Kyle Tilman

Deliberately crafting code since 2010 | kyletilman@gmail.com | 727.871.4223

About Me

I am a problem solver. Professionally, I solve problems with discourse and code. I lead discussions, ask questions, seek out differing perspectives and continuously learn, grow and mentor. I eagerly pursue responsibility, research uncertainty, and strive to elevate those around me in the pursuit of delivering results efficiently and effectively.

Work History

Lumos Labs - Staff Software Engineer - Platform | Jul 2022 - Jul 2023 lumoslabs.com

During my time at Lumos, I was able to deliver a number of high priority projects where I was the main contributor. The achievements I am most proud of are more connected to my leadership than to raw lines of code. My tools were: code reviews, pairing, asking questions, defining goals and scope, running planning sessions and retros. These efforts did not result in an algorithmic masterpiece but they did align our team, help us focus our efforts and multiply the efficiency and efficacy of the whole team. I was able to bring my leadership skills combined with technical skills to multiple teams to help them deliver on important, time-sensitive projects they would not have been able to accomplish otherwise.

  • Researched, documented and rewrote a legacy internationalization system written in Ruby, in order to move us to a new version of our internationalization vendor's API. This was a huge mission-critical project, on a tight deadline. Given the deadline (3rd party API deprecation) I wasn't going to be able to deliver 100% of the features we needed. I documented possbile solutions, conferred with the stakeholders (product, marketing, internationalization) and we decided on a path forward. We made the target cutover with no downtime. We simplified the API and deprecated a legacy system that no longer deployed without manual intervention and arcane tribal knowledge.
  • Introduced the team to our first AWS Lambda driven service using our shiny new IaC (CDK) tool!
  • Worked hand in hand with the Infrastructure team to deliver on some time-sensitive IaC (CDK typescript) work that the team was not able to accomplish
  • Planned out the Infrastructure and backend for one of the companies new mobile backend and launched it into production
  • Researched and introduced a proof-of-concept for a 3rd-party authentication vendor to simplify our in-house authentication provider. Then used the POC as the basis to shave about 10 planned weeks of work for building a new Authx system
  • As for leadership, I worked very hard to assimilate information across many teams and stakeholders in order to refine our product vision and engineering process.
  • Mentored teammates on Typescript best practices through code reviews and pair programming.

Carbon Health - Senior Software Engineer | May - Dec 2019, Dec 2020 - June 2022 carbonhealth.com

As a backend Scala dev at Carbon I started and helped build a team responsible for handling millions of lives worth of patient data. When staffing left another team short on people, I jumped in and helped refine the vision of the team and begin delivering on their big goals that had been pushed back several times.

  • Built the Interoperability team and actively setup agile process for delivery, reflection and growth of the team.
  • Planned and executed on new Event-driven architecture in Scala to decouple and simplify logic for reporting COVID test results and immunizations. Deprecated existing legacy code.
  • Researched and integrated with multiple 3rd parties (Redox, IronBridge) in our Scala backend to enable the scaling of all interoperability ingress and egress
  • Led a company-wide push for a better on-call process and delivered a new set of processes, documentation and scheduling. Collaborated with support and engineering to build out tooling and process that worked.
  • Started an education initiative to increase the effectiveness of our new recruits in our unique Scala environment.
  • Comprehensively identified requirements, domains, and contexts in the Labs Team in pursuit of decoupling our logic and moving towards microservices.
  • Mentored multiple other engineers to help guide them in growing their technical and soft skills.

Redox - Senior Software Engineer | Dec 2019 - Dec 2020 redoxengine.com

In my time at Redox I worked, as a backend Node.js engineer, with many frameworks, databases and backends. I spent a lot of time learning and growing from really smart people. Not only did I grow as a backend eng, I grew as a human. Learning how to work remotely well. Learning how to communicate effectively. Learning how to be a better team player.

  • After our team lead left, I led the Microservices team in delivering a lift and shift re-write of our core processing functionality from a Javascript monolith to a TypeScript microservice. We accomplished the project with zero downtime and no interruptions. During the move the system continued to handle thousands of jobs a second. This was a full team effort and hugely successful.
  • As an experiment, we took on the task of writing our code in a functional style. I ran many education sessions, documented, and provided a ton of feedback as half the team was new to functional programming.
  • Succesfullly delivered fullstack microservice with client side feature work suppporting date-based search based on Kafka and Postgres table partitioning. This was meant to replace an ElasticSearch server that was populated manually, higly coupled, and difficult to maintain.

Thunder - Senior Software Engineer | Feb 2014 - Feb 2019 makethunder.com

I was hired as a Systems/Platform Engineer but ended as a Senior Backend Engineer doing a lot of DevOps work. This was a fast moving position with lots of latitude to grow and get involved.

  • Dozens of user facing Node based microservices serving 2000+ req/seq running on AWS Fargate
  • Built out the whole CI/CD pipeline to move the company from one release every 6 weeks to many a day
  • Introduced container-based architecture and moved company from running on metal to running everything on containers. This assisted in deployment ease and dev efficiency.
  • Building our internal metrics, monitoring, alerting, and log aggregation and search stacks and educationg the teams on insrtumentation.
  • Building internal education about JavaScript development and best practices as we used more and more Javascript/Typescript services
  • Rewriting and optimizing existing Python based ETL architecture

Tricycle Studios - Lead Software Engineer | Oct 2011 - Feb 2014 tricyclestudios.com

I led a team in building an HTML/CSS/JavaScript based iPad sales tool used by thousands of sales reps across dozens of medical companies. The tool was built in a thin iOS framework using the front end framework Knockout.js. This was a small 8 person team that I led. We were running on Python APIs (Tornado, Django, Flask). I was part of this build from the ground up. I regularly met with the product team to define requirements and set direction on the dev team.