Ryan A. Koval

Software Engineering, Architecture & Management

JavaScript, TypeScript, Scala, Python, Go, Java, bash, Lua, C#, HTML, CSS, Less, Sass, Markdown

PostgreSQL, Redis, Prometheus, MySQL, ElastiCache, RDS, S3, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, MongoDB

AWS, Azure, Docker Compose, Terraform, Kubernetes, SLURM, ECS, Elastic Beanstalk

React, MobX, React Native, TailwindCSS, tRPC, Vue.js, Django, HTMX, Next.js, React Router, AngularJS, Play Framework

Docker, GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Playwright, Puppeteer, Jest, Temporal, Vite, sbt, Webpack, Ansible, Jenkins, Concourse CI

Linux, Claude Code, Neovim, Cursor, macOS, Bun, Node.js, Grafana, Sublime Text, Stripe, OAuth, NGINX, WordPress

Sep 2025 to present

Promoted to Engineering Manager within 4 months in an org of 105+ to create and lead the Product Engineering team of 7+, transforming a break/fix tool into a scalable, general-purpose automation platform overseeing $1B+ in hardware.
Introduced product personas, a shared component library, formal UX standards, and a product-driven mindset across engineering, shifting development toward cohesive, user-centered design and observability-driven workflows.
Improved product quality and developer velocity by introducing Playwright-based end-to-end testing, static analysis tools, AI-assisted code reviews, and internal enablement sessions.

Jan 2025 to Jun 2025

Ryan led all engineering and product efforts to design, architect, and implement an ERP/CRM system for blind inventory management of fashion apparel, catering to private client luxury styling services employed internally and by major retailers.
The platform managed over $2.8M in yearly client spend and maintained a consistent 30% keep rate for high-value luxury goods, often exceeding $20k per item.

Apr 2022 to present

Ryan founded the consultancy to specialize in world-class software engineering, architecture, product, and management services.
Successfully clients included Slammin' Backgammon, Jam Chat, and The Styled by Collective.

Aug 2021 to Jan 2025

Working primarily within the Guilded team after its acquisition, Ryan directly managed 6+ engineers by facilitating the RoGRO corporate review process and by providing radical candor to bolster the performance of his direct reports.
He served as technical lead on 7+ cross-functional initiatives involving 40+ collaborators across engineering, design, trust & safety, and community teams.
High-impact project leadership includes: a full editor rewrite; the Roblox universal rich text initiative; public-facing bot REST API; scalable big data science ETLs; CI/CD optimization and developer experience enhancements; Roblox↔Guilded OAuth integration; a ChatGPT-powered multiplayer AI chat bot.

Nov 2018 to Aug 2021

Ryan was a core member of the original engineering team of the Discord competitor that secured a $7M Series A funding in April 2020 and ultimately the $90M acquisition by Roblox in August 2021.
He spearheaded recruitment and management helping grow the engineering team from 7 to 21+ people with less than 15% turnover over two years.
He employed growth engineering to elevate the product from 0 to 110k+ DAU/0.9M+ MAU over 3 years.
Involved with virtually everything, he directed many product and engineering initiatives from end-to-end, including gathering user requirements, collaborating with the UX design team, and shipping code to production.

Feb 2016 to Oct 2018

Ryan led front-end development for a self-service collaborations portal, where he managed a global team.
He helped craft two major versions of a screen-scraping infrastructure used to gather data from all influencers for a customer-facing recommendation engine and general business intelligence.
He helped transition the organization from a two-week deploy cycle to rapid continuous delivery by designing and implementing new core infrastructure patterns.
He revived multiple legacy Node.js analytics projects plagued with stability problems and general disrepair.
He overhauled infrastructure configuration for another failing project in charge of syncing critical internal data throughout multiple systems.

Nov 2015 to Feb 2016

Ryan utilized his Scala experience to rapidly accelerate development of a complex eCommerce ordering solution for multiple high profile fast food and fast casual restaurants.

Nov 2013 to Oct 2015

Ryan constructed core components for nearly all aspects of a multi-million dollar system prison telecommunication investigative tool.
He steered Scala-centric AWS data processing pipelines for a prominent agricultural enterprise.

Aug 2011 to Oct 2013

Ryan interacted with and developed for nearly all aspects of a multi-million dollar automotive eCommerce website, which contained over 50 technology integrations and spanned both desktop & mobile platforms.
He captained front-end integration team of a classic Spring MVC implementation for a marketing tool used by an international marketing giant.