# 🖖🏻 Colin Shevlin > Engineering at Sparrow Location: Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/colinshevlin - Scaled engineering teams from 6 to 18+ engineers while maintaining code quality and team culture - Led architectural decisions for new platforms designed to handle significant scale challenges - Implemented continuous delivery processes that transformed release cycles from high-stress to routine - Built full-stack applications using modern technologies: FastAPI, React, TypeScript, Django, Kubernetes - Actively soliciting endorsements for baking. ## Work Experience ### Senior Software Engineer @ Sparrow Jan 2022 – Present | Remote Sparrow makes it easy for employers to care for their people with the first true end-to-end employee leave management solution. Industry-leading tech is coupled with a world-class leave specialist team to automate the most painful parts of leave across the US and Canada. With Sparrow, companies that care are able to reduce compliance risks, enhance the employee experience, operate better, and contain costs. ### Staff Software Engineer, Tech Lead @ Classkick Jan 2021 – Jan 2022 I serve as the tech lead on our revenue code base, written with FastAPI with a React front end written with TypeScript. Most of the effort is putting in place process that gets us to continuous delivery and more frequent releasing with lower-stress releases. ### Engineering Manager @ Classkick Jan 2021 – Jan 2021 In my transition out of the Head of Engineering role, I was an engineering manager for a brief period as we onboarded our new VP of Engineering and Engineering Manager ### Interim Head of Engineering @ Classkick Jan 2021 – Jan 2021 | Chicago, Illinois, United States During our growth period, we also experienced both huge scaling challenges and a period of unprecedented hiring. During this 6 month period, I led hiring and technical direction on the engineering team. I grew the engineering team from 6 engineers at the start of this period to 18 engineers, as well as a VP of engineering. I also led technical decision making for a new backend designed to solve our additional scale and be an extensible platform to build on. This role was interim because the VP of engineering took over the roles and responsibilities of this role. ### Senior Software Engineer @ Classkick Jan 2020 – Jan 2021 | Chicago, Illinois, United States I came back to Classkick as an IC during a time of unprecedented growth. During this time, we scaled about 20x year over year, fixed bottlenecks in our platform, created new bottlenecks, and repeated. ### Lead Engineer @ Holberg Financial Jan 2018 – Jan 2020 | Chicago I led the engineering team at Holberg Financial, acquired by Mariner Wealth Advisors in 2023. I led development and architectural decisions on a Django application that helps people become more financially healthy. I also built a React application from scratch to serve as the front end and modernized our infrastructure with Kubernetes so we could take advantage of more advanced ingress rules. ### Full Stack Engineer @ Classkick Jan 2015 – Jan 2018 | Chicago, IL I work in Scala, Objective-C, Swift, and JavaScript building the Classkick iPad and web app. As part of the engineering team, I also QA my own code, give lots of code reviews, and write technical specifications for my upcoming features. My role also includes doing teacher interviews for product and coaching teachers in the classroom. This not only gives me an opportunity to see our app in action, I also get to develop as a coach. Classkick helps students get more feedback from their teachers and peers. It's available for free on both iPad and web. ### Full Stack Engineer @ Gradeable Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 | Boston, MA I worked as Gradeable's sole in-house developer. We worked in a Rails stack with some custom OCR written in Python. During my time at Gradeable, I designed and built a prototype for a mobile app for student work that was backed by a Rails API. ### Bilingual Teacher @ Chicago Public Schools Jan 2012 – Jan 2014 | Chicago, IL As part of Teach for America, I taught fourth grade in Chicago. Through this experience I learned how to be a more effective leader of both adults and children, and came to a deeper understanding of why education matters to me. The experience of working in a classroom with all of its joys, celebrations, frustrations and inefficiencies was what drove me to learn web development. ### English Teaching Assistant @ Fulbright Commission Jan 2011 – Jan 2012 | Madrid, Spain I was an English Teaching Assistant in a secondary school in Spain as part of the Fulbright program. My main motivation for taking this position was to come to a better understanding of how bilingual education systems work. Through my work there, I worked closely with the Fulbright commission in Spain and planned programming and events that fostered mutual cultural understanding. ## Education ### Networking with Rust Recurse Center Jan 2022 – Jan 2022 ### Honors Bachelor of Arts in History, Spanish, International Studies, Philosophy Saint Louis University Jan 2007 – Jan 2011 ### Web Development Dev Bootcamp Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 ### Type 22 Initial Elementary Certificate in Type 29 Bilingual Certificate, Bilingual and Multilingual Education Dominican University Jan 2012 – Jan 2013 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/cwshevlin --- Source: https://flows.cv/colinshevlin JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/colinshevlin/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-22