Squadsy (Acquired by ClayHR)
Founding Software Engineer
In August 2023, I joined an early-stage startup as the sole engineer. I inherited an agency-built MVP that was technically insolvent: it had 0% test coverage, ran on deprecated dependencies, and was plagued by frequent production crashes. Over the next two years, I acted as the Architect, Lead Developer, and DevOps Engineer, transforming a "black box" codebase into a high-performance B2B platform that was successfully acquired by ClayHR.
View detailed work
The Technical Rescue: Zero to Production
When I started, I had never used Ruby on Rails. Within weeks, I had self-taught the framework, stabilized the existing features, and began shipping critical updates. I transitioned the company from a "firefighting" culture to a stable, scalable engineering environment by:
- Dockerizing the Environment: I containerized the legacy stack to eliminate environment parity issues and created a repeatable, reliable build process.
- Proactive Observability: I implemented a centralized error-handling suite using Bugsnag and Slack, building a real-time alerting pipeline that allowed us to resolve production issues before they impacted our enterprise clients.
Core Product: The Automation & Analytics Engine
I owned the full lifecycle of our core product features, ensuring they were robust enough for enterprise HR departments.- The "Journey" Builder: Architected a flexible automation engine that allowed HR leaders to trigger complex employee workflows based on dynamic HRIS data (birthdays, tenure, or role changes).
- Enterprise Integrations: Overhauled our OAuth 2.0 flows and built an event-driven ingestion pipeline for bulk HRIS data. This ensured secure, high-speed syncing with third-party platforms like Slack, Twilio, and Merge.dev.
- Business Intelligence Suite: I designed a proprietary analytics engine from scratch. It didn’t just track opens and clicks; I engineered a custom query layer that allowed users to perform multi-dimensional segmentation—filtering engagement trends by department, job role, and location to derive actual employee sentiment.
Performance Engineering at Scale
As our B2B client base grew, the initial architecture hit a ceiling. I led a deep-dive refactoring of the data layer to support enterprise-grade datasets:
- 300x Latency Reduction:By optimizing SQL generation and implementing advanced indexing, I reduced response times for high-load filtering queries by 300x.
- Baseline Improvements: Achieved a 20x speed increase across general system queries, ensuring a lag-free experience for managers handling 10,000+ employee records.
- Reliability: Implemented a leaky-bucket rate-limiting algorithm and background job throttling to protect our infrastructure from external API spikes and webhook floods.
DevOps & Infrastructure
I managed the company’s entire AWS footprint, treating infrastructure as a first-class citizen:
- 50% Cost Reduction: Conducted a comprehensive audit of our cloud spend. By migrating deprecated RDS instances and right-sizing our EC2 fleet, I slashed the monthly infrastructure bill by half while simultaneously improving system throughput.
- Zero-Downtime Deployments: Migrated the stack to AWS Elastic Beanstalk with rolling updates. I implemented graceful shutdown protocols to ensure that no background jobs or data transactions were lost during deployments.
Acquisition & Transition
- My work directly contributed to the company's acquisition by ClayHR. I was offered a Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) position to lead the transition but chose to pursue new challenges as a generalist engineer.