Software Engineer II, 2021 — 2023
Northfield Labs
Building field-data tools for people who work where the network doesn't.
- Role
- Software Engineer II
- Period
- 2021 — 2023
- The place
- Civil engineering software · field operations · ~60 employees
At Northfield I built data infrastructure for civil engineering clients — the systems that get information from a bridge or a job site back into an office reliably. The flagship was Fieldnote, an offline-first inspection app, which pushed me deep into local-first architecture and conflict resolution.
What I did there
Shipped Fieldnote end to end
Led the offline architecture and CRDT-based sync layer for an inspection app now used by 1,200 field inspectors, halving data-entry time and ending lost paper reports.
Owned the sync backend
Designed the resumable, deduplicating sync service that survives the intermittent connectivity of field work, along with the content-addressed store for large photo attachments.
Worked directly with the field
Spent time on real inspection crews shaping the capture flow. Building with the users rather than for them is a habit I picked up here and haven't dropped since.
What it changed
- Inspectors migrated
- 1,200
- Data-entry time
- −50%
- Lost reports since launch
- 0