Hey, I'm Joe.
I'm a software engineer interested in developer experience, automation, and emerging AI tooling.
Remote from Minneapolis, MN
Interests
Team leadership
- Leading large scale projects to completion
- Developing team members
- Creating a culture of learning
Developer experience
- Creating tools to make developers' lives easier
- Automating repetitive tasks
- Improving the developer workflow
- Implementing industry standard metrics
- Advocating for engineers
Creating products
- Building products - from ideation to launch
- Always customer focused
- Products for people, not for metrics
- Focused on not losing focus
AI tooling
- Leading AI enablement for 400+ engineers
- Giving agents written rules and real context
- Letting models narrate, never compute
- Building MCP servers for my own tools
Skills & Technologies
- Python (Confident)
- Elixir (Confident)
- JavaScript (Confident)
- TypeScript (Experienced)
- Ruby (Experienced)
- Flask (Confident)
- FastAPI (Confident)
- Phoenix (Confident)
- Node.js (Confident)
- React (Experienced)
- React Native (Experienced)
- Next.js (Experienced)
- Rails (Some experience)
- Postgres (Confident)
- MySQL (Confident)
- Kafka (Experienced)
- Kubernetes (Confident)
- Helm (Confident)
- Terraform (Confident)
- Argo (Experienced)
- Salt (Experienced)
- CircleCI (Experienced)
- Buildkite (Confident)
- Docker (Confident)
- Backstage (Confident)
- DevX Metrics (DORA, SPACE) (Confident)
- AI Enablement (Confident)
- AI Agents & MCP (Confident)
- Workflow Automation (Confident)
- AWS (Confident)
- Virtualization (Confident)
- Confident
- Experienced
- Some experience
Experience
March 2025 - Present
PagerDuty
Senior Software Engineer
Infrastructure - Developer Experience
Founding member of PagerDuty's first Developer Experience team, which I lobbied to create. Leading AI enablement and Backstage adoption for 400+ engineers, and building the metrics that show whether the developer workflow is actually getting better.
Built an auto-merge service that checks pull requests against written policies and merges the safe ones, like no-op infrastructure changes and dependency bumps, without a human in the loop.
May 2023 - March 2025
Senior Site Reliability Engineer
Infrastructure - Delivery
Responsible for engineering wide CI/CD (CircleCI and Buildkite), ArgoCD and ArgoRollouts, and infrastructure as code (Terraform and Atlantis).
Started the developer experience effort that grew into a dedicated team.
January 2018 - May 2023
Software Engineer
Product Development - Schedules, Core User Experience
Developed internal status page solution for PagerDuty using Elixir.
Led and architected new incident assignment service which was the first microservice to extract previously synchronous work from the Rails monolith. Architected distributed Erlang based system to handle immense incident stream for the entirety of the PagerDuty platform, handling 100K+ operations a day. Written in Elixir, involved working with Aurora Postgres, Kafka, and distributed Erlang.
Mentored interns and junior engineers.
February 2016 - December 2020 (5 years)
Statusy
Founder & Lead Engineer
Founder of the Statusy project, a hosted status page solution. Built on top of a Flask backend with a JavaScript frontend. I grew Statusy from an idea to a successful product with five-figure annual revenue. It was acquired by PagerDuty in 2018 and became part of their internal status page solution. Statusy was ultimately spun down in 2020.
July 2016 - October 2017 (1 year)
Plaid
Product Support Engineer
Assisted customers with integrating into the Plaid banking API. Corrected API issues and participated in creating internal tools to assist with customer support.
March 2015 - July 2016 (1 year)
Virtkick
Application Engineer
Employee number 1 at Virtkick, a virtualization platform. Responsible for building a distributed client for host machines that enabled virtualization through a pull model from a central API. Created using Node.js, C++, and Rails. Contributed to libvirt.
Projects
Sesharo
Active
Sesharo is a personal health and life-event tracker. It pairs one-tap logging with automatic feeds from wearables like Oura, Withings and Dexcom, plus calendar and location data.
An insight engine looks for trends and relationships across all of it. The numbers are computed deterministically; an LLM writes the weekly summary but never does the math.
Health data gets treated like health data: per-user row-level security and tiered encryption, up to end-to-end.
- Python
- FastAPI
- Postgres
- React Native
- Next.js
Ledeo
Active
Ledeo is a news reader that tunes itself. It ingests RSS, extracts clean full text and ranks stories for each reader using a model trained by their up and down votes.
Instead of an infinite feed it is moving to a bounded daily edition: a handful of stories everyone should see, plus a short list picked for you.
A separate breaking-news surface runs on a cheap cascade where AI is the last step, not the first.
- Python
- FastAPI
- Postgres + pgvector
- React Native
- Workers AI
Homelab
Ongoing
A Proxmox and Kubernetes cluster that is production for my house. DNS, media and home automation all run on it, for users who are not me and do notice outages.
It is managed as code with Terraform, Salt and Kubernetes manifests, and it hosts the server that lets my AI tools read and write my notes.
- Kubernetes
- Terraform
- Salt
- Virtualization
Statusy
2016 - 2020
Statusy was a hosted status page solution that differentiated itself by cost and features.
It was built on top of a Flask backend with a JavaScript frontend. I grew Statusy from an idea to a successful product with five-figure annual revenue.
Statusy was acquired by PagerDuty in 2018 and became part of their internal status page solution. Statusy was ultimately spun down in 2020.
- Python
- Flask
- JavaScript
- Postgres
- Kubernetes
Bitkumo
2016
Bitkumo was a virtualized server hosting provider that focused on providing a no-frills virtualization platform.
It was built on the Virtkick platform, which I was the first employee. I was responsible for managing physical servers, integrations and general business operations.
Bitkumo was acquired by Virtkick in 2016 and became part of the company’s product.
- Virtualization
- Linux Administration
- React.js
SpacePanel
2015
SpacePanel was an open source hosting control panel, and the project that started my career.
It got enough traction that Virtkick, a virtualization startup, brought me on as their first employee to keep building in the same space.
- Python
- Virtualization