About

Andrew Garrett is a Senior Software Engineer with over 10 years of relevant experience in the field. He currently serves as a Staff Software Engineer and tech lead for the Buy-Side backend engineering team at Compass, where he leads a team of six engineers to deliver features on time while maintaining code quality, consistency, and best practices. Andrew has developed the 2022 roadmap to evolve the Buy-Side backend architecture in a way that sets up future flexibility while achieving the required functionality laid out by Product. At the beginning of 2022, Andrew founded the Compass Kafka Guild and currently leads the Guild. He guides four independent working groups each focused on different aspects of DevEx from tooling to standards to organizational excellence. Over the last year, Andrew has worked with various stakeholders across Legal, Engineering, and Product to lay the foundation for an Open Source Software program starting with their internal Kafka Go client. Early in 2022, he successfully presented a proposal document to CTO, CPO, VPs, and senior engineers to obtain support to open source the client. They intend to open source the project at some point in Summer 2022. In his past roles at Compass, Andrew led multiple different teams to facilitate agent collaboration features across the Compass platform. He also led multiple efforts to improve the data infrastructure, including setting up Apache Airflow, designing and implementing a Kafka-based change data capture pipeline, and a process to use Apache Spark on AWS EMR to build out a data lake. These projects helped stabilize the infrastructure and allowed the team to meet their SLAs while saving resources. Andrew has experience in event-driven architecture, stream processing, and microservices. He possesses skills in Kafka, Kubernetes, AWS, Spark, Airflow, and various other engineering tools. Andrew has a Master of Information Management from the University of Maryland and a Bachelor's degree in Mathematical Economics from Colgate University.