Pete

Solo engineer on the Rails platform that connects youth in foster care with adoptive families across the Pacific Northwest, prioritizing accessibility and usability for social workers and families, as well as security and privacy for child welfare data. Replaced a legacy, vulnerable adoption inquiry platform with a custom Rails app and Airtable integration, now serving thousands of families and social workers. Built role-based access controls supporting social workers, families, and administrators with distinct permission levels. Built in-depth child profile features in collaboration with social work staff, contributing to a 200% increase in adoption inquiries.

Four-month engagement rebuilding backend architecture and communication systems for an AI-enhanced education startup. Rebuilt the WhatsApp messaging pipeline from scratch, replacing a fragile single-process setup with formatted templates, batched delivery via background jobs, and full delivery tracking, supporting broadcasts to thousands of families per send. Integrated AI/LLM workflows into production, including automated content redaction for compliance and AI-generated lesson plans, reducing manual content creation time for educators. Established Docker-based local development and a branching/deployment strategy, replacing ad-hoc processes that made regression tracking nearly impossible. Wrote new test suites with security scans for production data reliability.

Backend engineer on Apple’s affiliate marketing asset generation platform, built on Ruby on Rails and GraphQL. Built a custom image compression AWS Lambda (TypeScript/Node.js) from scratch, replacing a manual process in Apple’s asset generation pipeline. Rebuilt the internal error surfacing pipeline, giving the team visibility into failures they previously could not track. Worked within a large engineering organization on a production API serving external partners.