Squadsy (Acquired by ClayHR)
Founding Software Engineer (Sole Engineer)
As the first and only engineer at an early-stage startup, I took over a struggling, agency-built MVP and transformed it into a scalable B2B platform that was eventually acquired by ClayHR. I acted as the architect, developer, site reliability engineer and DevOps lead to turn this into a stable, acquisition-ready product. My role required extreme adaptability, moving between deep architectural work and rapid feature delivery to meet the demands of our first B2B customers.
View detailed work
Technical Adaptability
- I had never used Ruby on Rails before joining. Within weeks, I was shipping critical bug fixes and refactoring the core architecture. This experience taught me how to dive into complex, undocumented systems and become productive immediately.
Technical Leadership & Product Delivery
- End-to-End Development: Owned the full lifecycle of the product, from designing the interactive Frontend (React/Redux) to architecting the Backend (Ruby on Rails).
- The "Journey" Engine: Built the core product—a flexible automation engine allowing HR teams to create complex employee "journeys" triggered by dynamic rules (e.g., birthdays, anniversaries, or HRIS data changes).
- Third-Party Ecosystem: Implemented deep integrations with Slack (interactive messages and channel syncing), Twilio (SMS automation), and SendGrid/Outlook/Gmail (tracking opens and clicks).
- The analytics suite: Designed analytics pipeline for tracking opens, clicks, and engagement aggregation using event-driven models and background jobs, enabling near real-time insights across journeys.
Performance & Reliability
- Massive Scalability Gains: When the platform faced bottlenecks with complex filtering conditions for employees, I refactored the data layer to improve journey list response times by 300x and auto-add field fetching by 20x.
- System Stability: To ensure reliability under load, I implemented a leaky bucket rate-limiting algorithm for incoming webhooks and added background job throttling for external APIs
DevOps & Infrastructure
- Cost-Efficiency: Conducted a total audit of the AWS environment. By migrating deprecated RDS instances and right-sizing instances, I cut the infrastructure bill in half while increasing overall system performance.
- Modernization: Dockerized the legacy application to solve "it works on my machine" issues and transitioned the team to AWS Elastic Beanstalk with zero-downtime rolling updates.
Acquisition & Transition
- My work directly contributed to the company's acquisition by ClayHR. Post-acquisition, I was offered a Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) position to lead the transition but chose to pursue new challenges as a generalist engineer.