Lee Pender
Product-minded engineering leader and entrepreneur with 15 years experience building teams, products and platforms.
Professional Experience
Thought Driven Development
Role: Founder and CTO
Size: 1-5 engineers
Duration: 9 years
A boutique remote software consulting agency, (formerly Lunchtime Labs) specializing in native and web app development.
Recent Clients
American Express
Role: Technical Advisor to Global Services Automation Division
Size of engagement: 1 engineer
Duration: 4 months
Skills: product, process, technical strategy
- Identified technical gaps and issues in internal processes, cross-functional communication and workflows.
- Rough-sized gaps and issues in terms of risk and costs to the business.
- Delivered a series of recommendations rooted in agile principles.
2k games
Role: Technical Lead
Size of engagement: 3 engineers
Duration: 1 year
Skills: architecture, agile, compliance product design, rails, typescript, react, terraform, IAC, AWS, OpenAPI OAS, TDD, API design
- Technical lead for a team of three developers.
- Designed and implemented a Rails service and React UI for third-party DSAR request fulfillment, which decreased Time-to-Resolution by 10x.
- Increased developer velocity by 2x through technical upgrades to local build stack.
- Designed and launched a modular Rails + Contentful framework for customer- facing wikis, enabling 5+ teams to self-serve with minimal engineering support.
University of Chicago
Role: Product and Engineering Lead
Size of engagement: 3 engineers, 1 UX designer
Duration: 4 years
Skills: elixir, golang, product design, typescript, react, microservices, concurrent processing, fault-tolerant, geo-spatial analysis
- Worked with faculty and students on a criminal justice reform initiative led by professor Steven Levitt, co-author of "Freakonomics ".
- Hired and led team of three engineers and a UX designer.
- Architected and implemented fault-tolerant, microservices-based concurrent data pipeline in Elixir and Golang, processing real-time geo-spatial analysis at scale.
IBM
Role: Senior Software Engineer
Size of engagement: 1 engineer
Duration: 4+ years
Skills: mysql, data analytics, monitoring, security, caching, performance, react, typescript
- Built a series of lead-generation assessments in React.
- Led initiatives to migrate blog data, unifying data from dozens of blogs using custom data transformation scripts built in Ruby.j
- Performed SQL data analysis and manipulation of scattered Wordpress tag and category taxonomies, bringing conformity between blog taxonomy and internal taxonomies from 14% to 100%.
- Worked with the devops team to create fault-tolerant and performant blog deployment.
- Designed cache strategies including development of a custom page caching plugin for WordPress with advanced invalidation rules.
Mack Weldon
Role: Fractional CTO
Size of engagement: 3 engineers
Duration: 1 year
Skills: ecommerce, rails, spree, shopify, vue, javascript, monitoring, security, caching, performance, react, typescript
- Acting as fractional CTO for Mack Weldon, responsible for technical architecture, monitoring and security for the organization during a period of substantial growth.
- Led design and construction of loyalty Shopify app and generated a proposed updated design for their returns app.
- Oversaw the zero-downtime cut over from Rails/Spree to Shopify.
- Cut page load time in half by re-architecting frontend pipeline with Vue and optimizing Shopify's cache strategy, directly improving conversion during growth phase.
- On my own initiative, built a system which alerts on late orders saving the company $100k+.
Consensys
Role: Senior Software Engineer
Size of engagement: 1 engineer
Duration: 1 year
Skills: design, development, product, jekyll, react, typescript
- Worked on the Rhombus project, involving Eth oracles.
- Revamped landing page, removing jank, improving load times and SEO.
- Implemented new features and designs, e.g. picture-in-picture.
- Created concept and slide deck for a presentation at Eth Denver.
- Named, designed ui and workflows and built their blog "Oracular Vernacular".
Software developer II
SkilledUp Accelerator
Role: Software Developer
Size of team: 10 engineers
Duration: 1 year+
Skills: rails, react, typescript, javascript, sql, heroku
- Working embedded with the team at thoughtbot NYC, developed an educational web platform in Rails and React.
Lead front end developer
HealthGuru.com/Kitara Media
Role: Lead Front End Developer
Size of team: ~10 engineers
Duration: 3 years
Skills: php, javascript, html, css
- Oversaw the front end department during a period of substantial growth, from 20-60 employees, culminating in acquisition by a publicly held company, Kitara Media.
- Implemented a total site responsive redesign.
- Led frontend team in the development and implementation of internal tools.