Lee Pender

Product-minded engineering leader and entrepreneur with 15 years experience building teams, products and platforms.

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Professional Experience

January 2016-Present

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

February 2025-Present

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.
March 2023-June 2024

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.
August 2019-June 2024

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.
July 2020-January 2025

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.
Feb 2019-July 2020

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+.
Nov 2018-Nov 2019

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".

April 2014-August 2015

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.
January 2011-April 2014

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.
March 2010-January 2011

Front end developer

HealthGuru.com/Kitara Media