Rob Helmer

Summary

Full Stack Staff Engineer with 20+ years of experience building privacy-first consumer products and scalable web applications. Proven technical leader specializing in frontend architecture, team mentorship, and cross-functional collaboration. Expert in modernizing legacy systems, establishing engineering best practices, and shipping products impacting millions of users globally.

Experience

Staff Software Engineer Hims & Hers Health, Inc. 2025–Present

Lead engineering initiatives for secure, AI-augmented pharmacy technology platform serving millions of patients
Architect high-reliability UI systems for mission-critical healthcare applications and pharmacy workflows
Implement privacy-preserving telemetry and observability systems for mission-critical healthcare applications

Senior Staff Software Engineer Mozilla 2010–2025

Led frontend architecture redesign of Mozilla Monitor using React/Next.js/TypeScript, reducing release cycles from weekly to daily while mentoring engineers on modern development patterns and performance optimization.
Architected scalable breach monitoring infrastructure processing millions of data breach records using Node.js and GCP, implementing privacy-preserving aggregation with automated CI/CD through GitHub Actions and Argo.
Drove technical standards adoption across privacy research projects with Stanford and Princeton, establishing frameworks that analyzed 4.4M webpage visits and influenced Firefox telemetry systems.
Integrated privacy-preserving Prio telemetry into Firefox Experiments with MIT CSAIL, ensuring user data protection at enterprise scale.
Delivered LLM-powered semantic web search features, enabling more intelligent and context-aware discovery.

VP of Technology CustomWeather 2008–2010

Led engineering team delivering real-time weather data services with AWS automation, improving system uptime to 99.9% and mentoring junior developers on scalable architecture patterns.

Additional Experience

Earlier roles (1999–2006): Systems engineering and infrastructure consulting for internet and enterprise clients including CustomWeather, Aeronet, Vectiv/Dollartree, Skeva, Vectiv Corp., and Valuestar. Focused on scalable hosting infrastructure, Java application deployment, datacenter migrations, and early DevOps practices supporting high-profile clients such as Lycos, Vodafone, and Reuters.

Publications & Industry Collaborations

Industry Collaborator (Mozilla) – Rally and WebScience (Princeton, 2022): Developed browser-based research platform infrastructure analyzing 4.4M webpage visits from 1,817 participants. [arXiv]
Industry Contributor (Mozilla) – Protecting Privacy by Splitting Trust (MIT CSAIL, 2019): Integrated libprio privacy-preserving aggregation library into Firefox. [Dissertation]
Author – AI-Powered Analytics Reports with MCP (2025): Built and open-sourced an analytics reporting tool integrating the Model Context Protocol (MCP), Google Gemini, and Umami for natural language queries and automated insights. [Blog] | [GitHub]

Skills

Languages: JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, C++, Rust, SQL

Frontend: React, Next.js, advanced state management, performance optimization, component architecture

Backend: Node.js, microservices, RESTful APIs, FastAPI, Django, Flask, Redis, PostgreSQL

DevOps & Infrastructure: Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, GitHub Actions, CI/CD automation, Argo, Terraform, monitoring (Grafana, Prometheus)

AI/LLM & MCP: Semantic search, generative AI integration, Model Context Protocol (MCP), embedding-based retrieval, AI-powered analytics

Focus Areas: Technical leadership, frontend architecture, full-stack development, privacy engineering, distributed systems, team mentorship