Joshua T Kalis index

I've spent 20+ years building teams and shipping high-impact software. 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 while building high-performing teams that people want to join.

Impact

Engineered 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, and concealment, under aggressive timelines
Supported $100B+ in Closed Loans: Led engineering for mortgage pricing systems handling all company pricing rules via custom DSL, supporting over $100 billion in closed loan revenue
Built Zero-Downtime SRE Organization: Grew Site Reliability Engineering team from 0 to 11 members, achieving 99.9-99.99% uptime, zero self-inflicted outages, highest team approval ratings, and reduced MTTR by 10%
Delivered Secure Systems Across Environments: Supported full lifecycle delivery across both unclassified and classified government environments, maintaining security compliance and operational excellence
Champion of Inclusive Engineering Culture: Nominated for company DEI award for fostering collaborative environments where all viewpoints are valued; consistently built teams that became preferred internal destinations with strong retention
Drove $12M+ Monthly Revenue Initiative: Led frontend development for HARP project serving millions of daily users
Delivered High-Stakes Super Bowl Campaigns: Engineered secure, performant systems for Rocket Mortgage's 2016-2018 Super Bowl commercials, handling massive traffic bursts while maintaining security and responsiveness
Established Enterprise-Wide Architecture Standards: Designed and rolled out RESTful API framework adopted by 100+ microservices and hundreds of developers, creating productivity economies of scale
Transformed Engineering Quality: Raised test coverage from 0% to 80% in 8 months (100% for new code), while implementing CI/CD automation and ephemeral PR environments
Led High-Volume Talent Acquisition: Conducted 100+ technical interviews over 7 years, hired dozens of engineers, and mentored multiple engineers and leaders to promotions
Innovated Domain-Specific Solutions: Designed custom DSL and editor for complex mortgage pricing rules, significantly reducing input time and accuracy while improving execution speed

Employment

01/2026 - current | Software Engineer | Khan Academy
10/2024 - 01/2026 | Software Engineer | Hypergiant
05/2023 - 09/2024 | Team Leader | Visiting Media
12/2021 - 07/2022 | Team Leader | Guaranteed Rate
04/2012 - 12/2021 | Team Leader | Rocket Mortgage

Education

Michigan State University | BA, Information Science 05/2006