# Ciaran Downey > Staff Engineer at ChalkTalk Location: Somerville, Massachusetts, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/ciarandowney As an engineer of varying levels over the last decade, I've been lucky enough to realize my passion for building distributed systems that innovate, scale, and provide lasting value for customers. As a technical leader I aim to be the bridge between the business and the engineers, delivering features with a high degree of quality and reliability, while also fostering an innovative environment that keeps talented engineers engaged. ## Work Experience ### Staff Engineer @ ChalkTalk Jan 2024 – Present * Hybrid staff/manager responsibilities, both leading a team and individually contributing my own projects * Influence and effect engineering discipline and policy * Pioneer AI best practices, integrations, and general force multipliers * Delivered and contributed to design of key new LLM-enabled products aimed at broadening our user market * Delivered last-mile of a rewrite of our exam-taking platform ### Senior Engineering Manager @ Cambridge Mobile Telematics Jan 2022 – Jan 2024 | Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States * Owned the general data platform of the acquiree (TrueMotion), ensuring its continued operation and feature delivery for 7 of the top 10 US auto insurance providers * Oversaw the integration of two highly complex telematics data pipelines, balancing simultaneous needs for long-term platform unification with short-term features and fixes * Effectuated the incident response process rebuilt post-acquisition, taking on a supervisory role of "Incident Commander 2" to train up other leaders in my SME domains * Supported multiple peer teams with technical and product direction, addressing cross-functional concerns such as: * Phone -> Backend -> Data Science systemic refactors and optimizations * Improved testing environment and infrastructure for cross-domain concerns * Redundant systems unification without customer impact * Influenced and upheld company-wide architecture review procedures * Maintained a high-performing and happy team, occasionally delivering across more workstreams than team members ### Engineering Manager @ Cambridge Mobile Telematics Jan 2021 – Jan 2021 | Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States ### Engineering Manager @ TrueMotion Jan 2019 – Jan 2021 | Greater Boston Area * Lead a backend engineering team improving the scalability, extensibility, security, and reliability of our Mobile Telematics platform, with a focus on customer-generic features inherent to our core business * Architect and review technical project plans and designs involving backend systems across the company * Contribute developer tool enhancements particularly in our build system, for features like git flow and release automation * Oversee the global deprecation of Python 2 in an industry particularly sensitive to changes in data * Regular contributor to functioning and processes of our Incident Response process * Technical product manager for our telematics processing pipeline, building and executing roadmaps to introduce a variety of new products while also reducing longstanding technical debt ### Senior Backend Engineer @ TrueMotion Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | Boston, MA * Helped maintain a network of microservices supporting the ingestion and processing of phone sensor data, powering programs for Usage Based Insurance * Evangelized and standardized technical best practices, such as automated build and test systems, continuous integration and delivery, and containerization * Architected and released novel systems for capabilities such as near-real-time car crash detection and data-driven dynamic UX flows ### Senior Software Engineer @ Cimpress, global leader in mass customization Jan 2016 – Jan 2018 | Waltham, MA * Helped design and implement an MVP 3-Tier global planning service (DAP) for routing orders in the Mass Customization Platform (MCP), a merchant:fulfiller marketplace. * Helped create and maintain shared resources for our team, such as ephemeral build environments, environment architecture, internal Node and .Net libraries. * Continued contribution on a new suite of applications responsible for performing a customizable set of transformations to an order at various stages of the order pipeline to fit various merchant or fulfiller needs. * Participated in standardization and design of engineering principles powering the MCP ### Software Engineer @ Vistaprint Jan 2014 – Jan 2016 | Waltham, Massachussetts * Helped maintain custom manufacturing software, optimizing various shopfloor procedures, especially the "binning" of orders for fulfillment and shipping. * Planned and implemented a strategy for migrating the functionality of a legacy warehouse system to globally available multi-tenant microservices * Implemented an MVP for building and managing AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Serverless environments, which was subsequently adopted by other teams * Participated in "Innovation Wednesdays" to add or improve team processes ### Teaching Assistant @ University of Rochester Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 Managed lab sessions for two separate courses Taught and explained confusing material to the class Graded weekly lab assignments ### Software Engineer Intern @ Vistaprint Jan 2013 – Jan 2013 | Lexington, MA * Planned and implemented a summer-long project to implement a system to track the position of machinery as it moved around a manufacturing plant, in order to aid developers in understanding the inner workings of the shopfloor. * Worked on day to day bug fixes and improvements using a ticket system * Implemented a side project to improve the development environment * Created system for aggregating and visualizing data pertaining to actual software usage in the manufacturing plants ### Teacher's Assistant @ University of Rochester Jan 2012 – Jan 2012 As a teacher's assistant for the Data Structures course, my responsibilities were to grade labs twice a week and offer feedback to the students. The labs were primarily done in Java, with some done in C and Scheme. ### Software Engineer Intern @ 3Forge Jan 2012 – Jan 2012 Returning to 3Forge for another year, this time I focused on writing a three-tier system based off of our existing framework designed to monitor the states of multiple machines across a network and be able to record the history of all such machines. Languages used: Java, SQL Programs used: Eclipse, Maven, Perforce ### Intern @ 3Forge Jan 2011 – Jan 2011 3Forge is a new startup that develops infrastructure solutions for client companies. My time at 3Forge was mostly spent doing unit testing on the company's main trading system. I helped uncover bugs and contributed to the stability of the platform. Languages used: Java Programs used: Eclipse, Mercurial ### Intern @ Liquidnet Jan 2010 – Jan 2010 | New York City Liquidnet is a company that facilitates large scale equity transfers while maintaing the integrity of the public marketplace. In my time at Liquidnet I developed a three-tier time management system built with Java and SQL that is currently being used globally across the entire company. In my time at Liquidnet I gained experience in more organized methods of software development, especially those used by industrial developers. Languages used: Java, SQL Programs used: Perforce, Maven, Eclipse. 3Forge ## Education ### Bachelor of Applied Science (BASc) in Computer Science University of Rochester ### Packer Collegiate Institute ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/cidowney --- Source: https://flows.cv/ciarandowney JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/ciarandowney/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-31