# Tim Smith > Senior Backend Software Engineer Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/timsmith I am a backend engineer with 15 years of professional experience, looking for my next opportunity to grow. I bring a people-and-process approach to teams I lead and organizations I join, because I know that content and happy engineers are productive engineers. I foster a strong culture of collaboration and mentorship, leading by example by learning in public. I have deep technical expertise in designing and building distributed back-end distributed systems to meet enterprise scale needs, and full-stack breadth from React front-end to MySQL database schema design. ## Work Experience ### Staff Software Engineer @ Together Labs Jan 2025 – Present Assumed ownership of payment processing systems following the departure of the sole developer, performing knowledge transfer, stabilizing subscription fulfillment workflows, and ensuring uninterrupted payment operations. Scaled rewarded video system to increase daily ad engagement by 10%, refactoring a proof-of-concept into a production-grade architecture with persistent data storage, marketing admin tooling, and extensible reward ladder frameworks. Led backend delivery for company-priority retention initiative, stabilizing core systems and enabling Q4 launch of leaderboard-driven outfit challenge that increased retention and creator engagement. ### Staff Software Engineer @ Guideline Jan 2024 – Jan 2024 | California, United States Hit the ground running to partner with co-hire on entirely new partner integration. Coordinated with and guided partner devs and co-hire on designing API to meet both businesses’ needs. Launched in Q1. Took ownership of languishing API version migration of largest partner representing 50% of business, facing deprecation deadline in June. Discovered, reported, and scoped missing work from original project plan, amounting to tripling of project size. Refactored core integration systems and automated test suite to simplify enlarged migration project. Delivered with only one month extension. Enhanced code review process by organizing team reviews to teach and learn what was deserving of scrutiny in team’s codebase. Mentored team in debugging methodologies and designing testable code, reducing investigation costs and maintenance overhead on refactors. ### Staff Software Engineer @ Pluto 5000 Jan 2022 – Jan 2023 Delivered full-stack applications in a Node.js/React environment to meet company goals for investment presentations in my first month. Designed and built producer-consumer distributed system for delayed payments in a zero-trust encryption data storage environment in the subsequent two months. Designed and built multi-stage data processing pipeline for performing arbitrary data analytics on large data sets of encrypted documents. ### Staff Software Engineer @ Together Labs Jan 2016 – Jan 2022 Lead back-end application infrastructure team. Rescued project to funnel new users into chatrooms with community volunteers. Delivered project in under one month instead of planned two to three by designing and building alternative solution. Achieved 10-15% day 7/day 30 retention. Drove effort to resolve conflicting parallel implementations of "is my friend online?" between desktop and mobile clients. Identified cause of bad reviews on app stores, lead product meetings to compromise resolution, and designed and built compromise solution. Achieved 1-2 star improvements in mobile app store scores. Designed and built custom content management system for highlighting community content creators in seasonal sale events, including MySQL backend and internal admin tool as well as client-facing endpoints. Enabled increased click-through to store with correlated purchase volume. Lead server-side engineering effort for GDPR compliance. Coordinated across multiple teams and made prioritization calls under pressure to maintain velocity despite uncertain requirements, and built the tool for generating GDPR reports. Delivered GDPR compliance in less than a week. Built and deployed a variety of REST endpoints in PHP and Haskell to support product roadmap needs, handling over 100k concurrent users. Mentored junior engineers across organization, wrote technical designs, scoped projects, planned team work on quarterly basis, and maintained communication standards with internal stakeholders. ### Senior Software Engineer @ Accenture Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 Primarily completed work items for clients as per contracts (back-end Java software development.) Additionally mentored team of junior developers through Spring project, providing guidance and detailed feedback to support their growth and development. ### Software Engineer @ Audible, Inc. Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 | Newark, NJ Planned sprints, managed priorities, and improved performance and test coverage of user library. ### Software Developer @ Mediacom Communications Jan 2013 – Jan 2014 | Middletown, NY Java developer using J2EE and related technologies working on company provisioning system for providing services to customers. Fixed bugs in message encoding for server-to-server communication with third party partners, saving company money on penalty fees for high-volume interactions. ### Jack of All Trades @ GameSmith Jan 2012 – Jan 2013 | New York, United States Founder, CEO/CTO, lead game designer, and lead software developer at indie game startup. Designed game, invented custom language for describing game entities, built game to playable alpha in one year. Managed and lead team of friends. Negotiated contracts with artists and organized project timeline. ### Software Engineer @ IBM Jan 2009 – Jan 2012 | Poughkeepsie Software Engineer responsible for test automation and development of test tooling for z-series mainframe operation system XML parser. ### Co-op @ IBM Jan 2008 – Jan 2008 During my internship at IBM, I worked with a small team of other interns to develop an application to store knowledge provided by subject matter experts and provide feedback and recommendations based on that knowledge to IBM clients. ## Education ### Master's degree in Computer Software Engineering Marist University ### Master of Science (M.S.) in Computer Software Engineering Marist University ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/timothysmith0 --- Source: https://flows.cv/timsmith JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/timsmith/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-01