# Billy Rhoades > Staff Software Engineer Location: Seattle, Washington, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/billyrhoades Systems engineer. See https://brod.es ## Work Experience ### Software Engineer @ Undisclosed Jan 2026 – Present ### Staff Software Engineer @ Rippling Jan 2023 – Jan 2026 | Seattle, Washington, United States I guided technical direction for an org of thirty something and a 100k+ device fleet. Our patchwork Device Management product was temperamental, written by engineers six years prior for an order of magnitude fewer devices. I kept the platform afloat while tech leading the client software team. * Tech led the client software team, managing 10 programs across MacOS and Windows, principally a Rust agent * Solved multi-month incident pattern others gave up on: blocking API calls at 2k req/s. Saved $10k+/mo in EC2 * Drove reorg from vertical product teams to horizontal platform ones, reducing ticket ping-pong and enabling ownership * Brought fleetwide agent uptime from 90% to 99% on MacOS and under 50% to 96% on Windows * Shipped new orchestrator for our agent to replace fundamentally broken sqlite-based system * Cut weekly client incidents to bimonthly through systematic process: phased rollouts, CI smoke tests, metrics gates ### Senior Software Engineer @ ngrok Jan 2023 – Jan 2023 ### Engineering Manager @ ngrok Jan 2022 – Jan 2023 | Seattle, Washington, United States Stepped into management after we failed to retain EMs for a couple of years. Built foundational processes: SDLC, on-call rotations, postmortems, onboarding. I also managed the same team I founded, delivering our first product launch. Established the EM role so others could succeed in it. * Managed on-prem client relationship through contract resign (double-digit % revenue), delivered on technical requirements while holding them accountable * Led process creation: SDLC, next generation per-team oncall, postmortems, and engineering onboarding process * Managed team shipping years-long GSLB project eliminating regional boundaries; enabled automatic global failover * Cut pgreplica deploy times from 5 hours to 1.5 hours. pgreplica is ngrok's critical event bus ### Senior Software Engineer | Tech Lead @ ngrok Jan 2019 – Jan 2022 | Seattle, WA Employee #9 at a company with no EMs, no PMs, no sales team, just 8 engineers who happened to work at the same company coasting on accidental PMF. I interviewed our first wave of leadership: CTO, director of engineering, and all engineering managers. Led the Cloud Edge platform that enabled our first product launch and first major raise. Helped transform some lone wolves into 4 teams that mostly got along, while building foundational platform features. * Transformed ngrok tunnels from immutable to dynamically controlled via continuous endpoint config re-resolution * Built ill-advised Redis module during hackathon to rewrite business critical Lua into Rust; ran in prod for over 3 years * Brought ngrok tunnels from only basic auth to federated identity: OAuth (4 providers), later SAML/OIDC * Created custom Redis Sentinel K8s integration to make it deployable after successfully ignoring the problem for years * Hackathon: production K8s per PR in CI requiring e2e test pass, replacing our 'find out in prod' merge strategy * Tcpdumped WAL replication to debug wal2json hiding TOASTed values in custom event bus, mentoring new on-calls through it * Debugged intermittent query planner failures on billion-row table causing day-long queries; fixed via vacuum and RDS tuning * Solo migrated largest customer's (double-digit % revenue) 2 year-old distribution through massive platform changes ### Team Lead | Senior Software Engineer @ Cerner Corporation Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 * Managed a team of 7 exclusively new engineers in fixing defects and enhancing Patient Portal * Triaged, prioritized, and handled client escalations for a product with 1,000+ clients while filtering and investigating incoming defects * Designed, proposed, and led implementation of a mechanism to passively enforce uniqueness on a large, high volume Oracle DB table totaling over 2 billion rows * Streamlined release processes: combined 7 redundant workplans signed more than twice a month by multiple people into 2 workplans; reduced time spent creating artifacts every release from 2 hours to 15 minutes * Prototyped and pitched a Python 2.7 to 3.4, Django 1.7 to 2.0 conversion of 5+ year old Django monolith ### Associate Senior Software Engineer @ Cerner Corporation Jan 2016 – Jan 2018 | Kansas City, MO Developed microservice backend and React frontend for Questionnaire, a system for user-defined questionnaires with mutating questions Uplifted Clipboards, an online form system for providers, from Django forms into React Introduced redux-form and drove implementation across multiple products Designed and documented Gatling test procedures On-boarded and managed an intern that returned FT ### CS1580 / CS54 Lab Assistant @ Missouri University of Science and Technology Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 | Rolla, MO Assisted students with completing programming assignments ### CS1570 / CS53 Grader @ Missouri University of Science and Technology Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 | Rolla, MO Graded programming assignments for the Intro to C++ course ### Desktop Engineering - Student Lead @ Missouri University of Science and Technology Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 | Missouri S&T Delegated and assigned work to students Trained incoming and senior students Set up and interviewed new student candidates Served as a point of contact for DI Created new policy which puts all new packages and code on Git Managed campus SCCM site as a primary administrator ### Service Optimization and Readiness Intern @ Bayer Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 ### Desktop Engineer @ Missouri University of Science and Technology Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 | Rolla, MO Packaged and maintained Perl applications Used Microsoft SCCM for software and OS deployments to over 4,000 machines Created custom Windows 7 builds for campus hardware Maintained license servers for academic applications ### IT CTS Student Lead / Mentor @ Missouri University of Science and Technology Jan 2013 – Jan 2013 | Rolla, MO Coordinated and conducted meetings for more than 20 CTS students Made and maintained procedural reference material Trained, supervised, and coordinated time off for service desk student workers Kept and recorded CTS student schedules across all teams ### IT Student Support Analyst @ Missouri University of Science and Technology Jan 2011 – Jan 2013 | Rolla, MO Help users with a wide range of problems. Extensively communicate with a variety of users of different nationalities and technical backgrounds. Work with IT coworkers to assist users. Expediently resolve problems. Repair and troubleshoot hardware and software issues. ## Education ### Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Computer Science Missouri S&T ### High School Diploma Blue Eye High School ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/billy-rhoades-615a9a58 - Website: https://brod.es - GitHub: https://github.com/brhoades --- Source: https://flows.cv/billyrhoades JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/billyrhoades/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-22