Delaine Ackerman

About Delaine Ackerman

I’m a backend engineer with 9+ years of experience building scalable, distributed systems, with a focus on search and high-performance backend systems.I enjoy owning complex technical problems end-to-end - from shaping architecture and setting technical direction to delivering reliable systems at scale.I care deeply about writing clear, maintainable code, raising engineering standards, and mentoring others. I’m motivated by solving hard problems that matter, especially where software directly intersects with human needs.Currently building at Eventbrite.

Experience

1. Staff Software Engineer

   Eventbrite

   Sep 2022 — Present

   Architected and delivered a Learning-to-Rank (LTR) system for event search using XGBoost and OpenSearch LTR, improving search-driven ticket sales by 2.3%- Designed and maintained ML data pipelines that transformed user interaction logs into implicit relevance judgments and query-level features, enabling model training and real-time LTR serving in OpenSearch.* Built and deployed a search query understanding service that increased paid ticket sales by 14.1%, establishing foundational architecture later extended to LLM-based approaches.* Designed and prototyped a two-tower embedding-based reranking system to unify cross-surface discovery, defining embedding transfer pipelines and low-latency real-time ranking architecture.* Re-architected and implemented the OpenSearch ingestion pipeline processing millions of updates daily, eliminating a single-consumer Kafka bottleneck- Built a Kafka-to-SQS bridge with scalable Nomad workers and DLQ handling, reducing indexing lag from 15–24 hours to <30 seconds while ensuring durable delivery.* Engineered scalable ingestion and indexing workflows (SQS, AWS Lambda) to integrate third-party quality signals into OpenSearch, improving relevance and driving additional ticket sales per month.* Led a team of 8 engineers, split into two squads, to develop a new page type on the Eventbrite site* Maintain and work on three backend services* Work across three teams to review architectural designs and ensure projects are delivered on time

Education

• Nashville Software School

  Software Development

  2016 — 2016

• Universidad de Sevilla

  Spanish Language and Literature

  2010 — 2010

• University of Minnesota

  Bachelor of Arts (B.A.)

  2007 — 2011

• University of Minnesota

  Masters of Education

  2011 — 2013