# Kaden Barlow > Building at Applause Location: United States, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/kadenbarlow I’m a software engineer with 9 years of experience. I love working at fast moving startups and writing code that provides immediate value to customers. I feel most at home writing backend code in Node.js and Ruby on Rails. As a full-stack engineer, I have experience in a range of technologies including React, Vue, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, AWS, Heroku and Kubernetes. In my most recent role at Ditto, I focused on frontend development and software design, contributing to projects that enhanced user experiences. Previously, I worked at SimpleNexus where I started as the 10th engineer. I helped scale the engineering organization to over 100 engineers prior to an $1.2 billion acquisition. My time there was spent both as an individual contributor focused on backend development and infrastructure and in leadership roles such as team lead, engineering manager, and principal engineer. When not working you’ll find me out on my road bike, running, reading, tinkering with electronics or spending time with my family. ## Work Experience ### Senior Software Engineer | Dev Lead @ Applause Jan 2024 – Present ### Senior Software Engineer @ Ditto Jan 2023 – Jan 2024 I was one of five engineers at Ditto. I joined just after they completed their Series A. We released features quickly and with high quality as we iterated towards product market fit. My time at Ditto was centered around frontend web development and UX design. - Implemented features using the MERN (MongoDB, Express, React, Node.js) Stack, Typescript, and Redis - Developed prototypes, created a design system, and implemented several redesigns of core functionality - Improved user experience by reducing startup time of app from three minutes (worst case) to milliseconds - Increased quality by creating e2e test suites for two different applications using Cypress and Playwright - Maintained infrastructure hosted on Heroku, AWS and deployed to through Github Actions - Dabbled with Kotlin and Jetpack Compose to build an example Android app showcasing our SDK. ### Principal Software Engineer | Lead Architect @ SimpleNexus Jan 2021 – Jan 2023 I led the first team of Architects at SimpleNexus and worked with a group of 4-6 infrastructure and shared subsystem teams. - Introduced multi-account AWS architecture to secure boundaries and enable developer independence - Lead conversation of AWS resources to infrastructure as code using AWS CDK - Developed self-service infrastructure for teams to build, deploy and monitor their own microservices - Built our first data pipeline using AWS Glue, S3 and Athena initially for analysts using Domo - Hardened our disaster recovery processes including setting up support for cross-region failovers ### Engineering Manager @ SimpleNexus Jan 2021 – Jan 2021 | Lehi, Utah, United States I managed 6 teams, each with 5 to 8 engineers while we doubled the size of our engineering department. Those teams included our Platform Team, QA Team, and several feature teams. - Founded a new Architecture Team responsible for Engineering's two-year technical vision - Automated a new Incident Response Plan with Jira, Slack, OpsGenie, Lambda, and Zoom - Created Gitlab, K8s, and AWS infra for deploying ephemeral environments per MR - Introduced Cypress and rolled out automated UI testing across all codebases - Oversaw creation of a QA regression test suite and release cycle for a new product ### Senior Software Engineer | Platform Team Lead @ SimpleNexus Jan 2017 – Jan 2021 | Lehi, UT I led a team that focused on backend code architecture, system infrastructure, and application security. We worked mainly in Ruby on Rails and use AWS for our cloud infrastructure. - Migrated our infrastructure to Kubernetes using AWS EKS, GitOps, etc. - Designed an event system on top of Apache Kafka on AWS MSK - Introduced Rails Engines as a way to modularize and organize our backend code - Created the billing system which included integrating the main system with Netsuite - Oversaw penetration tests and SOC2 audits - Setup our application as a SAML IdP for SSO - Developed many frontend features and webpages in VueJS - Led my team in a 9 month refactor of the heart of our system ### Research Assistant @ Brigham Young University Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 | Provo, Utah Area - Applied machine learning and data science techniques to big data problems - Developed an algorithm to represent documents in a vector form while preserving semantics - Implemented data scrubbing techniques and utilized neural networks, kmeans, etc in Python ### Teachers Assistant @ Brigham Young University Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 | Provo - Instructed computer science sections on techniques of linear and non-linear data structures - Mentored computer science students in C++ programming, debugging code, and data structures - Designed bash scripts to automate the testing and compiling of student projects ### Support Training Manager @ Mozenda Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 | Provo, Utah Area - Supervised the training of new employees and other daily trainings - Solved customer problems using Regular Expressions, XPaths and Javascript - Interacted with QA department by reporting bugs and their reproduction steps in Jira ### Member Service Representative @ Deseret First Credit Union Jan 2015 – Jan 2017 A member service representative is a customer facing role that combines responsibilities traditionally owned by tellers, a personal account representatives, and a loan officers. ## Education ### Bachelor of Science - BS in Computer Science Brigham Young University Jan 2015 – Jan 2019 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/kaden-barlow --- Source: https://flows.cv/kadenbarlow JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/kadenbarlow/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-22