Dan Ehrman headshot

About Me

I'm a software engineering manager at Upstart. Prior to that, I was at Stripe, AWS, and Redfin, working on full-stack software, and before that, at a hardware company doing microprocessor design. I have a background in computer engineering and a strong interest in microprocessors, artificial intelligence, and computer history.

View a single-page printable PDF version of my résumé here (up to date as of January 2022).

Experience

Upstart: Seattle, washington (Mar. 2022 - Now)

Senior Software Engineering Manager

Upstart is an AI-powered lending company. My team is helping build Upstart’s newest business, mortgage, where we’ll be originating home loans for buyers typically overlooked by the traditional mortgage industry.

Stripe: Seattle, washington (Jan. 2021 - Mar. 2022)

Software Engineering Manager

Stripe is a payment processing company supporting the likes of Lyft, Amazon, and a whole lot more under the hood of the checkout experience. I led the Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) team in Seattle. We gave merchants the ability to collect payments in installments (e.g. “4 easy payments of $25”) directly from the Stripe API rather than building separate integrations with other payment processors.

Amazon Web Services (AWS): Seattle, washington (2020)

Senior Software Engineer → Software Engineering Manager

Joined on AWS Service Catalog in May 2020 as a senior engineer for a brief stint before transitioning back to manager to lead the team of 10. Spent my time there building tools to help our customers more easily and affordably provision stacks of AWS services. Left to get back closer to a startup environment.

Redfin: Seattle, Washington (2014 - 2020)

Software Developer I → II → Lead Software Developer → Software Engineering Manager

Worked on a variety of fun projects across the software stack:

  • With a small team of talented engineers, I was a founding member of our Notifications team, where we helped rearchitect and rebuild Redfin's notifications infrastructure to run on Kafka, Samza, and YARN, making our emails and push notifications fast and dependable while providing a new horizontally scalable tech stack to other Redfin teams.

  • Built a variety of features for our iOS and Android apps (saved searches, Shared Search comments, push notifications) and was the sole developer for an across-the-board restyling of our iOS app to achieve design parity with the website.

  • I started and led Redfin’s Owner Engagement team, where we built a whole host of features aimed at engaging homeowners and encourage them to sell to RedfinNow.

  • Finished up my tenure with Redfin by leading RedfinNow Engineering, building out enterprise tools and customer-facing tools for Redfin’s home-flipping business.

LSI Corporation: Allentown, Pennsylvania (2012 - 2014)

IC Design Engineer I → II

Axxia Mobile Communication Processor design team, working through all phases of the design cycle, from architectural specification to FPGA validation:

  • Designed and implemented an instruction-accurate simulator to model the performance implications of architectural decisions and guide direction for next-generation products.

  • Created solutions to successfully debug world's first 16-core ARM processor, the AXM5500, in ASIC bring-up environment.

  • Led effort across teams to develop and automate dynamic power characterization of the AXM5500, directly impacting and guiding leakage screening thresholds and customer datasheet specifications.

  • Designed new GUI-based methodology for FPGA/ASIC debugging that provides a human-readable connection to the hardware.

Purdue Solar Racing: West Lafayette, Indiana (2010-2012)

Software Engineer

  • Team leader and firmware designer for touchscreen driver display.

  • Designed software for cruise control, headlights, and other vehicle functions.

Purdue University: West Lafayette, Indiana (2011)

Research Assistant, Artificial Intelligence

  • Researched automated reasoning as a means of generalized planning.

  • Used Lisp and non-deterministic programming to create software to search decision trees, act on heuristics, and prove theorems.

Hamilton Sundstrand: Rockford, Illinois (2008 - 2010)

Engineering Co-Op

  • Executed statistical analyses of critical failing components for F-22 fighter jet and other aircraft, increasing production yield without added cost.

  • Created two key software packages to streamline interdepartmental communication, enhance bug tracking, and automate data analysis.

Education

Master of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering (MSECE) (2012 - 2018)

Georgia Institute of Technology; Focus on Computer Architecture, earned part time while working

Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering (BSCompE) (2007 - 2012)

Purdue University

Skills

High-level languages

  • Java

  • C/C++

  • Python

  • Lisp

  • Verilog

  • VHDL

  • CUDA

  • MPI

Assembly languages

  • ARM

  • MIPS

  • Freescale

Scripting tools

  • Perl

  • Bash

  • Sed

  • Awk

HARDWARE Design tools

  • Synopsys VCS

  • Synopsys DVE

  • Synopsys Design Compiler

  • Mentor Graphics ModelSim

  • ARM DS-5

  • ARM FastModels

Awards

REDFINNIAN OF THE QUARTER (REDFIN, 2016)

For proposing and implementing a set of creative ideas that ultimately helped Redfin surpass 2016 traffic goals.

Blue Spark, Level 3: Excellence (LSI Corporation, 2013)

For taking leadership of a critical cross-team project.

Level 3 Co-Op Award (Hamilton Sundstrand, 2009)

For excellence in performance and effort.

Interests

Computer design

Parallel systems, algorithms, mechanical computation. (See video of my mechanical computer here.)

Workplace efficiency

Kaizen, information sharing, process automation.