# Colin Rhodes > Software Engineer Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/colinrhodes Experienced software engineer with a focus on cross-disciplinary tools. Learns fast and is not afraid to use whatever tools get the job done. ## Work Experience ### Senior Software Engineer @ Reforge Jan 2021 – Jan 2023 ### Staff Software Engineer @ Calm Jan 2019 – Jan 2021 ### Staff Software Engineer @ Grove Collaborative Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area Grove acquired Darby! Helped grow the SF Engineering team by conducting interviews, training interviewers, and collaboratively refining the interview process. Helped scale existing async celery (Python) jobs by improving existing tools to automatically shard large workloads. Helped reduce over-engineering and analysis paralysis by simplifying a lot of the infrastructure and process requirements for the Engineering and DevOps teams. Introduced simple ways to use Spark for large ETL jobs using EMR and Airflow. ### Principal Software Engineer @ Darby Smart Jan 2016 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area Led application development--set guidelines for reviewing code, mentored junior engineers, made most of the high-level technical decisions. Led the effort to break down a Rails monolith into a separate React frontend, Rails API backend, and multiple supporting microservices. When we pivoted from an e-commerce site to a video-based social app, I heavily refactored the Rails backend to be performant with large sets of data by bypassing the ActiveRecord models, but still leveraging their scopes, by implementing a framework for defining the json data structures within ruby in a simple way. Implemented a video transcoding pipeline using AWS Elastic Container Service (Docker), ffmpeg, cython, python and SQS that could transcode the videos into variable bitrate HLS and DASH more quickly than AWS Elastic Transcoder, with better quality, fewer errors on mediastreamvalidator, for less cost, and in a way that was easy to scale. Implemented an analytics pipeline & recommendation engine using Python, Celery, and Redis that allowed us to use realtime analytics data and an incremental approach to collaborative filtering to update a user's video feed in real time to show them videos they are more likely to keep watching. Using this framework I was able to consistently improve retention for new users by refining the collaborative filtering parameters over time. Implemented an incredibly high-performance Rust & Redis ORM/API framework for our last pivot. Made extensive use of Rust's metaprogramming tools to create a very straightforward framework to leverage Rust's performance benefits without sacrificing development speed. Everything I contributed to was made to last, and rarely required any maintenance once implemented. I also ensured that being on pagerduty was stress-free for everyone, while simultaneously having almost complete coverage of any failures--there were rarely any incidents, and they were almost always due to external failures beyond our control. ### Senior Software Engineer @ Momo Information Technologies Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 | San Francisco Led the US Backend team--was responsible for mentoring junior engineers, reviewing all backend code, as well as defining API interfaces in addition to other roles. Designed and built a high performance Django-like ORM using Redis Cluster as the primary datastore, PubNub for backend to mobile messaging, and ZeroMQ for inter-process communication and RPC. Also responsible for DevOps--managed servers using Ansible and AWS. ### Co-Founder/CTO @ Extravue Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 Built & maintained a heterogeneous & massively scalable distributed computing platform & work queue for ARM & Intel servers using ZeroMQ & Docker, with Ansible for configuration management. Worked with my co-founder to develop a vision processing framework, aggregating data from multiple sources. Created the framework to allow plugins in Python, C, C++, and Matlab so vision scientists could use the language they were comfortable with. Built the framework in C, C++, and Python using ZeroMQ and a RESTful JSON http API. Created a front-end portal/dashboard using AngularJS (Javascript) & HTML/CSS. ### Lead Software Engineer @ Didja Inc Jan 2012 – Jan 2013 | San Francisco As web team lead, was responsible for reviewing code and mentoring engineers. Helped build a social web application for sharing and curating TV content from the ground up. Primarily contributed to the web application, APIs for iPhone, web frontend using Django and Python. Additionally made some contributions to video backend using C/C++ and Python. Finally, was responsible for DevOps: deployments, operations, and product stability. ### Senior Software Engineer @ Shutterfly Jan 2012 – Jan 2012 | Redwood City Worked on the Services team delivering a design dashboard for content designers using Adobe CQ, Java, and Mongo DB. ### Software Engineer/Consultant @ Eyegorithm Jan 2011 – Jan 2012 Built a web application to act as system of record and mechanism for crowdsourcing solutions to refine Eyegorithm software. Developed the web application primarily using Groovy, Grails, and Java. Built web services to interface with Eyegorithm software and a front end for managing data. Additionally did work using MySQL, Python, JavaScript, HTML and CSS. Owned application completely and was responsible for interfacing directly with researchers. ### Software Engineer @ Workday Jan 2009 – Jan 2012 | Pleasanton Worked on the security framework, including multi-phase authentication, SAML authentication, and encryption using Java. Did performance analysis and troubleshooting and wrote tools for debugging performance issues. Built tasks, web flows, and reporting tools for customers. Built web services and integrations for benefits providers and customers. ### Software Development Intern @ Williams-Sonoma, Inc. Jan 2008 – Jan 2008 | San Francisco Worked on various projects (including the merchandise locator, used in stores worldwide) and contributed code that was put into production for web applications. Was also responsible for design, testing, and adding features to numerous projects. ### Tutor @ Diablo Valley College Jan 2006 – Jan 2007 | Pleasant Hill Provided tutoring services at Diablo Valley College for students taking classes in C, C++, Java, Java Script, HTML, Data Structures and Program Design, Calculus, Linear Algebra, Differential Equations, and Physics. ## Education ### Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences University of California, Berkeley Jan 2007 – Jan 2009 ### Diablo Valley College Jan 2005 – Jan 2007 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/cnrhodes --- Source: https://flows.cv/colinrhodes JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/colinrhodes/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-22