CMU MSE Application

Application materials for Carnegie Mellon University’s Master of Software Engineering program (Engineering Leadership specialization).

Essays

CMU MSE Application Essays (PDF)

Digital Portfolio Video Script

Prompt: Tell us about something that you’re particularly passionate about. (3 min max)

Topic: Open Source Infrastructure

Almost every system I’ve built professionally runs on software I didn’t write and didn’t pay for. The Linux kernel. Bazel. Pandas. PostgreSQL. Tools that took decades of collective work to become reliable enough that I can treat them as given.

I manage build and release infrastructure at Cboe Global Markets. We support exchanges that process close to a hundred billion dollars in trades every day. The stack that makes that possible — the schedulers, the build tools, the container runtimes — is almost entirely open source. That’s not incidental. It’s the foundation.

For a long time I didn’t think much about that. I pulled dependencies, I shipped code, I moved on. What changed my thinking was going deep on Bazel while building our CI pipeline. I wasn’t just using it — I was reading the source to understand why certain caching decisions were made, filing issues, reading design docs written by engineers at Google who’d thought carefully about problems I was just starting to encounter. There was this moment where I realized: these people solved this problem in public, documented their reasoning in public, and left it for anyone to build on. And I was benefiting from that enormously.

That reoriented how I think about my own work. The tooling I build — the pipelines, the deployment infrastructure, the test frameworks — other engineers at my company depend on that the same way I depend on Bazel. They trust it without thinking about it. Which means the quality bar isn’t just about whether it works. It’s about whether it’s understandable, maintainable, and honest about its failure modes. The same things that make open source good make internal infrastructure good.

What I want to do long-term is build that kind of infrastructure at a larger scale — and eventually contribute back more directly to the tools I’ve built on. That requires being a better engineer, but also a better communicator and a better leader.

That’s what I’m coming to CMU to learn.