Peter Murphy

Work Experience

Senior Software Engineer 01/2022 - present
Credit Karma Charlotte, NC
  • Overhauled the declined-transaction experience by persisting and classifying decline reasons in-app, substantially reducing member support contacts; serve as the cross-team authority on debit decline and fraud behavior, representing CK Engineering on banking-partner escalation calls.
  • Built the infrastructure powering ~25K automated recurring and scheduled deposits daily, using Kafka and dead-letter queues to guarantee funds move even through network failures, with integrated fraud safeguards.
  • Helped build debit card lifecycle automation on the banking partner's API, including member and fraud-triggered lock/unlock and an expiry-driven renewal system that suppresses reissuance for inactive members to cut unnecessary card-production costs.
  • Designed and built Credit Karma Money's ATM fee system end-to-end, spanning transaction classification, fee orchestration, and cross-service notifications on a platform processing ~500K debit transactions daily, with an accompanying ATM Finder that surfaces nearby in- and out-of-network ATMs by merging Allpoint's partner network with Google Places.
  • Built the fee assessment and reversal components of Instant Transfers, coordinating the flow across several services.
  • Designed and built a new Disputes microservice from the ground up, owning everything from schema and data access to public APIs and async event consumers, to power the member disputes and chargebacks flow.
  • Improved the Personal Loans experience by tailoring offer presentation to each member's credit profile and financial situation, and launched a "First Loan Marketplace" for first-time borrowers.
  • Serve as product-engineering technical lead for Credit Karma's GenAI initiatives in Credit Cards: "See Why," which generates personalized offer-fit explanations now serving ~800K impressions weekly and expanding to higher-visibility surfaces; an Approval Odds explainability feature developed with the Data Science team; and an OpenAI integration surfacing CK-branded offers inside ChatGPT.
  • Drove a 6.5% site-wide revenue-per-user lift (~$100M/yr) by building contextualized headers for the Credit Cards marketplace that inject curated member and offer facts into offer presentation, with a related recommendation-system change adding a further +1.4%.
  • Continue to drive design iteration across the Credit Cards marketplaces in frequent collaboration with partners including American Express, Chase, Capital One, and other major issuers.
  • Treat observability and resilience as first-class deliverables, building the dashboards, runbooks, and onboarding documentation that keep systems healthy and teams self-sufficient well beyond any single rollout or subject-matter expert.
Coach 12/2018 - 06/2024
Major League Hacking Global
  • Mentored hackers building technical projects, on everything from general debugging to integrating partner APIs (Capital One, Google Cloud, GitHub) and deploying full-stack applications.
  • Advised event organizers before and on-site on team leadership, resource management, community engagement, and incident resolution.
  • Whether that meant #TakingOutTheTrash or resolving conflicts, demonstrated MLH's standard of excellence at events hosting 200 - 1,500 participants.
  • Fostered an inclusive environment by engaging participants across all skill levels and backgrounds.
  • Served as a North America Coach Lead, running 1:1s with fellow Coaches to strengthen MLH's internal support network through the pandemic era of fully-remote hackathons.
Data Engineering Intern 06/2021 - 08/2021
Credit Karma Alexandria, VA
  • Contributed forecasting features to an internal audience-targeting service, letting story and notification authors estimate a recommendation's reach before publishing, and improved the service's observability and diagnostics.
Software Engineer 06/2019 - 01/2021
Decipher Technology Studios Alexandria, VA
  • Researched and implemented ML techniques for automated anomaly detection at the microservice orchestration layer, applying autoencoders and reinforcement learning, including policy stabilization and sequence-to-sequence encoding.
  • Extended Envoy's proxy API to contribute control-plane features to the GreyMatter service mesh.
Policy Intern 06/2020 - 08/2020
DCLRS Washington, D.C.
  • Covered Congressional hearings and conferences, reporting on agricultural, business, and healthcare interests.
  • Wrote memos synthesizing research and legislative developments relevant to clients.
  • Redesigned the firm's biographical brochure in Adobe InDesign.

Education

B.S. in Computer Science 2021
Virginia Tech, College of Engineering

Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Minor

Leadership

VTHacks 2019 - 2021

Director, Co-Director, Sponsorship, Public Relations

Planned and executed Virginia Tech's 6th through 9th hackathons across four leadership roles.

Virginia Tech Honor System 2018 - 2021

Student Panel Member

Served on panels for student-run honor code hearings.

Coding Club 2015 - 2018

Founder, Director

Founded, planned, and executed Bishop Ireton's first hackathon.

Boy Scouts, Troop 680 2015 - 2016

Senior Patrol Leader

Planned and led weekly meetings for a 50-scout troop.

Honors & Awards

Eagle Scout 07/2015

Boy Scouts of America

Attained Scouting's highest rank, plus the Bronze, Gold, and Silver Palms.

Valedictorian 06/2018

Bishop Ireton Class of 2018

MLH 2020 Top 50 Hacker 02/2020

Major League Hacking

Selected from over 100,000 global hackers to share my story for Major League Hacking's Top 50 Hackers of 2020.

Skills

Languages

TypeScript, Scala, Python, Java, C, Go

Frameworks & Libraries

React, Next.js, Finagle, Cats, PyTorch, pandas

Infrastructure

Docker, Kubernetes, Google Cloud, Kafka

Tools

Splunk, New Relic, Claude Code, Git

Practices

Technical writing & documentation, cross-team communication, project planning, mentorship

Projects

5-4 Podcast Website 08/2020

Designed and maintain the 5-4 podcast website, including automated pagination of episodes and their transcripts.

Personal Website 02/2020

Portfolio site built with Next.js for my blog and reading list.

PyTorch Basics 01/2020

A sandbox repo built with colleagues to showcase MVP implementations of state-of-the-art Reinforcement Learning algorithms researched by the Decipher ML/AI R&D team.

DCLRS Brochure 07/2020

Redesigned DCLRS's biographical brochure in Adobe InDesign, covering executive staff, firm services, and customer success stories.

AECOM Call Tracker 02/2020

Built a webscraping tool for an AECOM hurricane-relief call center in Ponce, Puerto Rico, which pulled call records over a chosen time range and was deployed to EC2 so staff could analyze daily productivity.

Python MIPS32 Assembler 08/2021

A Python assembler that generates machine code from valid .asm, supporting 20+ instructions; adapted from a CS-2506 assignment.