# Garrett Levy > Staff Software Engineer at Fiveable Location: Sacramento, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/garrettlevy Experienced Software Engineer (JavaScript, Java, Python) and Github trending open source developer working with React/Redux/Node applications within the Flux design paradigm. Prominent speaker on Redux design patterns and application for frameworks including Angular 2/4 at SoCal React. Recently I’ve been working for Service Technologies, working on everything from the Frontend to ETL pipelines. Find me on Github at github.com/garrettlr. ## Work Experience ### Staff Software Engineer @ Fiveable Jan 2022 – Present | Sacramento, California, United States - Led creation of Fiveable’s design system, leveraging MUI, Figma, and Storybook to develop a bespoke design language for Fiveable, coordinating with designers and engineers to implement either end in a predictable fashion to streamline building UIs. - Migrated Fiveable’s most expensive pages to Next.js’ app router in order to take advantage of superior caching mechanisms, especially at deploy time, to provide better availability and more resilience towards resource availability. - Led the development of Fiveable's Cram Quiz product, a live multiplayer quiz game capable of supporting up to 400k users in order to drive engagement during Fiveable’s yearly teacher-led AP review sessions, leveraging Socket.io and Cloud Run. - Developed, planned and ran biquarterly Chaos drills, breaking random parts of the staging env and forcing the on-call engineer to coordinate efforts to restore service as a way to promote team readiness and spread knowledge about our infrastructure. - Leveraged vellum.ai and claude to generate images for our study guides on the fly, to help improve engagement and quality. - Deployed a practice question generation tool powered by OpenAI to make it easy for our content team to create practice questions for our mobile app. Was later extended to generate several different forms of content for our application. - Scaffolded Fiveable’s mobile practice app using expo and react native to empower our javascript team. Later handed off and oversaw development by a team of three engineers, leveraging technologies and patterns implemented during scaffolding. ### Senior Software Engineer @ Auction Frontier Jan 2019 – Jan 2022 | Sacramento County, California, United States - Developed a SOAP microservice integrating with one of AF’s customers’ backend systems in order to offload a long running reporting and statistics job from the API monolith, reducing costs and increasing availability of major systems. - Rebuilt AF’s internal reporting engine, leveraging the builder pattern to significantly reduce recursive complexity making modifications and updates to individual reports trivial, rather than prohibitive. - Co-Led migration of AF source code to lerna monorepos and developed tools based on this to simplify the development cycle. - Developed a service exposing I18n templates to customers, shifting responsibility for this task to AF’s international customers. - Architected and developed Susan, AF’s React/MobX based web UI kit to unify and modernize our frontends, leveraging typescript, jest, storybook/chromatic and strong linting rules to minimize reliance on human review. - Led architecture and development on Project Falafel, AF’s initiative to migrate from a monolith to a distributed microservices system, enabling customers to promote artifacts into their production environments at their own pace. Note: Auction Frontier was a subsidiary of Flagship Creative, before being aquired by KAR Global/Openlane in 2021 ### Software Engineer @ Service Technologies Inc Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | Greater Los Angeles Area  Led frontend development and pushed test coverage to 50%, from 0%, significantly reducing regressions - relieving the need to grow the team prematurely.  Led frontend development for the launch of Service's hotels product, doubling the website footprint.  Developed the frontend flow necessary to support several third party partnerships, resulting in 20K new users.  Retooled the frontend to properly bundle, split and treeshake the build, reducing load times and CDN costs.  Migrated various in-house tools from Angular 2/4 to React in order to unify our frontend stack. Occasionally used Redux.  Developed an in-app, cross-platform promotions and messaging system leveraging Firebase, React, Redux and RxJS to load and display messaging payloads asynchronously while ensuring users only see content once across all platforms.  Produced an ElasticSearch reindexer capable of moving up to 100gb/hr to AWS ES clusters, written in Java to leverage parallel computing. Accomplished an error rate of less than .1% by wrapping index requests with a geometric backoff class, preventing the apparent shutdown of Service.  Co-Led the architecture and development of a new ETL pipeline processing over 10M emails a day, enabling Service to replace its primary SaaS provider and providing significant cost reductions. Utilized AWS Fargate, Lambda, SQS, SNS and Reddis to segregate the pipeline to avoid bottlenecks, prevent duplicate processing of emails, and fix significant data loss issues.  Led development on Service's Microsoft Integration, offering free Service to Office365 subscribers, increasing new users by 5%.  Developed a serverless Mass Identity Mailer, enabling our agents to respond to airlines on behalf of our users via email.  Own our Flights Form Submission service, our primary revenue stream, consisting of a Selenium pipeline and a proprietary Selenium-like system to automate the airline complaint process for our users. ### Lead Software Engineer, UI/UX Lead @ Fermion Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 | Greater Los Angeles Area  Simplified development by utilizing Redux to eliminate large prop chains and preserve state histories to ease debugging.  Created simulated proxy components by parsing JSX from predefined components using node file system hooks.  Implemented tree-like hierarchical view of semantic component hierarchy by constructing abstract data structures within application state, allowing for a highly performant component rendering system.  Parsed component hierarchy data by creating recursive data-to-view rendering functions allowing dynamic user structuring of deeply nested components.  Enabled users to export real React projects by recursively diffing and parsing changes to proxies to write JSX to files.  Eased developer load via Enzyme/Jest testing integrated with Travis CI to redirect developer focus to new features.  Used node child processes in conjunction with exporter algorithm to quickly show a true implementation of the developer’s project without exiting our ecosystem.  Leveraged the Electron framework by generating installers and configuring bundling files in order to build a cross-platform desktop application.  Employed Flow type checking to ease debugging by ensuring correct data types were passed between class and function calls. ### Operations @ Uber Jan 2016 – Jan 2017 | Greater Los Angeles Area Stress tested proprietary internal tools utilizing a custom analytics suite to reduce bugs and improve productivity. ### Operations @ State Street Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 | Greater Boston Area  Developed a scalable VBA app providing tools to automate analytics and fault detection to reduce overtime costs.  Created a diffing algorithm powered by Pivot Tables, filters and MSSQL to compare and correct state changes in financial records by combining historical records and daily transactions to recalculate end of day records.  Enforced client-side version control via a custom algorithm to reduce support costs and deployment errors.  Mandated software updates on the client end by taking advantage of VBA’s ability to write to its own modules.  Utilized existing DLL hooks in legacy mainframe emulator to create an API to get, set and release data on the mainframe, as well as release pending financial transactions.  Implemented a custom OCR algorithm to parse image data to automate fault detection on high value wire transfers. ## Education ### Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Civil & Structural Engineering University of California, Davis Jan 2008 – Jan 2013 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/garrett-levy --- Source: https://flows.cv/garrettlevy JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/garrettlevy/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-23