# Cole P. > Senior Software Engineer at Ibotta, Inc. Location: Denver, Colorado, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/colep Senior backend engineer who transforms ambiguous technical challenges into production systems that drive real business value. Experienced across the full stack with TypeScript, Python, and Kotlin, and cloud-native architectures (AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform). I believe great software comes from teams who take pride in their craft. Environments where developer productivity, technical excellence, and shared ownership intersect to create real impact. ## Work Experience ### Senior Software Engineer @ Ibotta, Inc. Jan 2023 – Present | Denver, Colorado, United States - Pioneered organization-wide AWS resource visibility platform from concept to production, migrating from Terraform parsing to AWS Config integration and building a generic YAML-driven ingestion pipeline that accelerated security and cloud infrastructure team's critical engineering work by ~50% (AWS, Databricks, Python) - Demonstrated technical leadership under pressure by building complete demo-ready application in 1.5 days (Svelte, TypeScript, Kubernetes, Databricks) and rallying team of 4 engineers to deliver critical stakeholder demo, followed by leading a postmortem to improve team processes - Partnered with distinguished engineer to architect critical improvements to proprietary ETL framework, delivering chained-run capabilities that vastly improved disaster recovery and achieved SOC-2 compliance (TypeScript, Node.js, AWS, Terraform) - Kept pace with changing technical requirements and authored the second version of a business critical consumer-facing API featuring pagination, filtering, and versioning, that drove a 32.37% increase in user engagement over the previous version (Kotlin, Groovy, Spring Boot, Ruby, Rails, Terraform) - Drew-up and implemented changes to our team's CI/CD pipelines to reduce the number of manual touch-points from 6 to 2. Worked with ArgoCD, Kubernetes, AWS ECR, and Shell Scripts to manage, spin-up, and release new versions of our services. ### Software Engineer @ Ibotta, Inc. Jan 2021 – Jan 2023 | Denver, Colorado, United States - Served as incident lead on a business-critical production bug. Worked cross-functionally to communicate, investigate, identify, mitigate, and eventually resolve a complex race-condition that was previously costing the company tens of thousands of dollars weekly in lost revenue. - Shouldered the role of Tech Lead on the creation of a domain-critical API. Identified key functionality, decomposed work, provided regular status updates and timelines, wrote code, and reviewed change requests before eventually shipping an effective API that serves 3.5 million requests weekly. - Self-initiated integration of resque-retry gem into Ruby on Rails monolith to automate handling of intermittent message queue failures, eliminating a daily source of developer frustration and manual toil across the engineering organization. - Gave presentations to the engineering organization at-large, on topics such as productivity, creative thought, technical share-outs, and conference summaries. - Served on the interview circuit, interviewing potential new-hires in technical and behavioral settings. ### Associate Software Engineer @ Ibotta, Inc. Jan 2021 – Jan 2021 | Denver, Colorado, United States - Served as the tech lead working alongside two other engineers to delegate tasks, plan a multi-week epic, and ultimately deliver a well-designed and architecturally crucial microservice. (Kotlin, Spring Boot, Groovy, Terraform, AWS DynamoDB, ArgoCD, Kubernetes) - Was heavily involved in the onboarding of three fellow backend engineers and worked to get them up to speed quickly while keeping the team productive amid turnover. - Completed complex tickets in a massive Ruby on Rails monolith, stood up several Spring Boot services using Kotlin and Groovy, and created and maintained service infrastructure using Terraform and AWS. - Effectively mitigated production issues in unfamiliar services while acting as the primary on-call engineer, writing and running performant scripts in production to minimize customer impact. - Became documentation-obsessed and wrote quality API documentation using OpenAPI, as well as numerous architecture diagrams, and quality debugging runbooks on the team's services to better assist on-call engineers. ### Software Engineer @ PocketChange Jan 2018 – Jan 2021 | Greater Denver Area - During my time in university, I volunteered on the side with a start-up called PocketChange, which aimed to build a platform for charitable micro-donations. - I developed a large expansion in the Chrome Extension product scope, increasing locations for potential user interaction by 600% from 2 contact sites to 12. I leveraged jQuery, JavaScript, CSS, and HTML to improve product visibility and utility, helping to retain users to grow product and break the 500-user mark. - Working alongside one other engineer, I wrote a versatile, compact, and concise, embeddable version of our product. I wrote JavaScript, HTML, and CSS in the front-end and PHP, using the Laravel framework, in the backend. Interested sites could embed our widget into their pages with a simple copy-paste. ### Software Engineering Intern @ Optum Jan 2020 – Jan 2020 - Worked alongside Optum's internal Identity and Access Management team to deliver an efficient Asynchronous C# API using ASP.NET that acted as the authentication layer for a homegrown IAM web-app. - Thoroughly tested the API using Postman, XUnit, and Moq. Documented the project using OpenAPI specifications. - Participated in the Summer Intern Presentation Series, presenting biweekly to technology leaders within Optum. ## Education ### Bachelor of Science - BS in Computer Science University of Denver Jan 2017 – Jan 2020 ### Hispanic and European Studies Program Universitat Pompeu Fabra Jan 2019 – Jan 2020 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/colepolyak - GitHub: https://github.com/PolyCole --- Source: https://flows.cv/colep JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/colep/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-22