives.
  • Advised a cross-functional team tasked with improving server-side scalability and robustness of Real's Rhapsody subscription music service.
  • Technical point of contact for user and billing integration efforts with key strategic partners, including Comcast and Cox.
  • Participant in next-generation digital rights management (DRM) design; including server-side license management design, critique of compile-time code obfuscation and run-time anti-circumvention techniques, and end-to-end robustness analysis.
As Director of Software Development, responsible for a wide project/product set, including Content Management Tools, Community Services, User Data Web Services, and Media Authorization.
  • Worked to improve poor communication with project and program management and to build and foster a sense of team across a group of developers working on disjunct projects.
  • Instituted development practices to improve quality and agility, including nightly automated builds and automated regression testing.
  • Successfully campaigned to begin replacing multiple home-grown, poorly supported, message-oriented-middleware solutions with a single standards-based solution.
  • Worked with team members to carve out time from an over-committed development schedule to allow forward-looking development and exploration.
[09/03 - 09/04] Independent Consultant, RealNetworks Inc., Seattle, WA
  • Engaged by the CTO to assist in evaluation of internal projects and processes around content management, publishing and commerce efforts.
[09/02 - 09/04] Systems Programmer, Graduate Student, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA
  • Full-time programmer on a DARPA funded research project investigating scalable, fault-tolerant, tunable wireless networking using primarily commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components.
[08/01 - 08/02] Senior Software Engineer/Chief Engineer, CNP Inc., Los Angeles, CA
  • Web publishing/content management software design and implementation using Java/J2EE.
  • Cross-functional team coordination/communication, customer facing communication and evangelism, leadership/mentoring of small development teams.
[11/99 - 04/01] Principal Engineer, Open Market, Burlington, MA (Remote Employee)
Consultant, Professional Services Group, Open Market, Burlington, MA (Remote Employee)
  • Multi-tenent web-based e-commerce software design and implementation in C/C++.
  • Product tech lead responsibilities on a 15 person team.
  • Solution design and implementation (C/C++) for Open Market Professional Services clients, including Sony, Ingram Micro, and Checkout.com.
[8/98 - 3/99] Staff Engineer, Disney Online/Buena Vista Internet Group, North Hollywood, CA
 
Prior experience upon request.
Education:  
[2002 - 2004] Master of Science, Computer Science, University of California, Riverside.
Thesis: A Scalable Architecture for Public Key Distribution Acting in Concert with DNS
Publications:
  • ACSAC 2005: Jones, Berger, Ravishankar, "Layering a Public-Key Distribution Service over Secure DNS"
  • MASS 2004: Berger, Ye, Sinha, Krishnamurthy, Faloutsos, Tripathi, "Alleviating MAC Layer Self-Contention in Multi-hop Wireless Networks".
  • MobiCom 2003: Ye, Berger, Sinha, Krishnamurthy, Faloutsos, Tripathi, "On Alleviating MAC Layer Self-Contention in Ad-hoc Networks" Poster, Extended Abstract.
[1992 - 1996] Bachelor of Science, Computer Science, University of California, Riverside.