Steve Pletcher

Work

Senior Software Engineer on Frontline Operations
The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

The Broad is the home of (by far) the world's largest store of genome sequencing data. I helped people move it around and get it processed, to the tune of terabytes a day.
I was the technical lead for the frontline operations (Hops (silent H)) team, which is in charge of delivering data between their applications, processing it for valuable metrics, and troubleshooting when things go wrong. My chief duties were writing automations and web infrastructure to get this done and managing the various services they were writing to do that. Alongside that, I was both training up the engineering skills of the rest of the team and setting things up to make their software dev learning experience as seamless and frustration-free as possible.

Full-stack Web Developer
Pubmark, Inc.

If you don't know them, your mom does. They make BookBub, an e-book discounts newsletter, boasting over nine million subscribers to its mailing list despite employing about seventy-five people. I didn't know the market was there either.
I was part of the core product team, building new features in Ruby on Rails (among other languages and frameworks) to help people discover new books they wanted to read. Alongside those features, I deployed two independently-developed tools that boosted developer productivity and helped to release the site's partner dashboard, allowing friction-free submission and management of e-books for deals and featured slots.
After graduation, I switched to their infrastructure team, where I worked on automations and cloud architecture using AWS, Ansible, and other things that start with A. I pioneered the company's use of spot instances for batch processing and autoscaling for applications with heavily variable loads, cutting their cloud services bill by over $27,000 a month.

Applications and Integrations Developer
SCVNGR, Inc.

Most people in Boston and New York know these guys for their product, LevelUp. I worked in C# to integrate LevelUp cleanly with some archaic points of sale with basically no documentation. Later on, they pulled me off that stuff and pitted me at a tougher task: I was in charge of developing internal tools to speed up work for the app development and support team's battle against a neverending sea of clients and customers.

Software and Systems Developer
HaystackID

As the only developer on staff (save for our IT manager, who wasn't much for coding), I was in charge of making the little things the team had wanted but never had the resources to make. Mainly, I wrote tools to splice together tabular data and streamline formatting tasks, all of which had to work fast and work right, no exceptions. Sounds boring, but it turns out that's most of what they do. I saved them hours a day. No complaints so far.

Web Development Intern
The Industrial Resolution

This was my first real job - a tiny four-developer operation that took me on when I had a year of college under my belt and not much else. Thankfully, they were patient, and they helped me figure out that web development is definitely my jam. I mostly learned web dev principles here, but I also learned that having a great boss makes everything better.

Education

Portfolio