I turn complex product and platform problems into clear, reliable experiences—from onboarding and lifecycle communication to monetization, APIs, and data systems.
Currently building Neon and Lakebase at Databricks, after Neon's acquisition.
Experience
I work across customer-facing growth, product infrastructure, and the systems that connect them—taking ideas from early framing through production operation.
Software Engineer · Neon & Lakebase
Continuing the Neon product inside Databricks
Growth and product engineering for the Neon product and Lakebase inside Databricks. I work across lifecycle experiences, onboarding, monetization, and the platform services that support them.
Software Engineer · Growth & Console
Acquired by Databricks
Built customer-facing experiences and shared growth systems across the Console and platform, including lifecycle communication, access control, billing safeguards, partner integrations, and frontend foundations.
Full-stack Engineer
Healthcare, developer tooling and B2B software
Built web and mobile products for teams working in healthcare, customer operations, technology evaluation, forms and analytics, and municipal services.
Approach
A few principles I return to when the problem is ambiguous, crosses several layers of the stack, or needs to move safely into production.
Before choosing components or endpoints, I try to understand the entities, boundaries, states, and failure modes. A clear model usually makes the implementation simpler.
I like working across the interface and the service behind it. Decisions in one layer are often easier when the constraints of the other are visible.
Migrations, observability, rollback paths, and operational ownership are part of the design. Shipping safely matters as much as reaching code complete.
For growth work, delivery is the start. I instrument funnels, watch product behavior and reliability, and use production evidence to decide what to improve next.
Selected systems
Selected work across lifecycle growth, monetization, product experience, and platform engineering. Each case study focuses on the problem, my contribution, and the tradeoffs that shaped the system.
Neon · 04 systemsNeonThe system
Shared infrastructure that turns product and operational events into useful, timely customer communication.
My contribution
Designed and operated the event model, delivery path, deduplication, campaign workflow, monitoring, and reliability improvements.
Engineering considerations
Technical case study / 01The engineering problem
Customer communication looks simple at the interface. Underneath, it is a distributed-systems problem: events repeat, downstream providers fail, campaigns change, and operators still need to explain what happened.
My scope
Outcome
A shared foundation for product and operational communication, with reliability behavior designed into the platform path rather than recreated for each campaign.
Architecture
Product intent
Stable event modelA product or operational event describes what happened—not how a message should be delivered.
Safe processing
Retry-safe boundaryDeduplication and idempotent handlers make repeated delivery an expected condition, not an incident.
Campaign resolution
Intent separated from transportRuntime events are resolved against communication intent before channel-specific work begins.
Delivery and evidence
Observable end to endDelivery stages emit enough operational context to trace failures, recover work, and improve reliability.
Model duplicate events explicitly and make handlers idempotent.
Expose where work is accepted, resolved, queued, delivered, or failed.
Keep reliability behavior in one platform path instead of rebuilding it per campaign.
NeonThe system
Customer-facing controls for configuring monthly spending limits and receiving proactive usage warnings.
My contribution
Helped shape the release boundary and built the backend model, public APIs, notification worker, frontend integration, and launch measurement.
Engineering considerations
NeonThe system
A permissions model for teams that need different levels of access across projects and environments.
My contribution
Worked from customer and product requirements through the role model, administrative interfaces, migration tooling, and staged rollout.
Engineering considerations
NeonThe system
A partner-facing flow for creating, upgrading, and recovering managed database resources through an external platform.
My contribution
Owned the paid-path design and core implementation across identity, billing, APIs, resource ownership, and recovery behavior.
Engineering considerations
Contact / 05
I'm always glad to talk about growth engineering, product infrastructure, developer experience, and the hard problems between them.
russ.dias@icloud.com