Steve Grossi (he/him)

Full-stack product engineer and team lead

Skills

Empathy, curiosity, and clarity foremost—then Elixir, Ruby, JavaScript, React, CSS, HTML, SQL, Docker, and AWS.

Senior Engineer at Payitoff, acquired by Array (September 2022–Present)

  • As a senior engineer I coupled planning, architecture, and delivery of new product capabilities with systems-level changes to security, observability, and developer tooling that ensured our ability to scale-up safely.
  • Led a phased, zero-downtime migration to envelope encryption for sensitive data, providing enhanced security and enterprise-readiness. I designed a simple abstraction enabling others to adopt this capability with just a few lines of code, and contributed an upstream bugfix to the open-source aws-kms library.
  • Instituted a business intelligence tool (Metabase) to save time and improve consistency answering questions about our product usage and outcomes. This became an essential tool for our engineering, product, and sales efforts.
  • Coached a team of mostly new-to-Elixir (and some new-to-programming) engineers on Elixir, Phoenix, and LiveView patterns, building a reputation for instructive, collaborative code-reviews.

Lead Software Engineer and Engineering Manager at Lessonly, acquired by Seismic (November 2014–September 2022)

  • As Lessonly’s second engineer, I’ve helped grow a culture of collaboration and knowledge-sharing. With code reviews, shared style guides, automation, and more, I’ve focused on building more than software—on building systems, practices, and patterns that have helped us scale from two engineers to 40.
  • As a Lead Engineer, I’ve coached teams of developers of various backgrounds and experience levels to question, understand, decompose, deploy, measure, iterate on, and communicate about flagship features of the platform like learning paths, commenting, and a Chrome extension.
  • As we’ve scaled up, I’ve honed the ability to analyze an optimize code and infrastructure through simplification, optimization, and caching (ideally in that order)
  • As an Engineering Manager for several years and enablement lead afterward, I’ve worked primarily on empowering my team with communities of practice, automation tools that save time and provide context when it’s needed, and abstractions like APIs for common needs to containerized dev environments.
  • Since 2017, I helped start and run Lessonly’s employee-led Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion group. We organized discussion groups, an executive panel, and training that measurably improved the diversity of the company.

Senior Developer at Alldayeveryday (January 2013–November 2014)

  • Lead developer building a mobile-responsive, international publishing platform for Gap’s global media team.
  • Sole developer for Gap’s 2013 online holiday gift guide, an editorialized shopping experience backed by a custom Rails CMS.
  • Co-developer of an HTML5 mobile web app for Nike’s Global Media Summit using Rails and Backbone.js. Features included a live calendar, photo stream, and chat.

Senior Coordinator of Online Projects at CancerCare (July 2009–January 2013)

  • Migrated cancercare.org from a folder of PHP files to a maintainable, version-controlled web application with a custom CMS built on Rails.
  • Designed and built many of CancerCare’s supplemental sites including cancercarecopay.org, cancercareforwomen.org, and myelofibrosisawareness.org.
  • Managed two contract developers brought on to help with major projects.

In the Community

  • Since moving to Indianapolis, I’ve been a frequent member and sometime speaker at the Indy.rb Ruby users’ group.
  • I organized Indy Elixir, the local Elixir users’ group before taking it online-only due to COVID.
  • I’ve volunteered with Railsbridge Indy, teaching Ruby and Rails chiefly to folks underrepresented in the industry.

New York University B.A. in Philosophy & Comparative Literature

Philosophy and literature prepared me unexpectedly well for a career in software. Philosophy taught me how to take apart, construct, and write clearly about complex concepts and systems. And comp-lit taught me how to approach pretty much anything from a variety of useful critical perspectives.