Résumé of Darren Boyd
26759 Banbury DriveValley Center, CA 92082
Mobile: (310) 869-3109
[email protected]
grav.dev
Summary
Full-stack engineer and technical founder with 20+ years of experience building software products end to end — from first commit to production. Track record as a founding or first engineering hire at multiple companies (Blujack, Provide, an independent SIS startup), balanced by experience scaling and leading engineering teams. Looking to join an early-stage, seed-funded startup as a founding or senior engineer with full-stack ownership.
Experience
Student Information System Startup
Founder & Engineer
- Founded a startup building a Student Information System (SIS) for small independent schools, solo-developing the full Ruby on Rails application from concept through production.
- Owned every dimension of the product — architecture, infrastructure, and deployment.
- Currently working through go-to-market strategy while validating demand with small independent schools.
Signum University Lead Developer
- Built and continue to maintain the Signum Collaboratory (collaboratory.signumuniversity.org), a Ruby on Rails platform supporting Signum University's online academic community.
- Sole engineer responsible for the full development lifecycle: architecture, feature development, deployment, and ongoing maintenance.
Provide
VP Engineering / Chief Architect
- Joined as the first engineering hire and personally built Provide's initial web application, establishing the technical foundation for its lending-marketplace business.
- Grew and led a fully remote engineering team from one to twelve members as VP of Engineering.
- Evolved the product through a major business-model shift, from lending marketplace to direct lender.
- Transitioned to Chief Architect to lead a new Python-based system for extracting structured data from financial and legal (PDF) documents.
Blujack Technical Co-Founder
- Co-founded Blujack and served as sole technical lead for a group-travel management product, building the full application in Ruby on Rails.
- Built and shipped native mobile apps on iOS and Android; integrated third-party APIs for real-time flight status, search, and confirmation-email parsing.
- Managed a small engineering team and helped pitch the product at Launch Festival (Feb 2014).
Realgravity Senior Developer
- Developed Realgravity’s video-embed service and distributed video upload/transcode/distribution pipeline.
- Moved a monolithic Rails application to a service-oriented architecture; built and managed AWS infrastructure.
- Involved in hiring across levels, from junior developers to a VP of Engineering; mentored junior staff.
Additional Experience
Zendesk Senior Developer
- Enhanced Zendesk's Rails-based help desk platform; built live-chat integration and a cross-system ticket-sharing API.
RepairPal Senior Developer
- Built interactive web features and location-based search for a Rails-based auto-repair information platform.
Tapioca Mobile Director of Engineering
- Led an Agile team building a Ruby/Rails SMS, MMS, and video-transcoding platform for mobile carriers, delivering 12M+ messages and transcoding 200K+ videos.
The Revere Group Development Team Lead
- Led Rails development for JibJab Media and built web-service APIs for its “Starring You” product.
NT Services Senior Java Developer
- Built a large-scale Java payment-processing system (JSF, Spring, Hibernate).
Earlier roles
- Chartwell Technologies, Telus Communications, Montage.DMC, Valmet Automation, University of Saskatchewan, Western Computer Link — Java, Perl, and C/C++ development and technical leadership roles.
Education
University of Saskatchewan
Bachelor of Commerce, Computer Science
- Graduated with distinction.