cover_letter / art_Va6qfvLiXF0

Dear Mixpanel Hiring Team, Mixpanel sits at a genuinely interesting inflection point: 29,000 companies already trust the platform, and the path to deeper enterprise penetration runs directly through the foundational systems — auth, permissions, audit, compliance — that security and IT teams scrutinize before signing. That intersection of infrastructure rigor and product craft is where I've spent the most consequential parts of my career, and it's what draws me to this role. ## Technical and Platform Foundation My platform work is grounded in hands-on technical depth, not just oversight. At Intuit, I owned the developer platform infrastructure that powered QuickBooks, TurboTax, Mint, Mailchimp, and Credit Karma — scaling ICE to 675M+ engagements in FY23 and driving a rSocket migration that took throughput from 6K to 50K TPS while supporting ~1.5M concurrent connections at sub-25ms TP99. That work required reasoning carefully about second-order effects: a change to the shared auth or messaging layer touched every product team simultaneously, so I had to think in systems and sequence investments with precision. I've also built auth and identity pipelines from scratch. At Streamio AI, I engineered end-to-end auth and payments infrastructure using Kinde OAuth 2.0, Stripe tiered subscriptions, and Electron SafeStorage for secure credential management — across macOS, Linux, iOS, and web. I understand the tradeoffs in identity architecture not just from product specifications but from having implemented them. That technical fluency is what lets me partner credibly with engineers on architecture-level decisions, write precise acceptance criteria for auth contracts, and evaluate security tradeoffs without needing to defer every question downstream. On the AI-native dimension the JD calls out: I use AI tools actively in discovery, synthesis, and research workflows. I've built production multi-agent systems (OpenClaw orchestration framework with gateway protocol and subagent delegation at Streamio), a local-first model evaluation platform (aeval) with statistical rigor — bootstrap confidence intervals, Welch's t-test, Cohen's d — and an RL post-training workbench benchmarking GRPO/DPO across TRL, VeRL, OpenRLHF, and NeMo RL. These aren't side projects; they're how I think about building platforms that are measurable, reliable, and trustworthy. ## Why This Role The Splunk chapter of my career is directly relevant here. I owned Search Service (Go microservices), Search Catalog (PostgreSQL metadata), and SPL/SPL2 for Splunk Cloud Services — products that enterprise security teams evaluated as part of their data infrastructure decisions. I understand how RBAC, audit logs, and admin controls show up in enterprise sales cycles, because I watched them determine whether deals closed. The Mixpanel Platform team's mission — making the product easy to manage, secure, compliant, and reliable — is precisely the kind of foundational work I find most compelling, because it quietly powers everything and occasionally takes center stage when it matters most. ## Role-Specific Connection The two-track engineering structure (server infrastructure/security + enterprise management/UI) mirrors the kind of cross-functional coordination I ran at Intuit, where I aligned dependencies across mobile, backend, and DevPortal tracks simultaneously. I'm particularly energized by the challenge of making the indirect ROI of security and compliance investments legible to leadership — building the business case for RBAC improvements or passkey adoption requires translating security review outcomes and deal friction into financial terms, which is work I've done explicitly (the ICE Self-Service platform mitigated $1M+ in projected opex growth; ICE Presence generated $480K/month in additional invoicing). I also have direct experience with the enterprise onboarding velocity problem: reducing developer onboarding from 2–3 weeks to minutes was a core outcome of the ICE Self-Service work, and the same principles apply to enterprise admin onboarding at Mixpanel. ## Selected Prior Experience - **ICE Self-Service Platform (Intuit):** Delivered DevPortal, GitOps config, and ICE Playground — reducing developer onboarding from 2–3 weeks to minutes in pre-prod and under 24 hours for production, while mitigating $1M+ in projected opex growth. Scaled to 675M+ engagements in FY23. - **rSocket Migration (Intuit):** Drove throughput from 6K to 50K TPS supporting ~1.5M concurrent connections at sub-25ms TP99 — a platform-layer decision with product-wide impact across QuickBooks, TurboTax, Mint, Mailchimp, and Credit Karma. - **MSaaS Drift Detection (Intuit):** Initiated and built a Java JAR library to scan Git repos for configuration drift, partnered with Design on DevPortal UI, and built remediation roadmap using OpenRewrite — proactive platform governance before problems surfaced in production. - **Search Service & SPL Ownership (Splunk):** Owned Go microservices, PostgreSQL metadata service, and SPL/SPL2 for Splunk Cloud Services; delivered Scheduler Service end-to-end in ~4 months; led query performance optimization achieving up to 10x improvements for a beta enterprise customer. - **OAuth 2.0 / Auth Pipeline (Streamio AI):** Engineered full auth and payments pipeline using Kinde OAuth 2.0, Stripe subscriptions with tiered plans, and Electron SafeStorage — across macOS, Linux, iOS, and web surfaces. - **Enterprise Service Language Assessment (Intuit):** Conducted enterprise-wide assessment across 9 languages, analyzing usage data and developer feedback to inform strategic investment decisions presented to the CTO — the kind of structured synthesis that translates messy signal into clear, prioritized proposals. - **Splunk Logging-as-a-Service (Kaiser Permanente):** Led development and enterprise rollout of a logging platform handling 1.7 TB daily volume across 200+ internal enterprise customers — direct experience with the operational complexity of shared infrastructure at scale. ## Closing Mixpanel's mission — turning data clarity into innovation — depends on enterprise customers trusting the platform with their data and their organizational complexity. That trust is built in the platform layer: in how permissions are modeled, how auth failures are handled, how audit logs are structured, how admin workflows scale. I've spent 12+ years building exactly these kinds of foundational systems, and I'd welcome the opportunity to bring that experience to Mixpanel as it scales into the enterprise. Thank you for your consideration. --- **O. Felix Amoruwa** famoruwa@berkeley.edu | 909-731-9011 | felixamoruwa.info