Reid Erdwien

Denver, CO

Reid Erdwien at Arches National Park

Introduction

Welcome to this site! I'm Reid Erdwien and I live in Denver. My educational background is in physics and math. My work experience is in tech, and professionally I'm interested in DevOps and Site Reliability Engineer practices and positions as I enjoy this operational side of software engineering. Personally, some of my hobbies are mushroom hunting, playing board games and going down Wikipedia rabbit holes.

Resume

Download Resume (PDF)

If you prefer, most of the resume content is recreated here as well.

Technical Skills

  • Languages: JavaScript, TypeScript, Scala, Python, SQL, Go, Bash
  • AWS Services: EC2, VPCs, S3, IAM, SQS, SNS, PostgreSQL
  • Databases: MongoDB, MySQL AuroraDB, DynamoDB, CrateDB, ElasticSearch
  • CI/CD & IaC: Jenkins, GitLab CI, Spinnaker, Terraform
  • Containerization: Docker, Kubernetes (Helm), Nomad
  • Observability: Prometheus, Splunk, Grafana, Cloudwatch
  • Fundamentals: Linux, Git, Network Protocols (SSH, HTTPS, DNS, TCP/IP, SSL/TLS)

Work Experience

Software Support Engineer II Dec 2022 - Jul 2025
Qualtrics International Inc. | Provo, UT
  • Embedded in a team of developers to support a web-based text analysis product that enriches millions of records with categorization, sentiment, and more.
  • Integrated CI/CD platforms and managed infrastructure as code for the team's resources.
  • Maintained, upgraded and scaled production relational databases with no-downtime operations.
  • Performed container orchestration migrations from Nomad to Kubernetes for auto-scaling and cost savings.
  • Created Grafana visualizations, instrumented code with Prometheus metrics to streamline on-call experience.
  • Migrated services and databases from co-location data centers to AWS.
Software Support Engineer I Nov 2020 - Dec 2022
Qualtrics International Inc. | Provo, UT
  • Developed internal tooling for retrieving and altering system resources, leading to faster issue resolution.
  • Implemented tracking of product usage data (Splunk, Airflow, SQL) to accurately track product growth trends.
  • Coordinated a major back-end processing cut-over and legacy system deprecation for over 6000 active companies.
Product Specialist Nov 2019 - Nov 2020
Qualtrics International Inc. | Provo, UT
  • Led the SSO (Single Sign-On) support team, responsible for onboarding new team members.
  • Provided support for SAML issues, OAuth setup, certificate rotations and organization SSO configuration.

Education

Kansas State University Graduated May 2019
Physics B.S., Mathematics B.S., Statistics Minor (GPA: 3.92)

About Me

Mushroom Hunting

My wife and I enjoy learning about and searching for mushrooms. I'm not brave enough to eat anything we have found. We haven't been very successful yet, but the nice part is that in the worst case you get a good hike in!

Board Games

Probably one of my favorites is Wingspan. If you get to know me further, it's also inevitable that I will introduce you to Crokinole, a great Canadian flicking game.

Wikipedia

I have a broad range of interests and can spend hours following threads across many subjects. I'm also trying to edit and contribute, which can be a good way to test understanding and learn more.

AI Statement

I believe LLMs in some sort of harness (Claude Code, Cursor, etc.) are already valuable tools for software development. However, it's important for the engineer committing the code to still understand and be responsible for every piece of code that enters production. Certainly these agents are not perfect, but I also expect the tools to improve with time due to more sophisticated harnesses, decreasing inference cost, increasing context windows, and further reinforcement learning. Therefore, I don't shy away from trying to get value out of the tools as I can today.

Publications

I did some undergraduate research in physics. There are two published papers related to this work.

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