# Stephen Kernan

> Tech Lead | Senior Software Engineer @ Axios

Location: Greater St. Louis, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/stephenkernan

Engineering lead with 5 years of experience rapidly prototyping ideas, improving developer workflows, and building performant systems. I lead the R&D team at Axios, delivering AI-powered tools that drive newsroom efficiency.

## Work Experience
### Senior Software Engineer / Tech Lead @ Axios
Jan 2023 – Present
- Drove 25% increase in organic newsletter signups by architecting and building a recommendation engine powered by subscriber traffic patterns

- Designed and implemented an automated content-tagging system with a 70% tag acceptance rate, creating a new revenue opportunity for sponsored topic pages while adding depth to our audience cohorts

- Led an org-wide database mentorship initiative that involved pairing with each backend engineer to teach them about query optimization, leading to 20% faster median response times across all services in just 3 months

- Improved the performance review scores of two junior engineers through one-on-one mentorship, coaching, and advocacy - leading to one engineer's promotion in their next eligible promotion cycle

- Wrote a guide for safe database migrations which eliminated migration-related outages in 2025

### Senior Full Stack Engineer @ Balto
Jan 2022 – Jan 2023 | St Louis, Missouri, United States
- Architected and oversaw the implementation of our newest product

- Paired with the Real-Time Coaching team to ensure that their advanced reporting features were performant and delivered on time

- Championed the adoption of AWS Aurora, which significantly increased the scalability and resiliency of our production database

- Created and facilitated a Postgres course to help engineers across multiple teams level up their database skills

- Formalized the first iteration of a mentorship framework for junior developers at Balto

### Full Stack Engineer II @ Balto
Jan 2021 – Jan 2022 | St Louis, Missouri, United States
- Led the overhaul of a failing service a month ahead of schedule, reducing query time from a 90s response time down to under 500ms

- Identified table volume limitations early in our new QA service, developing and carrying out the implementation of a reporting pattern that reduces our volume by a factor of 1,000

- Mentored my two newest teammates to ensure that they were able to contribute meaningfully to the team in half of the normal ramp-up time without any significant drop to team momentum

- Created and facilitated a short-term working group to address the limitations of our core architecture before the limitations become a problem

- Created and facilitated #hack-pack - a group of 35 non-engineers who want to learn to code

- Presented at least monthly to our engineering guilds to introduce concepts and patterns

### Full Stack Engineer @ Balto
Jan 2020 – Jan 2021 | St Louis, Missouri, United States
- Designed and implemented the database relationships for Real-Time QA, which shipped to beta customers two weeks ahead of schedule and has generated > $4M in ARR

- Optimized indexing on our largest table at the time to reduce query times by 90%

- Implemented our first load test in order ensure that our most crucial features scale

### Financial Relationship Consultant @ Regions Bank
Jan 2018 – Jan 2020 | Creve Coeur, MO

### Intern @ THE CENTER FOR PURE HEART VISION
Jan 2016 – Jan 2017 | Little Rock, Arkansas Area


## Education
### Bachelor's degree in Bible/Biblical Studies
Harding University
Jan 2014 – Jan 2017


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/stephen-kernan
- Website: https://stephen-kernan.github.io

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Source: https://flows.cv/stephenkernan
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/stephenkernan/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-03-22