Resume

github.com/jdrydn

linkedin.com/in/jdrydn

Achievements

Strategy

  • Experience in developing, reviewing & implementing product & technology strategies across startups & teams.
  • Interacted with & presented to a variety of customers, founders, investors & other stakeholders.
  • “Can do” attitude - adopting flexible principles to support new feature requests at any time.
  • Planning for failure by consistently considering disaster recovery & redundancy.
  • Building development & staging environments to design & test new features ahead of release.

Commercial

  • Continuous focus on the end business goals.
  • Identifying & eliminating bottlenecks in performance across the entire stack to improve user experience.
  • Routinely using data-driven decision making to guarantee results.
  • Creating new metrics to measure success & optimise all processes, workflows & user journeys.
  • Implementing product feature-flags to enable/disable features on-demand.
  • Performing live customer-facing configuration, setup & support.
  • Answering user-facing queries & support requests.
  • Handling IT administration & staff support.

Technology

  • GraphQL & REST APIs
  • Node.js (ExpressJS, Koa, Serverless)
  • PHP (CodeIgniter, Symphony, Wordpress)
  • Frontend (HTML, SCSS, React.js, Vue.js, Handlebars, Liquid)
  • Relational databases (MySQL, MariaDB, Postgres)
  • Document databases & search engines (DynamoDB, MongoDB, ElasticSearch)
  • Infrastructure-as-code (AWS Cloudformation, AWS CDK)

People

  • Working as part of varying-size teams to build solutions for business goals.
  • Collaborating with third-party vendors & contractors to fulfil customer requests.
  • Hiring & managing software developers, assisting with learning, professional development, mentoring & running training sessions.
  • Creating teams with regular sprints & release cycles, sharing updates with the entire organisation.
  • Organising & attending networking events & hackathons.

Employment

Fig Finance - Head of Technology

May 2022 - Present

  • Joined the team as the team lead, spearheaded the initial product development / release & restructured the team, including contractor evaluation & personnel optimisation.
  • Continued success with monthly product planning & regular releases.
  • Fast reaction with business pivot to API-first product, designed & built initial API version including various flows.
  • Designed & implemented an integration framework to integrate with 3rd-party lender APIs for automatic account creation, loan disbursement & other banking features.
  • Subsequent API features & performance improvements.
  • Building internal tools for staff using external providers (Retool).

Real Links - CTO

January 2019 - April 2022

  • Joined as first hire after pre-seed round.
  • Completed greenfield rebuild of existing site into SaaS multi-tenanted white-labelled platform operating on AWS.
  • Designed & implemented an integration framework that adapts to any external system requirement, including SmartRecruiters, Greenhouse & Workday.
  • Building internal tools for staff within core application.

muzmatch - Senior Backend Engineer

November 2017 - December 2018

  • Joined as first hire after seed round.
  • Migrated the platform to AWS from dedicated hosting.
  • Reworked user onboarding to increase MAU & subscription dramatically.

Car Throttle - Senior Engineer

June 2015 - October 2017

  • Joined as first developer hire after Series A round.
  • Refactored legacy PHP monolith into modern JavaScript stack, separating the API/database from the frontend & supporting iOS/Android development.
  • Built a responsive internal CMS tool for editors, community managers, social team & video team.

Mindwork Labs / Markco Media - Developer

June 2013 - August 2014

  • Learning production-grade full-stack development.
  • Building user-facing features & staff tools - through 2 acquisitions, from startup to SMB to corporate.

james@jdrydn.com