Forward Deployed Engineer at Origin — building and supporting the platform alongside customers.
Previously a Senior Backend / Data Infrastructure Engineer at Estuary, focused on Python, distributed systems, APIs, and real-time data integration (CDC).
Remote (Starkville, MS) • contact@justinsmith.sh • LinkedIn • Resume
I'm a software engineer at Origin embedded with customers — shipping features, troubleshooting production issues, and closing the feedback loop between real-world usage and the platform. FDE means I'm a full member of the engineering team who also engages directly with customers to solve problems end-to-end.
Previous impact (selected):
- Enabled data capture for 6,500 Stripe Connected Accounts with 500,000+ concurrent streams (zero data loss). PR #2467 • follow-up: PR #2812
- Led zero-downtime migration for 20+ enterprise customers by re-architecting a legacy Airbyte wrapper into a native async Python connector (preserved 100% historical data). PR #3409
- Cut recovery log storage costs by 80% with JSON merge-patch checkpointing. PR #3068
- Previously at Camgian: helped secure $8M in follow-on contracts via edge-based data microservices; improved Kafka throughput by 300%.
- Previously at Camgian: built/operated high-throughput streaming systems (Kafka, async ingestion) handling GBs/minute.
Most of my prior open-source work lives inside Estuary's connectors repo.