cover_letter / art_ZLoLked7FBY

Dear Postman Hiring Team, Postman sits at the center of how the world's developers build, test, and ship APIs — a platform trusted by 98% of the Fortune 500 and more than 45 million developers. That scale of developer trust is earned, not assumed, and it starts the moment someone lands on postman.com. Having spent the last three years building developer-facing platforms at Intuit — where I scaled a developer infrastructure product from 6K to 50K TPS and grew platform engagements to 675M+ in a single fiscal year — I understand that the web experience is not a marketing surface; it is the product. --- **Technical and Product Foundation** My product work has consistently lived at the intersection of developer experience, platform infrastructure, and measurable growth. At Intuit, I owned the ICE Self-Service platform end-to-end: DevPortal, GitOps configuration, and the ICE Playground. The core problem was developer onboarding friction — a 2–3 week process that blocked teams from reaching production. I redesigned the experience and the underlying technical scaffolding together, reducing onboarding to minutes in pre-production and under 24 hours for production, while avoiding over $1M in projected opex growth. That required me to hold both the customer journey and the technical architecture in mind simultaneously — the same muscle this role demands. I also conducted an enterprise-wide Service Language Assessment across nine languages, analyzed telemetry and usage data in SQL and BigQuery across roughly 20 mobile apps and 30+ product SKUs, and built Asterias, a declarative asset lifecycle management platform with a GraphQL API. These were not research exercises — they were prioritization inputs that shaped multi-year platform investment decisions presented to Intuit's CTO. On the measurement side, I have worked directly with funnel data, usage telemetry, and attribution pipelines to connect platform behavior to business outcomes. I know the difference between a dashboard that reports activity and one that supports decisions, and I have built toward the latter. --- **Why This Role** My career arc has moved from deep technical execution — hand-coding BPTT in C++ at Berkeley in 2004, shipping NeurIPS-published research on neural networks, building production ML platforms — through platform and infrastructure product leadership, and most recently into founding two AI-native products (Streamio AI and Fintellect AI) where I owned every layer: product strategy, engineering, go-to-market, and customer discovery. What I have not yet done at full scale is own the web as a product surface for a platform with Postman's reach. That is exactly what draws me here. Postman's web properties are the first chapter of the developer relationship — the place where a developer decides whether Postman is worth their time. The opportunity to define that experience, build the measurement foundation that makes learning possible, and expand top-of-funnel discovery across a product portfolio as broad as Postman's is the kind of consequential, ambiguous, cross-functional challenge I am built for. --- **Role-Specific Connection** Three areas of the job description resonate most directly with work I have already done. First, technical search and agentic optimization: as AI-assisted search changes how developers discover tools, the architecture of postman.com — URL design, structured data, crawlability, internal linking — becomes a product decision with compounding returns. I have thought carefully about this in the context of Vantage, my AI job search platform, where discoverability of candidate profiles and agent-generated content required deliberate information architecture choices. Second, privacy-aware measurement: I have navigated App Store consent gating, first-party data flows, and compliance constraints across both iOS and macOS products, and I bring a practical point of view on balancing measurement quality against user trust. Third, the handoff between the public web experience and the authenticated product: at Intuit, the DevPortal was precisely this seam — the surface where a developer's first impression of the platform became their working environment — and reducing friction at that boundary was central to the 275% YoY engagement growth we achieved. --- **Selected Prior Experience** - **ICE Self-Service platform (Intuit):** Delivered DevPortal, GitOps config, and ICE Playground; reduced developer onboarding from 2–3 weeks to minutes in pre-prod and under 24 hours for production; mitigated $1M+ in projected opex growth. - **675M+ platform engagements, 275% YoY growth (Intuit):** Scaled ICE throughput from 6K to 50K TPS via rSocket migration supporting ~1.5M concurrent connections with sub-25ms TP99 across QuickBooks, TurboTax, Mint, Mailchimp, and Credit Karma. - **Enterprise-wide telemetry and prioritization (Intuit):** Used SQL and BigQuery to analyze usage data across ~20 mobile apps and 30+ product SKUs; built RICE-based and data-driven prioritization frameworks for multi-team backlogs. - **Java and Python SDK Starter Kits (Intuit):** Extended developer SDKs with scaffolding templates, build configurations (Gradle/Maven), testing frameworks, and CI/CD integration — enabling developers to reach production-ready microservices in minutes. - **Vantage — AI Job Search Platform (Streamio AI):** Led 0-to-1 product strategy, engineering, and go-to-market for a cross-platform product with 40+ agent tools, streaming SSE chat, App Store–compliant monetization (Apple IAP + Superwall), and Playwright/Jest release gates; hardened network UX via stale-while-revalidate caching, in-flight deduplication, and per-request aborts. - **Search Orchestration at Splunk:** Owned Search Service (Go microservices), Search Catalog (PostgreSQL metadata), and Splunk Processing Language (SPL/SPL2); delivered Scheduler Service end-to-end in approximately four months; led query performance optimization achieving up to 10x improvements for a Fortune 500 beta customer. - **Splunk Logging-as-a-Service (Kaiser Permanente):** Led enterprise rollout of a logging platform handling 1.7 TB daily volume across 200+ internal customers; built caching capability using Redis and XC10 to address scalability and fault tolerance. --- **Closing** Postman's mission — to help developers build the API-first world — depends on a web experience that earns developer trust before a single API call is made. I want to build that experience: one that is fast, discoverable, measurable, and honest about what Postman is and who it is for. I would welcome the opportunity to discuss how my background maps to the specific challenges your team is navigating. Thank you for your consideration. **O. Felix Amoruwa** famoruwa@berkeley.edu · 909-731-9011 · felixamoruwa.info