Buffalo, Missouri, United States (remote). Willing to relocate.

Summary

Staff software engineer with a passion for agentic development, combining cutting-edge tools & tactics with deep expertise. Former director of engineering ($30.4MM acquisition exit) who returned to building with technical excellence & executive context. Improves team outcomes through mentorship & service.

Experience

Over The Top

–

Staff Software Engineer

Irvine, California (remote)
  • Co-founded AI task force with executives to research and implement safe and effective use of LLMs and other emerging technologies to reduce costs, increase productivity, and enable new capabilities.
  • Created vibe coding environment that combines prompt engineering with deterministic quality gates and process guard rails, enabling business stakeholders to create value with software development.
  • Established agent-friendly foundation for the next era of front-end development using C#, .NET, JavaScript, Hotwire Turbo, Stimulus, and Server-Side Rendering (SSR) for better performance & UX.
  • Modernized pre-Signals Angular app, enabling the team to ship features faster with improved stability.
  • Facilitated DevOps best practices including CI, CD, observability, usage metrics, and phased rollouts.
  • Led learning initiatives for software engineers, QA testers, UI/UX designers, and product managers.
  • Established agile best practices including retrospectives and cross-functional example mapping.

Senior Front-End Software Engineer

Irvine, CA (remote)
  • Improved app performance and reliability to reduce support costs and increase net promoter score.
  • Designed, implemented, and documented a real-time notifications system with a plugin architecture.
  • Increased team throughput and lowered defect rate by introducing CI and CD (continuous delivery).
  • Owned and implemented large features, resulting in a 22% year-over-year increase in conversions.

Upland Software: Second Street

–

Director of Software Engineering (Upland)

Austin, Texas (remote)
  • Reduced operating budget by over 50% to meet corporate profitability targets through restructuring.
  • Coordinated cross-departmental efforts to migrate legacy applications from dedicated servers to AWS.

Director of Software Engineering (Second Street)

St. Louis, MO (remote)
  • Led 16-person engineering department of a $9.4MM ARR B2B SaaS company to $30.4MM acquisition.
  • Designed lean product roadmap prioritization process to focus on shipping value through deadline-driven feature ranking and customer empathy exercises with cross-functional managers and directors.
  • Trained managers in conflict resolution, team building, project management, and talent acquisition.
  • Orchestrated the cross-functional response to a high-stakes operational incident by establishing a communication and coordination framework for rapid mitigation while keeping stakeholders informed.

Software Engineering Manager

St. Louis, MO
  • Doubled engineering team velocity through process innovation, waste reduction, hiring, and coaching.
  • Coordinated with managers and stakeholders from each team to align priorities and solicit feedback.
  • Established career support framework for software engineers, including formal one-on-ones, reviews, goals, title leveling, and a skill competency matrix to increase retention, job satisfaction, and growth.

Front-End Engineering Tech Lead

St. Louis, MO
  • Developed a software development kit (SDK) and JavaScript API to support third-party integrations, allowing our customers’ developers to build single sign-on (SSO), analytics, and enhanced features.
  • Built an apprenticeship program to mentor juniors in programming, refactoring, kanban, and design.
  • Developed micro front-ends using React.js and webpack to ship a new product with faster load times.

Senior Front-End Software Engineer

St. Louis, MO
  • Innovated our front-end integration strategy by writing a cross-iframe communication library and an embed script to reduce bugs, shorten cycle time, ease debugging, and increase customer satisfaction.
  • Developed single page application (SPA) products using Ember.js, Sass, and RESTful JSON APIs.
  • Improved regression and defect rate by introducing test-driven development (TDD) using QUnit.

Front-End Developer

St. Louis, MO
  • Built the company's technical foundation for the next decade by investigating front-end frameworks, co-designing a REST-based JSON API with the back-end team, and implementing an Ember.js MVP.
  • Enhanced user experience by shipping product features using HTML, Less CSS, JavaScript, and jQuery.
  • Designed and developed a no-code responsive web design tool using CoffeeScript and Backbone.js.

Southeast Missouri State University

– (part-time)

Student Web Developer, Web Design & Support

Cape Girardeau, MO
  • Shipped comprehensive redesign of university website (www.semo.edu) using HTML, CSS, and jQuery.
  • Enhanced website with calendar and RSS widgets, image sliders, and social network API integrations.

Projects & Outside Experience

Kerrick Design, LLC

– (part-time)

Freelance Web Developer

Buffalo, MO
  • Created Ruby bindings for Ratatui (Rust) to make Terminal UIs (TUIs) in Ruby, used by Sidekiq & more.
  • Developed Rooibos, a Ruby framework using The Elm Architecture (MVU) and functional programming.
  • Built and deployed a full-stack audio processing app with Ruby, Sinatra, HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript.
  • Shipped Google Chrome extensions with over 10,000 users using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and JSDoc.

Long Term Software

– (part-time)

Software Consultant

Buffalo, MO
  • Built and deployed full-stack MVPs using Ruby on Rails, Hotwire, Stimulus, Docker, and Kamal.
  • Collaborated using pair programming to diagnose and fix bugs and ship features in a Vue.js web app.

Manning Publications & IT Revolution

– (part-time)

Technical Manuscript Reviewer

Remote
  • Vibe Coding by Gene Kim & Steve Yegge; Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja, Third Edition by Burnham et al.; The Feedback-Driven Developer by Ashley Davis; Sass and Compass in Action by Netherland et al.

Skills & Interests