Résumé

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Dylan Fitzgerald

dylan@dylanfitzgerald.net • Denver, CO, USA

Staff Software Consulting Engineer. Design, build, upgrade, and transform well-documented and maintainable systems while facilitating effective collaboration and strategic decisionmaking among technical teams and leadership.

Accolades

“Giving Dylan your money is a good idea, and you can put that in a Google review!” — EdTech client CEO

“Working with Dylan let me sleep at night” — paraphrased, Director of Application Engineering, S&P 600 company

“[Dylan] left that client a true believer” — colleague at larger consulting agency

Experience

Owner/Principal, Arboreal Studios, Inc.

December 2018-Present

Principal consultant and developer. Recent projects include but are not limited to:

Platform & AI-augmented Development

  • Built and deployed RSOLV.dev, an AI-powered security platform using GitHub Actions and frontier LLMs
  • Leveraged Aider and Claude Code for accelerated development across multiple client projects
  • Maintain production k3s homelab hosting personal projects including RSOLV.dev and blog

Managerial / Engineering Leadership

  • Onboarded multiple consultants into a consulting agency while leading their engagements on-client
  • Coordinated with leadership and dependent teams and managed a small team to design, implement, and deliver Client’s Web Component library for integration into Phoenix LiveView app
  • Provided hundreds of senior+-level code reviews, primarily but not exclusively for Ruby and infrastructure code, for over 100 developers from junior to CTO-level at multiple organizations across a wide range of industries. A primary offering for these was security issue identification and mitigation.

Consultative

  • Provided technical and strategic guidance, mentorship, and delivery services to technical/engineering staff, management, and leadership at and across multiple clients.
  • Guided non-technical client staff through project discovery, definition, scoping and sequencing, then delivered a POC and a follow-on completion round on fixed scope basis, inclusive of development, documentation, distribution, and product demonstrations.
  • Evaluated Client’s web application and infrastructure for compatibility with a potential acquirer’s requirements as part of due diligence process. Identified and personally addressed blocking issues. Client successfully closed acquisition.
  • Audited Client’s infrastructure for cost and effectiveness. Recommended and implemented migration to Render.com from CloudFormation-managed AWS. Reduced month-to-month infra spend by tens of percentages. Eliminated need for day-to-day KTLO operations support, then gracefully handed off ops ownership to in-house CTO.

Software Development

  • Integrated with a tiger team of four other senior/staff consultants to pick up a client’s project frame for a six-week Shape Up-styled development cycle. Delivered ahead of schedule amidst client layoffs. Supported a consultant colleague in getting promoted to Staff position.
  • Improved Client’s ability to reach end users by designing & building the backend and queueing architecture for a Twilio-driven push messaging/notification service
  • Integrated AWS Translate into Client’s Rails app, automating machine translation of user-submitted content
  • Rebuilt, and prepared for deployment, Client’s Javascript+Salesforce electronic signature capture implementation, enabling immediate resale to their customers & clients

Infrastructure

  • Migrated production PHP/CakePHP application from CloudFormation-managed AWS to Render.com, reducing infrastructure costs by 50% while addressing security vulnerabilities
  • Containerized, dependency-upgraded, and migrated a profitable, long-lived NodeJS storefront application from a manually-triggered multi-step Jenkins build and deployment process to a Gitlab Actions-managed CI/CD pipeline, reducing infra spend, maintenance overhead, and time to deploy to minutes from 1h+
  • Developed a containerized, cross-platform (RHEL and Windows XP SP1) Gitlab CI build pipeline for upstream C/C++ sources in satisfaction of Client’s specific, government-interfacing requirements.
  • For aforementioned acquisition client, planned and applied Rails upgrade, containerization, and app migration from Linode to acquirer’s preferred environment, inclusive of creating new CI/CD pipeline
  • Multiple Rails upgrade and infra migration/containerization projects for multiple clients, including internal long-lived API tool representing »$1MM/annum revenue

Staff Software Engineer, Privy LLC.

Remote — October 2024-May 2025

Software Engineer, CareMessage

Remote — January 2018-January 2019

Senior Operations Engineer, Software Engineer, LearnZillion, Inc

Remote — March 2014-November 2017

DevOps Engineer, The Cleanweb Initiative

Remote/Contract — 2012-2014

Peace Corps Volunteer, Technology Education, US Peace Corps/The Gambia

2010-2013

Systems Administrator, Dynamo Labs (Contract)

Dallas, TX — February-June 2010

Skills

  • Languages: Ruby, Rails, Elixir/OTP, Phoenix, JavaScript/Typescript, HTML, CSS/Sass, SQL, HCL, bash
  • Frameworks and ecosystem tools: Sidekiq (Pro, Ent), Oban, Redis, Capistrano, RSpec, standardrb, RuboCop, NodeJS, React, Lit (formerly LitElement)
  • API design, documentation, implementation, and integration (1st and 3rd party)
  • Extensive continuous integration/continuous deployment design and implementation across multiple platforms: GitHub Actions, CircleCI, GitLab CI, Jenkins, Sourcehut, custom scripting
  • 12-factor env setup, improvement, implementation using Docker Compose, Podman Compose, Rancher, k3s, k8s, bare metal, etc.
  • SDLCs and consulting tools: agile/Scrum, Kanban, Shape Up (formally trained), SFBT
  • Systems & Services: GNU/Linux systems and virtualization thereof. Apache, nginx, MySQL, PostgreSQL, CDNs, OpenSSH, OpenSSL, vulnerability mitigation, etc.
  • Cloud services and infrastructure/deployment management: AWS (EC2, R53, VPC, S3/Glacier, CloudFront, IAM), GCP (GKE, IAM), Terraform/Tofu, Docker/Podman/containerd, GitHub (including Actions, Workflows, Templates, CLI…), GitLab (including GitLab CI), SFDX, Kubernetes
  • Strongly versed in AI augmented software development via Claude Code, ollama/local LLMs, various Emacs plugins, multiple diffusion models (local and frontier) via API and bare metal.

Education

Worcester Polytechnic Institute — B.S. Electrical and Computer Engineering, cum laude, 2006

Training

  • Shape Up via Shaping In Real Life, 2nd cohort — May 2023
  • Solution-Focused Brief Therapy Basics — June 2021, Refreshed April 2023
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