# Riley Shenk > Software Engineer Location: Gaithersburg, Maryland, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/rileyshenk I have 10 years of experience implementing full stack solutions with Ruby on Rails and JavaScript. I have a passion for crafting dynamic frontend interactions with ReactJS, Vue.js, and designing with utility first CSS I seek to gain a close understand of specific pain points users are facing before writing any code. I believe quality of software has a one to one relationship with how well engineers know the users. I am energized by being in a field that is constantly making shifts to narrow in on best practices. I enjoy following several tech podcasts, reading articles, working through books that build complete applications, attending conferences, and participating in advanced workshops. ## Work Experience ### Senior Software Engineer @ Share Local Media Jan 2024 – Present ### Software Engineer @ Share Local Media Jan 2021 – Jan 2024 | Remote Fullstack Software Engineer working with Ruby on Rails, Elastic Search, React/Javascript, and tailwindcss ### Software Engineer @ GetWellNetwork Jan 2019 – Jan 2021 Full Stack Software Engineer working to equip doctors and health care providers with tools to help manage large populations of patients. I worked on building new backend APIs with Ruby on Rails on top of a PostgreSQL database. I also helped lead building a single page application managed by React, Typescript, Webpack, HTML, and CSS. Performance optimizations were critical to the success of that data driven application. ActiveRecord queries were analyzed to ensure their are proper database indexes, minimizing expensive table joins, and eliminating any potential n+1 queries. The frontend was optimized with React components that fetched the minimum amount of data needed to render pages. Network request are cached for instant loading of previously rendered components. Code splitting managed by Webpack to avoid bloated javascript bundle sizes. Backend apis were tested with rspec for unit tests and larger request specs. Frontend unit tests were run with Jest and React components were tested with full dom mounts using Enzyme. The frontend component library and design system was documented with storybook.js. The software team was highly collaborative, prioritizing pair programming and doing code reviews early and often. ### Software Engineer @ LearnZillion Jan 2016 – Jan 2019 | Washington D.C. Metro Area Remote full stack software engineer working with Ruby, Rails, Rspec, PostgreSQL, Sidekiq, JavaScript, Vue.js, vue-test-utils, HTML, CSS • Built a Rails API with Vue frontend that enabled customers across multi tenant app to customize their own navigation experience, eliminating manual intervention from the engineering team. • Wrote a Sidekiq cron job to retrieve student activity data, export reports over SFTP to customers’ servers, upload report to AWS, and sent alert email to the customer with Rails Action Mailer. • Leveraged TDD with backend RSpec tests, Jasmine testing for frontend unit tests, and vue-test-utils for frontend integration tests that did full dom mounts simulating clicks and change events. • Eliminated downtime on PostgreSQL data migrations (ex: avoid adding column with default value). Leadership/Remote Team Builder • Honored for having the most impact in building remote culture through being collaborative, relational, and lighthearted. • Initiated multiple remote book studies: The Power of Moments to enhance onboarding experience, Lean Analytics to reframe metrics of success, and Don’t Make Me Think to improve site navigation UI/UX. • Convinced the CEO to start a company wide getting-into-classrooms initiative that had employees spend time observing classrooms based off the belief that the best software comes from deeply understanding and experiencing user pain points. • Took initiative to interview and select a Gallup StrengthFinders Coach to work with the engineering team, senior leadership team, and later the entire company to help understand how to leverage each others’ strengths. ### Intern @ Cvent Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 | Tysons, VA • Created ruby scripts that used the Slack API to automate employee onboarding, offboarding, and profile managing. • Researched, tested, and implemented an open source Stash codesearch plugin that uses an Elasticsearch cluster to extend the search capabilities of Stash from searching just filenames in a single repository to searching content in files across all company repositories. ### Teaching Assistant - Intermediate C programming @ University of Maryland Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 "Riley is among the best TAs I have had over my almost 30 years at UMD -- not just enthused about the topic but also about communicating it to the students.” – Professor William Hawkins Responsible for giving 2 hours of weekly lectures and grading all homework, quizzes, and exams. ### Intern @ AT&T Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 • Member of an agile software development team (scrum model) developing a custom AT&T network security product capable of ingesting, analyzing, and storing 15 GB of data per second in MySql and Hadoop databases. • Enhanced Hive and Beeline queries by writing a custom Hadoop User Defined Function (UDF) in Java that utilized a hash map to rapidly display application names. • Developed a bash script to sync configuration files in a Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) housed in multiple Hadoop clusters across the United States. • Wrote MySQL queries to retrieve data stored in the products secure cashing system. ### Intern @ GL Communications Jan 2012 – Jan 2013 “Riley demonstrated that he is a quick study and highly intelligent. More importantly, the fact that he is a hard worker and a team player was evident from the very beginning. Additionally, he is very mannerly and genuine.” - Matthew Yost, Project Manager. GL Communications Inc Wrote an automated quality control testing suite to test network monitoring hardware 16x faster and more reliably then existing manual testing procedures. This software eliminated the need for the engineering department to train and support a quality control division, resulting in a significant corporate cost savings. All testing results were indexed and stored electronically by serial number and date. ### Intern @ Siva Corrosion Services, Inc. Jan 2011 – Jan 2011 ## Education ### BS in Computer Engineering University of Maryland ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/rileyshenk --- Source: https://flows.cv/rileyshenk JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/rileyshenk/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-22