Josh Fayer

Hi there, I’m Josh (he/him)! I’m a Data & Software Engineer at CleanDNS on the Research and Development team. My current focuses are research into internet abuse and how to identify and act on early patterns of online harms. I also contribute to the design and implementation of the data processing architecture that powers our abuse mitigation platform and automations.

Brief employment history #

I graduated from Syracuse Unviersity (🍊) in 2020 with a degree in Public Relations and minors in Computer Science and Political Science. I quickly found my passion in software development, and switched into developing software professionally.

From 2020-2023, I worked at Break Something, a political media firm, developing websites, data dashboards, and other custom software.

In 2023, I was hired as a Junior Software Developer at CleanDNS mostly writing React and Node.js serverless functions to power our internet abuse mitigation platform. In April 2024, I was promoted to Data & Software Engineer.

Nowadays at CleanDNS, I spend most of my time in the backend, developing APIs and microservices, data pipelines, machine learning models, and our sinkhole product (see Particular Accomplishments below).

A few of my favorite things (technologies) #

Below are, in no particular order, some technologies I use every day and that I have a special place in my heart for:

Particular accomplishments #

In early 2024, I was a lead developer of CleanDNS’s sinkhole product. The sinkhole is an alternative method for DNS registrars and registries to mitigate abusive domain names. Instead of simply shutting down the sites by applying a client or server hold, clients can partner with us to point the domains at our sinkhole, mitigating the abuse while allowing us to collect DNS and web traffic logs. Our sinkhole processes over 90 million DNS and web logs per day and is growing constantly!

Contact Info #