Kurtis Melby

Polyglot server engineer who dabbles in frontend development and game programming. Expert in finding the shortest path to building quality product and technology. I've done lots and lots of backend and frontend web server programming in Java, Scala, Elixir and Python, Ruby/Rails, Javascript/React, TailwindCSS. Additionally I've done worked on "big data" pipelines, Android apps, and Unity games.

Professional Experience

Google 2023 - Present

Server Software Engineer

Engineering on Google Drive.

Etsy 2021 - 2023

Staff Software Engineer

Engineering seller tools on the Shop Opportunities Team.

Realm 2019 - 2021

Head of Technology

Promoted to running the engineering and tech department while still being hands-on with the Ruby on Rails server and web engineering, plus services in Python and Elixir.

Worked with leadership on company strategy related to our platform.

Server Engineering Lead

Implemented many large upgrades to the platform, including: transitioned to Webpack and Tailwind CSS, built a hybrid text reader and audio player, automated syncing our episode transcripts with the audio, and built a new “feed” API in GraphQL for our apps.

Gimlet (and Spotify) 2018 - 2019

Lead Software Engineer

Built and launched a brand new public website, gimletmedia.com, and internal CMS from the ground up using modern web tools like Phoenix Framework, Stimulus.js and Bulma CSS.

Engineered a data warehouse solution for analyzing our hundreds of millions of listener downloads using BigQuery SQL and Periscope Data to create performance tracking and audience insights dashboards used across the company.

Google 2015 - 2018

Senior Software Engineer, Google Lens

Android app development on Google Lens, including working with ML models on device and custom UI prototyping. The Camera app feature we prototyped was eventually launched on the Pixel 3, allowing users to use their camera to do passive object recognition on device.

Senior Software Engineer, Google Play Books

Server and data pipeline development implenting new feartures like book series and improved book discovery by surfacing book related news articles and Youtube videos in the mobile app.

Oyster Books 2014 - 2015

Senior Software Engineer

Built a data ingestion pipeline for all incoming book data from major publishers. Maintenance and feature worker on Django servers and Postgres database.

Yodle Inc. 2012 - 2014

Lead Software Engineer

Promoted to technical lead for a small team doing fullstack feature work in Java, Scala and Angular web development on a microservices architecture.

Senior Software Engineer

Developed features in a service oriented architecture using Java / Spring web servers and PostgresDB.

Software Engineer

Worked with on a small team to develop a complete sales productivity webapp customized to Yodle's salesforce and workflow.

MicroEdge LLC​ 2010 - 2012

Junior Software Developer

Was part of a large project to convert a large enterprise VB6 app into a modern Windows application using C# and WPF.

EDUCATION

University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, Institute of Technology

Graduated 2010
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, Focus on Artificial Intelligence

Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Spring 2009 exchange