Rafe Colton


Summary

Positive and optimistic, with 15 years of professional experience managing systems, executing complex interdisciplinary projects, and writing custom software across the stack. Operating with a bias for action and a grounded, empathetic demeanor. You can find me in a growing engineering team that values mentorship, collaboration, courage, and getting shit done!

Work Experience

Expensify

Senior Engineering ManagerDec 2023–Present
  • Directly address employee performance & behavioral issues, deliver feedback & PIPs
  • Lead multiple teams of 7-10 in engineering, product development, and compliance
  • Coach and support other managers in addressing employee performance issues
  • Implement company-wide policy on vacation, referrals, expense reporting, PIP-management, & more
  • Maintain individual SRE responsibilities
Engineering ManagerSept 2022–Dec 2023 (1 year, 3 months)
  • Directly address employee performance issues, deliver feedback & PIPs
  • Lead a team of 7-10 SREs and Software Engineers
  • Formally mentor 1-3 employees per year
  • Coach and support other mentors in promoting employee growth
  • Maintain individual SRE responsibilities
Site Reliability EngineerJan 2020–Sept 2022 (2 years, 8 months)
  • Develop & maintain production systems, CI/CD, security policies, and developer tooling
  • Represent IT organization in SOC 2, PCI-DSS, SOX, & partner audits
  • Manage infrastructure & software projects from conception through implementation
  • Participate in 24x7 on-call rotation
  • Train new-hires

Himalayan Institute

Web Development ManagerOct 2015–Dec 2019 (4 years, 2 months)
  • Built the web team and the entire web presence from scratch. Conducted hiring activities for web, marketing, A/V, and graphic design, and established best practices, working methodologies, and yearly roadmaps.
  • Responsible for conceptualizing, planning, coordinating, and executing all web products, including two full WordPress sites, two mini-sites (same domain, different branding), a Shopify site, an internal documentation website, and a $150k/yr membership program. Primary stack included WordPress (PHP) and React/Redux.
  • Acquired $7k/yr in grants on AWS and Azure and built custom monitoring and integrations platform, leveraging Go (Golang), Ansible, Terraform, Icinga2, and Docker.

Apple

Software EngineerMar 2015–Sep 2015 (7 months)
  • Maintained software platform that managed infrastructure deployment and automation for Maps.
  • Developed full-stack using Rails, Sinatra, AngularJS, PostgreSQL, and Redis.

ModCloth

Software Engineer Oct 2012–Dec 2014 (2 years, 3 months)
  • Providing deployment tools, infrastructure automation for Ubuntu and SmartOS, and back-end services.
  • Installed, configured, and operated persistence and communication layer, including PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Memcached, and RabbitMQ.
  • Primary languages included Go (Golang) and Ruby, with scripting in Bash.
  • Used Chef, Ansible, and Docker for provisioning, configuration management, and containerization.

Kemists

Software Engineer Jun 2012–Sep 2012 (4 months)
  • Full-stack development in Ruby on Rails & JavaScript
  • iOS 5 development using Objective-C, Cordova, & JavaScript

Fireman Creative

Web Development Intern Dec 2011–Apr 2012 (5 months)

Full-stack development for small business customers using WordPress, PHP, LESS, jQuery, and MySQL

Apple Store, Shadyside

ExpertMay 2018–May 2011 (3 years)
  • Led sales
  • facilitated daily operations
  • Mentored new-hires
  • Assisted in new store openings & other special events

Skills

Technical

  • Languages: PHP, Python, C++, JS/JSX, Bash
  • Databases: SQLite, MySQL, Bedrock
  • Tools: Git, Vim, Tmux, GitHub, Slack, 1Password, SaltStack, Fabric, Terraform, PagerDuty
  • Applications: Elasticsearch, VictoriaLogs, Rsyslog, Kibana, Nagios, Collectd, Nginx, HAProxy, Systemd
  • Services: Cloudflare, AWS (EC2, S3, CloudFront, etc)
  • Operating Systems: macOS, Ubuntu LTS, JunOS
  • Hardware: Lenovo SR950/SR530, Juniper QFX

Non-Technical

  • Audit & Compliance: SOC 2 (SSAE 18), SOX, PCI-DSS Level 1, bank partner audits (BofA, Amex, Chase, WF)
  • Governance: Policy development & documentation, risk management, incident response, data governance, disaster recovery planning
  • Interpersonal: Action oriented, proactive communicator, tenacious, creative problem solver. Effective conflict resolution.
Talks & Publications
Education

Bachelor of Science, Computer Science with Honors, University of Pittsburgh, Summa Cum Laude (2012)
Bachelor of Arts, Politics & Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh, Cum Laude (2010)