Steve Hull
Product Engineer · Monte Rio, CA
About
The times, they are a-changing. Claude Code is an amazing resource and pairing partner. It feels like there's nothing we can't accomplish with this new technology. But as always, taste and instinct still play a major role in shipping quality software.
Thoughtful, playful, passionate, hard-working & egoless. I'm not afraid to dive into legacy code or open source libraries and contribute. I believe code should be written the same way as a mandala—beautiful, purposeful, and impermanent. I prefer integration over unit tests.
Values
Honesty | Openness | Collaboration | Constant improvement
Experience
15+ years of experience in startups and open source
Kajabi
Apr 2020–Present
Staff Engineer
Jun 2022–Present
Technical advisor and pinch hitter across teams. I shape architecture and data design before projects start, and step in wherever the hardest problems are.
- Led the deployment and adoption of AnyCable
- Co-founded the Data Guild, a weekly review of database health: tuning queries, adding missing indexes, and heading off risks before they become incidents
- Rewrote our OpenSearch queries in Ruby, retiring a Lambda and simplifying deploys
- Found and fixed several major security vulnerabilities
Engineering Manager
Sep 2020–Jun 2022
Managed the Themes team while staying on as its dev lead.
- Created the team charter and led hiring
- Ran 1:1s and coached reports toward their career goals
- Planned sprints with Product
- Oversaw the rewrite of the WYSIWYG Liquid theme editor
Staff Engineer
Apr 2020–Sep 2020
Dev lead for the Themes team. Partnered with Product & Design on user problems and championed hidden tech debt and performance work.
- Reworked theme file storage, cutting DB usage from >800GB to <200GB, verified with the scientist gem
- Built the Rails side of Kajabi's next-generation website theme
- Caching, performance, and observability improvements
Ruby on Rails, Sidekiq, Rspec, Liquid, React, Anycable, Opensearch, Terraform, AWS, k8s, Aurora PostgreSQL, Redis, Memcached, various other AWS services
Boundless Labs
Sep 2017–Jan 2020
Founding Engineer
Built a best-in-class #nocode platform for building interactive web apps. Led feature development from ideation through planning to implementation & maintenance.
Ruby on Rails, Rspec, Ember.js, Fastboot, Mobiledoc, Bootstrap, SCSS, PostgreSQL, Redis, Sidekiq
Looksharp
Sep 2013–Aug 2017
Senior Fullstack Engineer
Built the employers' CRM from the ground-up, integrating the pre-existing ATS, including threaded in-app email integration. Built multiplatform mobile app using Ionic & Angular for recruiters to use at career fairs. SEO & SEM work to help maintain and improve our rank in Google.
Ruby on Rails, Rspec, jQuery, Ionic, Angular.js, Cordova, Foundation, SCSS, MySQL, Memcache, Redis, Sidekiq
Taskrabbit
July 2011–May 2013
Senior Fullstack Engineer
Built & maintained features, A/B tests, evolution of task bidding & assignment, led the Taskrabbit for Business team, mentored new engineers, built the first version of the Android app.
Ruby on Rails, Rspec, jQuery, Ionic, Angular.js, Cordova, Foundation, SCSS, MySQL, Memcache, Redis, Sidekiq
Insiderpages
Oct 2009–May 2011
Senior Fullstack Engineer
Built multi-faceted doctor search tool, built & managed ETL for Healthgrades data, started the project that evolved into myhealthteams.com
Ruby on Rails, Rspec, jQuery, Javascript, SCSS, MySQL, Elasticsearch, Memcache, Redis, Resque
Education
Humboldt State University
Bachelor's in Applied Mathematics, 2005