Joshua T Kalis he/him/his

Experience

Guaranteed Rate

Jan 2021 - Jun 2022

Engineering Manager

• Stabilized team attrition.
• Authored inner source development standard process.

Rocket Mortgage / Quicken Loans

Apr 2012 - Dec 2021

Engineering Manager

Mar 2018 - Dec 2021

Guided and developed an SRE team of software and systems engineers responsible for the reliability of client and partner-facing digital storefronts, critical company infrastructure, post-incident response, root cause analysis, API development, and ad hoc projects.

• Ensured incident root causes were deeply researched and oversaw planning to prevent regressions.
• Managed development of a highly scalable leads ingestion API, handling a large portion of external integrations for third-party lead purchasing.
• Spearheaded the development of a status page aggregation to improve visibility of systems availability during incidents and outages.
• Authored an SRE Manifesto to organize expectations of the role across the company.
• Built and systematized a Community of Practice for SRE and introduced monthly Lean Coffee sessions to share lessons learned and details of current projects to increase transparency.
• Drove the adoption of SRE best practices around Service Level Agreements (SLA) and Service Level Objectives (SLO) and adoption of Service Level Indicators (SLI) to track uptime as an enterprise SLA.
• Led the team implementing multi-region infrastructure changes - as terraform templates - following AWS best practices.
• Championed work on automated observability testing in preparation for chaos engineering.
• Defined SRE team Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and coached other leaders in producing their OKRs.
• Fostered a healthy team culture and championed diversity & inclusion.
  • Achieved 97% retention and increased team diversity to 40%.
  • Mentored team members via regular 1:1s; achieved a 50% promotion rate.
  • Transitioned - a team of 10 - to be 100% remote during Covid.

Solutions Architect

Nov 2015 - Mar 2018

Promoted to a hybrid role with a mix of technical responsibilities related to an AWS migration and transition to REST while also taking on expanded responsibilities in mentoring and coaching teams.

• Named to a team focused on migration strategy from on-prem to cloud-first with AWS.
  • Contributed to decision-making for AWS services (Fargate, EC2, API Gateway, DynamoDB, S3, Aurora, and others), cost versus performance trade-offs, and subject matter expertise for HTTP API decisions.
  • Defined enterprise standards for AWS and championed their adoption.
• Defined strategy for an enterprise-wide integration platform and articulated value proposition to obtain buy-in on REST and API-first adoptions from hesitant engineering teams.
  • Directed a data-driven vendor evaluation and drove final decision resulting in multi-million dollar deals with Mulesoft (ESB and API Gateway) and Software AG (MQ). ESB and MQ were optional, whereas API Gateway was required to ensure security and consistency across the enterprise.
  • Evangelized the adoption of the API Gateway and advised teams on migrating hundreds of services to the new platform. Improving reliability, availability, maintainability, and security (RAMS).
• Played a critical technical role in a six-month effort to improve services scalability in preparation for Rocket Mortgage’s Super Bowl commercial; expected to raise the company’s profile and lead to significant traffic.
  • Built a custom - open source - RAML linter in JavaScript as a Node.js module that could run on developer machines to validate APIs were adhering to corporate specifications.
  • Built a custom web app that showed API definitions were valid and deployable and included an automated deployment tool built via Python API and Angular SPA.
  • The new tooling reduced API review time by 90% and design time by 40%.
• Facilitated learning sessions for teams working through migrations from SOAP to REST.
• Reviewed and approved API Gateway pull requests and deployments to production.

Senior Software Engineer

Apr 2012 - Nov 2015

Hired to Quicken Loans as one of the first software engineers assigned to a 30-member team focused on ideation for a new project that would later become Rocket Mortgage and grow to $40B annual sales.

• Served as a JavaScript subject matter expert, led the selection of front-end tooling (jQuery and RequireJS), and performed most front-end development across early versions of Rocket Mortgage’s user experience.
• Proposed, presented, and developed an innovative solution using a DSL for mortgage pricing calculation to improve UX, increase performance >10x, and reduce user effort in editing by 70%.
• Consulted with teams on web accessibility, JS frameworks and toolsets, and engineering best practices.
• Built client experience for a refinance program that achieved $12B in first-year earnings.

Centurion Medical Products

Sep 2010 - Apr 2012

Senior Software Engineer

• Collaborated with leaders from Marketing and Technology to produce a new corporate website.
• Migrated source control from Microsoft TFS 2010 to Git.

Michigan State University - Academic Information Systems

Sep 2008 - Jun 2010

Software Engineer

• Evangelized browser-stack standards, guidelines, and best practices.
• Modernized technology for version control and CI/CD.

Michigan State University - International Business Center

Apr 2003 - Sep 2008

Software Engineer

• Developed interactive automated event scheduling utility
• Spearheaded academic publishing book review system
• Crafted a simple UI for multiple international time-series datasets
• Optimized a custom content management system (CMS) for student contributors

Education

Michigan State University

May 2006

Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media - BA

• Study Abroad: The Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy, and Germany
• Student Greenhouse Project website