Joshua T Kalis (he/him/his)

I've spent 20+ years building teams and shipping high-impact software — conducting 100s of technical interviews, mentoring engineers to promotions, and consistently building high-performing teams that people want to join. A background in graphic and visual design gives my frontend work an eye for detail and user experience that's rare at the senior engineering level. At Rocket Mortgage, I led frontend development for Warren Buffett's Billion Dollar Bracket, built their first SRE team from scratch achieving 99.99% uptime, and worked on systems supporting over $100 billion in closed loans. More recently, I've been transforming engineering quality and culture, like taking test coverage from 0 to 80% in 8 months and influencing company-wide architectural decisions. A consistent thread across that work is real estate and mortgage domain expertise — from $100B+ in loan systems at Rocket Mortgage and Guaranteed Rate to building a multi-tenant real estate coordinator platform from scratch at Vela Rising.

Employment

• 04/2026 - current | Founding Engineer | Vela Rising
  • Real Estate Coordinator Portal: Architected a multi-tenant SaaS platform from scratch on a Deno/TypeScript stack — designing multi-provider OIDC/PKCE auth with per-tenant credential config, zero-deploy-time tenant resolution, and type-safe schema across a multi-schema PostgreSQL database
  • AI-Augmented Development Model: Designed a contribution workflow enabling non-technical real estate consultants to author PRs via AI assistant, with engineer-owned review gates — bringing domain expertise directly into the codebase safely
• 01/2026 - current | Software Engineer | Khan Academy
  • International Districts Platform Re-architecture: Redesigning a platform serving millions of students across dozens to 100+ domestic and international partnerships — addressing fundamental data modeling failures, including non-relational Datastore used for inherently relational data and rigid partnership structures unable to accommodate the diversity of real-world partner relationships
  • Frontend Modernization: Bringing modern React conventions (functional components, hooks) to a mixed codebase shaped by developers primarily from Python and Go backgrounds, serving both internal support workflows and external school administrator tooling
  • Go Backend Architecture: Driving deliberate architectural patterns across a GCP-hosted Go codebase — replacing naive imperative approaches with intentional tooling choices (relational vs. non-relational storage, queues, gRPC vs. REST vs. GraphQL) and addressing batch processing jobs hitting memory, compute, and wall-clock limits
• 10/2024 - 01/2026 | Lead Fullstack Engineer | Hypergiant
  • Secure Delivery Across Classification Levels: Built and delivered Next.js applications across both unclassified and classified government environments, applying current best practices and cutting-edge features while maintaining strict security compliance and operational excellence
• 05/2023 - 09/2024 | Team Leader | Visiting Media
  • Transformed Engineering Quality: Raised test coverage from 0% to 80% in 8 months (100% for new code), implementing CI/CD automation and ephemeral PR environments
  • RBAC Architecture and Adoption: Designed role-based access control architecture and led the thought leadership that convinced the company to adopt it
• 12/2021 - 07/2022 | Team Leader | Guaranteed Rate
  • Stabilized Engineering Leadership: Restored stable leadership to two engineering teams that had experienced chronic instability, stepping into the role organically despite not being hired for it
• 04/2012 - 12/2021 | Team Leader | Rocket Mortgage
  • Warren Buffett's Billion Dollar Bracket: Led frontend development for Quicken Loans' legendary $1 billion NCAA tournament contest, handling national marketing exposure, massive traffic spikes, and secure identity verification under aggressive timelines
  • Built Zero-Downtime SRE Organization: Grew Site Reliability Engineering from 0 to 11 members, achieving 99.9–99.99% uptime, zero self-inflicted outages, and reduced MTTR by 10%
  • $100B+ in Closed Loans: Led engineering for mortgage pricing systems via a custom DSL and editor, handling all company pricing rules and supporting over $100 billion in closed loan revenue
  • Super Bowl Campaigns (2016–2018): Engineered secure, performant systems for Rocket Mortgage's Super Bowl commercials three years running, handling massive traffic bursts while maintaining security and responsiveness
  • Enterprise Architecture Standards: Designed and rolled out RESTful API framework adopted by 100+ microservices and hundreds of developers, creating productivity economies of scale across the organization

Skills

• Languages & Runtimes: Bun, CSS, Deno, Go, HTML, JavaScript, Node.js, PHP, TypeScript
• Frameworks & Libraries: CSS-in-JS, Fresh, Next.js, Preact, React, Tailwind
• Architecture & Patterns: Domain-driven design, gRPC, GraphQL, microservices, multi-tenant SaaS, OIDC / OAuth 2.0 (PKCE), queues, RBAC, RESTful API design, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
• Data & Infrastructure: AWS, data normalization, Drizzle ORM, GCP, PostgreSQL, SQL
• Design: Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Figma, UI/UX design, visual design
• Practices & Tooling: Agile, CI/CD automation, custom DSL design, ephemeral PR environments, SAFe, Scrum, test-driven development (TDD)

Education

• Michigan State University | BA, Information Science 05/2006