Bill Reed

Software Engineering

I'm looking for a technical leadership position. My goals are to make my team successful, to always be learning, and to help others around me to grow.

Work Experience

Senior Software Engineer/Tech Lead, Dockwa

December 2022 - Current
  • Tech Lead for a team of engineers supporting functionality across both sides of the product marketplace.
  • Collaborated with employees at all levels across multiple departments, including product, design, engineering, customer support, and marketing.
  • Architected and introduced the usage of modern React including functional components, hooks, react-query, react-hook-form, jest, and other technologies. Provided best practices documentation, a tech talk, a Rails integration, and in-person resources to help engineers learn the new technologies. Resulted in faster development on the front-end, test coverage where there was none before, and an increase in developer happiness.
  • Improved upon existing processes and introduced new ones to facilitate on-time project delivery and enhance team members' planning and development skills. Led by example, then delegated the same tasks to team members and leaned in where necessary to help them grow and ensure delivery.
  • Provided timeline estimates for projects involving multiple team members and consistently delivered within the expected timelines.
  • Successfully led team through multiple abrupt product pivots. Involved the whole team in planning for the next pieces of work while holding everyone accountable.
  • Mentored junior and senior team members with regular 1:1s, group discussions, PR reviews, tech talks, documentation, and ad-hoc conversations. Coached an engineer to grow from backend-only into a full stack role.
  • Advocated for promotions and raises for team members, resulting in the successful promotion of one team member and a salary increase for another.
  • Kept team morale high during tough projects by focusing on what we learned from our missteps and getting small keepsakes for team members.
  • Architected multiple major features such as profile photo uploads, long term waitlist, and a POS system.
  • Guided team members during planning to make architecture decisions that kept the product maintainable and scalable.
  • Effectively onboarded new team members with dedicated tickets to ease engineers into the team's domain. Was described by one engineer as the "easiest onboarding I've had to a team at Dockwa."
  • Acted as a technical resource for engineers across all teams for all aspects of our tech stack.
  • Initiated, led, and documented investigations into site-wide slowdowns. Resulted in discoveries of heavy asynchronous jobs and fixes for them that brought performance back to expected levels.
  • Developed a take-home interview question while collaborating with engineering leaders, the design team, and recruiters. Created a template repository on Github to make the process as easy as possible for candidates.
  • Developed a stop-gap design system hub and later sponsored the implementation of Storybook for improved developer and designer collaboration.

Senior Software Engineer/Tech Lead, Breezeway

September 2021 - August 2022
  • Tech Lead for a team of 6 engineers spanning web and mobile applications.
  • Updated team processes, collaborated with the product manager, and led by example in order to drive the team to deliver on time and ensure features matched requirements
  • Aligned the team’s processes to adapt to business goals, often making trade-offs between technical debt and fast feature delivery.
  • Consistently collaborated with product manager and stakeholders to build a roadmap two quarters out considering technical feasibility, risks, and trade-offs while advocating for impactful tech debt.
  • Coordinated projects and best practices across multiple teams alongside two other Tech Leads.
  • Established hiring plan for direct team and participated in interviews and feedback sessions for open engineering IC and Tech Lead roles.
  • Mentored junior and senior engineers across the organization to improve their abilities to plan projects while considering technical debt and trade-offs, break down large efforts into tickets, collaborate with other engineers and departments, increase their technical depth, and various other improvement areas.
  • Introduced documentation best practices for production issues and daily tasks resulting in new and continually updated “playbooks” for the team to reference.
  • Encouraged engineering best practices through tech talks, documentation, team discussions, and 1-on-1 mentoring.
  • Established subject matter expertise for the company in JavaScript, React, Redux, CSS, API development, testing factories, and ORM usage.
  • Architected and built multiple major features in the product. Examples include creating the concept of user account settings and standardizing how “deep selection” is handled for bulk actions across the product.

Senior Software Engineer, BookBub and Chirp Books

September 2016 - September 2021
  • Architected and built multiple major features in the product. Examples include modifying the campaign emailing system to support ad-hoc emails, implementing a shopping cart and modifying the checkout flow to support it, creating a blog with dynamic embeddable content, collaborating on a multi-step signup flow, and building a responsive carousel.
  • Established subject matter expertise for the company in JavaScript, React, and CSS.
  • Mentored interns, co-ops, and junior engineers on my teams to improve their ability to break down and solve large problems, write clean code, and perform meaningful code reviews.
  • Used internal tooling to perform A/B Testing, collect feature usage metrics, and do gradual rollouts to ensure improved conversion rates and increased user interaction.
  • Introduced React hooks and GraphQL to the engineering organization through hack days, tech talks, team-focused training sessions, and 1-on-1 mentoring. Resulted in the full engineering organization of about 30 engineers adopting the technologies.
  • Refactored code which had stalled development due to tech debt, resulting in revitalizing feature development and bug fixes.
  • Integrated applications with third party products, including email providers (SendGrid and Sendwithus), Google services (Adsense and ReCaptcha v2 and v3), and marketing services (Instapage and Optinmonster).
  • Performed technical interviews for candidates on-site and via phone screens for engineering internships, co-ops, and up to senior IC roles.
  • Monitored for production issues, helping to triage, create hot-fix solutions, and address the root cause. Created post-mortem documents when needed, and collaborated to ensure tech debt was addressed to prevent future issues.

Senior Software Engineer, GE Digital

March 2016 - September 2016

Software Engineer, GE Digital

July 2014 - March 2016

Edison Engineering Development Program, GE Healthcare

July 2012 - July 2014
  • Tech lead for a team of 4 engineers responsible for the website for the Predix cloud platform. Functionality included browsing a catalog of available application services (databases, messaging queues, etc) and a dashboard for accounts to view their hosted applications and services.
  • Worked with product, marketing, and stakeholders across the GE businesses (aviation, healthcare, etc.) to gather and refine requirements to support internal and external customers using the Predix platform.
  • Hosted a bi-weekly internal developer meetup highlighting interesting work done across the engineering department. Gave developers the chance to connect across teams, ask questions, and expand their knowledge.
  • Participated in the Edison Engineering Development programming consisting of three rotations across different GE businesses and teams. Took company-taught courses on software development and created patent proposals.

Personal Projects

DecreeJS
Created a JavaScript library to listen for key sequences and execute functions when they occur. The library has no dependencies, full unit test coverage, and can respond to complex, multi-step key sequences with any key as a modifier.
Personal Blog
Personal blog with a focus on game development.
Various WIP Games

WIP Sidescrolling Adventure Game - Combat oriented platformer with multiple zones, NPCs with dialogue, and bow combat.

WIP Dungeon Puzzle Game - Mobile-focused puzzle game where the player navigates dungeons to reach the exit and avoid dying.

Proficiencies

Languages

  • JavaScript
  • HTML5
  • CSS/SASS
  • TypeScript
  • Ruby
  • Python
  • Java
  • Kotlin
  • Swift

Technologies

  • Git
  • Webpack
  • Async Jobs
  • PostgreSQL
  • A/B Testing
  • Feature Flags
  • AWS

Front-end

  • React
  • Redux
  • Tailwind
  • Angular 1
  • Phaser

Back-end

  • Ruby on Rails
  • Node
  • Flask
  • Nginx
  • Spring Boot

Mobile

  • React Native
  • iOS
  • Android

Education

Bucknell University

2008 - 2012
  • B.S. Computer Science & Engineering
  • Minor in Applied Mathematics and Modeling
  • GPA: 3.53