# Ian Donovan > Senior Rails Developer | Mentor, Friend Location: Boston, Massachusetts, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/iandonovan ## Work Experience ### Senior Software Engineer @ Oddball Jan 2024 – Present | Boston, Massachusetts, United States ### Senior Developer @ Clora Jan 2020 – Jan 2024 | Boston, Massachusetts, United States While maintaining individual contributions, I additionally lead our co-op/internship program through Northeastern University. I am responsible for interviewing candidates, choosing who to hire, and mentoring the interns for their six-month terms. I act as a “player-coach” of sorts whose primary role is that of a senior engineer while I simultaneously hold office hours and perform other mentorship duties. A rundown: ● Sole technical interviewer for all candidates. Over the four co-op terms I conducted over one hundred such interviews. ● Act as mentor to co-ops upon their hiring. Over the four co-op terms we hired nine people, all of whom reported to and were guided by me. ● Host twice-weekly drop-in “office hours” where anyone with a question can join the meeting and ask. ### Full Stack Engineer @ Clora Jan 2017 – Jan 2020 | Cambridge, MA As the second engineering hire in a post-seed startup, I develop Clora’s primary application – a two-sided marketplace for life-science professionals and the people who hire them – with Ruby on Rails and React, deployed to Heroku. We leverage Redis for our job queue, Algolia for our user-facing search, Twilio for texting, and S3 for file storage. Projects and other initiatives: ● Introduce resume parsing OpenAI’s API to pre-fill consultants’ profiles during registration ● Architect project templates so employer users can easily create variants of a basic job posting ● Add “featured consultants” page with corresponding Algolia search functionality to immediately surface top talent ● Streamline codebase’s transactions through the introduction of services, significantly reducing lines of code in the Model layer ● Upgrade Rails version from 4 to 5, 5 to 6, and 6 to 7 ### Software Engineer @ Smashing Boxes Jan 2014 – Jan 2017 | Durham, North Carolina Create a wide range of web applications (both integrated and API-only) by writing clean, intelligible, test-driven Ruby on Rails code. Frequent buzzwords include TDD, Agile (standup, sprints), dev-ops, and disruption. Branched off into iOS development, working with Swift 2-3 and consuming all that JSON I'd been crafting for years on the backend. Began working remotely from Dorchester, MA on June 6th, 2017. ### Software Engineer @ Pubget Jan 2012 – Jan 2014 Develop web technologies leveraging Ruby On Rails. Created Pubget Updates (www.pubget.com/account/updates), an e-alert system that notifies users of new papers in their areas of expertise. Crafted tasks to automatically download, parse, and import large-scale XML files from Medline and other NLM sources into Solr. Branched off and internationalized a new document delivery product for a Japanese customer. ### Systems Intern @ Lutron Electronics Jan 2011 – Jan 2011 Designed, built, and tested electrical circuits used in the Energy-Savr Node, an environmentally-conscious light control system with both commercial and residential applications. Used knowledge of both analog circuitry and software design. Responsibilities included filter design, power supply alterations, transistor switching network design, and microcontroller timing software development. ### Teaching Assistant @ Tufts University Jan 2011 – Jan 2011 | Medford, MA Guided students through COMP 11, the introductory computer science course at Tufts. Led lab sessions and provided project assistance. ## Education ### Bachelor of Science (BS) in Computer Engineering Tufts University Jan 2008 – Jan 2012 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/idonovan --- Source: https://flows.cv/iandonovan JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/iandonovan/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-22