# Joshua Aaron Guthals > Lead software engineer with management experience. Enjoy leading teams to productive, profitable, and generally beguiling outcomes. Location: Chicago, Illinois, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/joshuaaaronguthals I’m a principal software engineer with extensive experience in areas such as training, mentorship, project management, and cross-functional team leadership. I worked the past two years remotely from Chicago, IL, in functional Ruby and React-Redux for Invoy Health (located in Irvine, CA), and spent the last year transitioning into engineering management. While at Invoy, I focused the first year on designing internal APIs in two end-user areas: 1) our internal portals for analysts' use and 2) our customer facing mobile apps. This included building and exposing access to features such as daily insights, educational clips, check-in streaks, and landing pages (marketing and member snapshots). The second year yielded a transition to cross-functional team leadership, including sprint planning, team syncs, standups, product and design huddles, general management, and team hangouts. I provided increasing support for our app engineers and data scientist, communicating timelines and deliverables, connecting them with internal and 3rd party resources to facilitate completion of roadmap items, and generally seeking to be there when they needed me. Prior to that I was lead software engineer at a high-volume SMS & MMS B2B provider, Mobile Commons by Upland Software (centralized in Austin, TX). We regularly generated upwards of 2M texts per day for our blue-chip clients. I focused on mentoring engineers, optimizing SQL queries, managing background jobs with Resque, designing API calls to telecommunications companies (Twilio, OpenMarket), and expanding our code to allow for international SMS campaigns. Notably, I was lead engineer on American Red Cross's text-to-donate project. In 2011, I obtained my masters (with honors) from NYU in Music Technology, with an emphasis in Digital Signal Theory, orchestral Microphone Placement, and C/C++ programming. My thesis, exploring our ability to perceive vocal pitch correction in acoustic music, was used as a template for future NYU students' projects. Over the years, I have concerned myself with health and social issues, including HIV prevention, cancer research, and LGBT rights -- by participating in AIDSWalk and Team in Training, and by accepting an appointment to the NYC Dept of Health's HIV Planning Group (2014-2021). Prior to attending General Assembly, I combined many of these interests, doing Qualtrics survey design and web design for an HIV Prevention Research group at Hunter College (2011-2013), while also managing a team of 20+ field recruiters. I have attached my up-to-date resume immediately below my summary. ## Work Experience ### Senior Software Engineer @ Invoy Jan 2021 – Jan 2023 | Irvine, California, United States ● Interim Engineering Lead, summer 2023. Reported to Head of Product and Software, ran standups, software, product, & design syncs. Conducted interviews. Communicated team objectives, set release schedules via semi-monthly sprint planning meetings. Oversaw critical app projects, including SSL certs, firmware integrations. ● Technical Lead, managing member experience initiatives across apps, portals, marketing landing pages. Cross-team planning & facilitation. Built backend logic & front end pages (eg Daily Insights, Educational Clips, BofA Plus 1, & Invoy In a Box). ● Backend engineer responsible for internal APIs providing members and analysts access to reports, serving educational clips & daily insights to members during daily check-ins, and rendering weekly program snapshots. ● Achieved key efficiency improvements: Upgraded shipping & fulfillment automations, reducing manual shipping work. Implemented self-service in-app member program changes, freeing analysts for higher-level personalized coaching. Enacted low code Webflow marketing pages, freeing hours of backend engineering time. ### Board Member, HIV Planning Group, Chair of Membership & Community Engagement Workgroup @ New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene Jan 2014 – Jan 2021 | Greater New York City Area 2 year appointed volunteer position on the NYC DOHMH's HIV Planning Group, re-appointed for second, third, and fourth term. The primary goal of the New York City HIV Planning Group (“NYC HPG”) is to reduce the incidence of new HIV infections and disease in New York City. Members of the NYC HPG work to inform the update of a comprehensive New York City Jurisdictional HIV Prevention Plan. ### Senior Lead Software Engineer @ Upland Software Jan 2021 – Jan 2021 | Greater New York City Area Mobile Commons by Upland runs text-messaging-based campaigns that integrate seamlessly into companies' existing communications outreach. We process millions of text messages daily. Our clients include the American Red Cross, USPS, Planned Parenthood, Hillary Clinton Campaign, Viacom, AARP, The College Board, Univision, Rock the Vote, the NYC MTA, and United Farm Workers. Recent emphasis has been major SMS delivery speed improvements for specific clients (5x or more), building out text-to-donate functionality for the Red Cross, enabling multi-part SMS (via ruby-smpp), pure SQL for reporting needs, expanding special character sets in our message body processing to insure multi-lingual functionality, allowing custom help and opt-out messages in Spanish, and integrating features into our platform with newly acquired text message partner (HipCricket). CRM Integration, Upgrading Rails, Monitoring SMS/MMS traffic, Specs, Phone Metadata, Custom exports and reporting, TDD, Agile. ### Senior Software Engineer @ Upland Software Jan 2015 – Jan 2021 Mobile Commons by Upland runs text-messaging-based campaigns that integrate seamlessly into companies' existing communications outreach. We process millions of text messages daily. Our clients include the American Red Cross, USPS, Planned Parenthood, Hillary Clinton Campaign, Viacom, AARP, The College Board, Univision, Rock the Vote, the NYC MTA, and United Farm Workers. Recent emphasis has been major SMS delivery speed improvements for specific clients (5x or more), building out text-to-donate functionality for the Red Cross, enabling multi-part SMS (via ruby-smpp), pure SQL for reporting needs, expanding special character sets in our message body processing to insure multi-lingual functionality, allowing custom help and opt-out messages in Spanish, and integrating features into our platform with newly acquired text message partner (HipCricket). CRM Integration, Upgrading Rails, Monitoring SMS/MMS traffic, Specs, Phone Metadata, Custom exports and reporting, TDD, Agile. ### Junior Software Engineer @ Upland Software Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 CRM Integration, Upgrading Rails, Monitoring SMS/MMS traffic, Specs, Phone Metadata, Custom exports and reporting ### Software Engineer Apprentice @ Mobile Commons Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 | greater new york city area Mobile Commons runs text-messaging-based campaigns that integrate seamlessly into companies. existing communications outreach. ### Web Development Student @ General Assembly Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 | Greater New York City Area Three-month full-stack web development intensive with emphasis on Ruby on Rails, Backbone.js, TDD/BDD (Rspec, Jasmine, Capybara, Travis), SQL, PostgreSQL, Agile Software Development (Scrum), Git / GitHub, Heroku, Wireframing/creating ERDs, HTML5, CSS3/SCSS, interfacing with and creating API's, CS fundamentals, and public presentation of technical concepts. ### Recruitment Specialist and Webmaster @ Center for HIV Educational Services and Training, Hunter College Jan 2012 – Jan 2013 | New York, NY Created and distributed press releases. Managed internet campaigns on Facebook, Craigslist, chat rooms, blogs, and elsewhere to recruit eligible subjects for our long term research projects. Updated & programmed website. Handled social marketing & blogging and represented organization at events. Trained & supervised recruitment staff of 25+ paid field recruiters and student interns. Reported upon recruitment effectiveness. Managed petty cash expenses and technology devices for field recruiters. Supervised media interns. Interviewed & hired staff. ## Education ### Master's Degree in Music Technology in Tonmeister Honors, Acoustics, Computer Programming, Music Psychology, Advanced Audio Engineering New York University Jan 2009 – Jan 2011 ### Full-stack web developer in SQL, Web Development Immersive, Ruby, CSS, HTML, JavaScript General Assembly Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 ### B.A. Psychology & English Literature in Cognitive Psychology, Statistics, Developmental Psychology, Creative Writing, Personal Essay Writing Rice University Jan 1995 – Jan 1999 ### Direct Exchange Programme in Developmental Psychology, British Modernist Literature, Shakespeare University of Oxford Jan 1997 – Jan 1998 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/jguthals - Website: http://joshuaguthals.herokuapp.com - GitHub: http://github.com/zioplox11 --- Source: https://flows.cv/joshuaaaronguthals JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/joshuaaaronguthals/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-22