About

My name is Eli Hickox. I'm a software engineer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. I spent three years studying Mathematics and Computer Science at The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before dropping out to join the systems team at RelateIQ, which was acquired by Salesforce.

At RelateIQ, which later became SalesforceIQ and then Einstein, I worked on what would now be called predictive systems and automated intelligence. The whole premise was using data and signals to automatically capture and surface relationship intelligence that salespeople would normally have to manually track. I spent three years as a backend engineer building integrations like Salesforce Inbox and Automated Activity Capture. I built geolocation features for read receipts, the mobile news feed, and custom object support.

My most important work there was designing and implementing real-time content control systems for organizational activity timelines. This landed me two patents: US Patent 10,686,741 (Method and System for Real-Time Blocking of Content from an Organization Activity Timeline, granted June 16, 2020) and US Patent 10,719,811 (Method and System for Retroactive Removal of Content from an Organization Activity Timeline, granted July 21, 2020). These systems use identifier-based blacklists to evaluate and filter activities in real time or retroactively. The same kind of high-throughput filtering and routing logic you see in modern AI systems.

In my last year at Salesforce, I moved to their Networking and Security team. I learned AWS, Terraform, Chef, and the rest of the infrastructure toolkit. I built a Terraform as a Service prototype to unify the infrastructure of Salesforce's various acquisitions. I also deployed and maintained a PGP keyserver for commit signing across teams.

After Salesforce, I joined Split Software as a backend engineer. I worked on workspaces and the event ingestion pipeline, which processed metrics at scale for A/B testing and feature flags. I built the Alerting and Monitoring feature from the ground up. Split was all about data-driven decision making long before that became standard practice.

Next, I spent nearly a year as a full-stack engineer at Lyric Hospitality. I worked on the GDS integration and affiliate tracking with sites like KAYAK.com. My biggest project was building a reservation optimization system using Optaplanner that increased unit availability by 8% across the entire inventory. I wrote the Terraform, the Java code, and everything in between. This was constraint optimization on real data, solving problems that standard algorithms couldn't handle. Unfortunately the pandemic hit and the company closed up shop like many others in hospitality.

I spent over two years at Eaze, joining during the height of COVID when the cannabis delivery business was booming. I was brought on as a backend engineer to build the API Gateway for a new React Native driver app. From there I worked across the stack, including the METRC compliance systems that enabled Eaze's expansion into Michigan. My final role was Data Engineer on the Analytics team, where I modernized their Python infrastructure and helped establish best practices.

At Chainalysis I spent nearly three years as a Senior Data Engineer on the Data Cloud team. I worked on the next-generation real-time blockchain ingestion system built on Databricks Delta Live Tables, implementing a massive-scale streaming join architecture that could handle chains with billions of transactions at low latency. I worked directly with Databricks Solutions Architects, using undocumented beta features to push the performance boundaries. I also maintained infrastructure for the Investigations API used by agencies like the IRS and FBI, and I built a beta pre-production environment to improve operational efficiency and compliance.

I'm currently a founding engineer at AnySoft, where we're building the future of enterprise software. I'm the infrastructure engineer on our small team, responsible for our multi-tenant Kubernetes architecture and cloud compliance. I also write application code when needed. My focus is building systems that let us scale and innovate safely without needing a massive team behind me.

This is my personal website which showcases my portfolio of personal projects and provides links to my profiles on various websites. To see some of my projects, check out the Projects page. Note that this is an incomplete list—the pace of software development is rapid and I don't always have time to update my website. To see a more complete collection of my projects, check out my GitHub or GitLab. Although even this is not a complete picture as I do use several version control hosting platforms, including privately hosted ones.