Joshua T Kalis he/him/his

Technology leader, deeply passionate about fostering great teams to solve challenging problems under a shared vision and common goals. Proven ability to deliver mission-critical, high-profile projects on tight deadlines. Diversity and inclusion champion, skilled in developing healthy organizations built on mutual respect, transparency, and candid communication.

Experience

Visiting Media

May 2023 - Current

Software Engineering Team Lead

Transformed the engineering organization to align with best-in-class practices for product development and delivery, utilizing: automation in CI/CD pipelines, ephemeral non-production deployment environments, integrated quality assurance automation, product development and engineering collaboration processes.

Guaranteed Rate

Dec 2021 - Jul 2022

Software Engineering Team Lead

Rocket Mortgage / Quicken Loans

Mar 2018 - Dec 2021

Software Engineering Team Lead

Built and developed a robust Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team entrusted with ensuring the dependability of client and partner-facing digital storefronts, fortifying the company's infrastructure, overseeing post-incident response, spearheading API development initiatives, and executing 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 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.
  • Nominated for an annual company award of recognition for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Rocket Mortgage / Quicken Loans

Nov 2015 - Mar 2018

Software Architect

Promoted to a multifaceted role blending technical leadership, rapid learning, and engineering excellence. Amidst many dynamic changes, and a period of significant transformation marked by a cloud migration, steering high-visibility, high-impact projects such as Super Bowl commercials and the Billion Dollar Bracket.

• 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.
• Served on a three-person team to define project strategy for an enterprise-wide integration platform and articulate value proposition to obtain buy-in on REST and API-first adoptions from hesitant engineering teams.
  • Directed a data-driven vendor evaluation and final decision resulting in multi-million dollar deals with Mulesoft (ESB and API Gateway) and Software AG (MQ).
  • 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.
• Played a critical technical role in a six-month effort to improve services scalability in preparation for Rocket Mortgage’s Super Bowl commercial.
  • Developed an open source (Node.js module) for verifying (lint-ing) API definitions, in RAML.
  • Built a Python and Angular SPA for automating the RAML lint-ing and deployment process.
  • 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.

Rocket Mortgage / Quicken Loans

Apr 2012 - Nov 2015

Senior Software Engineer & Technical Lead

Handpicked as the sole frontend engineer on a team dedicated to ideation and initial development for Rocket Mortgage, a groundbreaking endeavor in the mortgage industry. Played a pivotal role in shaping the early stages of this transformative initiative, contributing expertise in frontend development.

• 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

Michigan State University - Academic Information Systems

Sep 2008 - Jun 2010

Senior Software Engineer

Michigan State University - International Business Center

Apr 2003 - Sep 2008

Software Engineer & Technical Lead

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