Grant Heffernan
Principal Systems Engineer at AT&T
Greater Boston United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolGrant Heffernan is a Principal Systems Engineer with 14 years of experience designing and operating highly available, networked systems across startups and large enterprises, currently at AT&T after senior infrastructure roles at SmartThings and Mapzen. He blends deep operational expertise—spanning UNIX systems, database integration, and deployment automation—with hands-on DevOps work, including contributions to the Tilezen vector tile service that show practical PostgreSQL and deployment templating skills. Dual US–Italian citizenship and eligibility to work across the US and Schengen countries give him flexibility for distributed teams and international projects. Known for solving tricky pathing and logging issues in production deployments, he pairs pragmatic troubleshooting with architecture-level thinking to keep services resilient and observable.
14 years of coding experience
24 years of employment as a software developer
Xaverian Brothers HSBA, BA at Brandeis University
Italian, English
Github Skills (8)
configuration-management10
database-administration10
postgresql10
devops10
vector-tiles9
tiles8
openstreetmap8
python4
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
tilezen/vector-datasource
Mar 2014 - Nov 2014
Tilezen vector tile service - OpenStreetMap data in several formats
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer & Database Engineer
DevOps Engineer & Database EngineerContributions:20 commits, 9 pushes in 8 months
Contributions summary:Grant primarily focused on configuring and modifying the `deploy/templates/tilestache.conf.erb` file, which suggests involvement in infrastructure setup and configuration management. The commits reveal interaction with PostgreSQL database settings, query paths, and environment variables, indicating a role in database integration and management. Their work also includes fixing pathing issues and adding logging within the deployment scripts.
pythonfltkmap-editortilesetmapzen
valhalla/docker
Sep 2016 - Jan 2018
docker
Contributions:95 commits, 9 PRs, 88 pushes in 1 year 4 months
docker-composedocker-imagedocker
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