Joshua T Kalis (he/him/his)

I've spent 20+ years building teams and shipping high-impact software across mortgage, real estate, education, and government domains. 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, and a consistent focus on team culture means the teams I build become places people want to stay.

Employment

• 01/2026 - 10/2026 | Software Engineer | Khan Academy
  • Full-Stack Contract Expiration Tracking: Authored the design doc and implemented a system end-to-end (Go / GraphQL / React + TypeScript): encrypted multi-valued contact storage, a derived state machine (Active / Warn / Suspended / Expired / Extended), a scheduled reconciliation job with an auditable transition ledger, and an admin UI
  • CI/CD Security Vulnerability: Root-caused and patched a zero-review auto-merge hole where a PR touching one workflow file could land its entire diff to production, then fixed and verified live by triggering the patch against its own landing PR
  • Parity-Validated Migration Pattern: Designed a reusable pipeline migration pattern (hidden-URL shadow traffic, schema-driven diff engine, PII-safe structured logging) adopted as the team standard for every future report migration
  • Architecture Benchmarking: Benchmarked pure-Go, in-process SQLite, and DuckDB for a CSV roll-ups pipeline at 10K-student scale, ruling out DuckDB at 4.85s vs. a 30.55ms baseline (158× slower) with measured numbers
• 10/2024 - 01/2026 | Lead Fullstack Engineer | Hypergiant
  • Secure Delivery Across Classification Levels: Built and delivered Next.js applications (Vite, React Server Components) across unclassified and classified government environments, including a reusable open-source design system in React and TypeScript
• 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 drove company-wide adoption
• 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 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' $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% via a distributed service status page
  • $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 systems for Rocket Mortgage's Super Bowl commercials three years running, sustaining massive traffic bursts securely under national exposure
  • 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

Independent Work

• Vela Navigator: Real estate technology platform (Deno, TypeScript, PostgreSQL)
  • Real Estate Coordinator Portal: Architected a multi-tenant SaaS platform from scratch, with multi-provider OIDC/PKCE auth and 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
• Speculate: Personal investment decision-support tool (Deno, Preact, SQLite, TypeScript, Go)
  • Stock Screening Platform: Built a full-stack platform managing 5,000+ symbol price histories: Deno server, Preact SPA, SQLite storage, Alpaca Markets and Yahoo Finance integrated via a concurrent batch fetch pipeline
  • Mean-Reversion Signal Engine: Implemented using OLS trend fitting, amplitude/frequency metrics, and R² scoring to surface buy/sell candidates with statistical backing
  • Go Performance Migration: Moved computationally intensive analysis passes to a Go binary, improving scan throughput across the full 5,000+ symbol universe

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, SQLite
• 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