Career
Work Experience
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Ibotta
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Senior Backend Engineer
2022 — PresentDesigning and implementing backend systems for complex data flows spanning multiple AWS zones.
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Specific notable accomplishments in this position:
- - Top contributor on a 5-6 member team, authoring 30% to 40%+ of the tickets for the team.
- - Identified the need for and designed the idempotency guarantees in team's event driven architectures.
- - Substantially reduced complexity in codebases by defining boundary layers with clean contracts and distinct types.
- - Designed team’s data propagation strategy to setup new AWS zones.
- - Early pioneer of setting up scalable, multi-environment, dynamic Runscope tests. Served as a consultant for several teams in the organization.
- - Early pioneer of implementing SLOs/SLIs in the organization. Shared learnings by facilitating a workshop on Site Reliability Engineering practices.
- - Earned the Collaborator Gator Award in May 2024 for simplifying Ibotta’s Lambda Serverless CodePipeline deployment. My involvement reduced code complexity, effort to implement, and deployment time, meanwhile strengthening org-wide understanding.
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Engineering Manager
2020 — 2022At the peak of this role I was simultaneously leading four high visibility projects across 24 engineers in order to deliver mission critical account linking infrastructure for Ibotta's first partners. This infrastructure was necessary to associate users with the redemptions made on partner properties, meet CCPA compliance, and reduce the engineering effort required to onboard new partners into the Ibotta app (3 months -> 1 week). These teams and projects built some of the critical groundwork that supported the company's eventual IPO.
Recruited new talent and scaled the teams' SDLC in order to deliver projects on time.
Worked with business development, architecture, and product to understand partner needs and translate those into technical requirements.
This role of course included performing all the table stakes management skills like 1:1s, performance reviews, hiring, interviewing, reorgs, project management, software estimation, delivering feedback, working cross functionality, aligning developer interests with project opportunities, capacity planning, navigating conflict resolution, writing business proposals, employee goal setting, OKR planning, conducting team health surveys, and organizing team building activities. -
Senior iOS Engineer
2019 — 2020Proven history of shipping quality code, on or ahead of time, for a variety of high profile features related to user registration, onboarding experience, and engagement for the Ibotta iOS Mobile app. All features were developed with high unit testing standards and the VIPER architecture pattern. Many of these initiatives were significant wins for the business by improving core business metrics and code quality.
- - Chunked registration increased the registration success rates by 1%.
- - Learning center increased the number of new users that redeemed a single offer and those that redeemed multiple offers by over 3% each.
- - Onboarding banner modifications alone resulted in a net gain of 1.64M for the business.
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The Ibotta Mobile App
iOS Development
(wait for GIF) A high-level overview of the app learning center shown to new users after registration.
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Michigan State University
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Software Engineer
2015 — 2018Sole engineer responsible for frontend native iOS mobile and web development. Created from scratch the University's first mobile app to be used by ten of thousands of students, alumni, and faculty. Also created a secondary iOS application and Flux Vue.js website to register people travelling on the University's behalf for safety reasons. The iOS apps were built with MVVM-C architecture pattern.
As a publicly funded University meeting requirements of government accessibility law was a top priority. For iOS apps this meant supporting robust dynamic type and layouts and a seamless Voiceover experience. For web it meant supporting fluid keyboard interactions, aria labels, semantic HTML, screen readers, and dynamic text.
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MSU Campus App
iOS Development
Home page providing a condensed feed of app content in a singular location.
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MSU Travel Registry App
iOS Development
The login options for the app.
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MSU Travel Registry Web App
Web Development
Trips home page displaying upcoming and past trips.
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Atomic Object
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Software Consultant & Developer
2014 — 2015Learned about concepts such as object-relational mapping, database migrations, responsive design, event and data binding, and RESTful web services. Developed responsive full-stack features for web applications using test-driven development and agile/scrum practices.
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College Experience
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Student Lead @ Technology for Social Good
2013-2014Collaborated with professors to write a winning proposal to secure one of nine $25,000 grants nationally. Developed a library for Android with the goal of simplifying the mobile app development process in order to give high school students a simplified experience to learn programming for the first time. I was involved in all areas of the project, including code development, website development, team management, writing lesson plans, and leading class sessions.
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Afterschool Pilot Program
Android Development
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Teaching Assistant for Introduction to Programming
2013 - 2013Pursuing my love of learning and teaching, I taught lab sessions, graded student projects, and tutored students in open lab in Python.
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Student Developer @ MATRIX
2012-2013First experience with web programming and JavaScript, learned about concepts such as client-side/server-side programming, HTTP, SQL injection, MySQL, AJAX, CSS, and DOM manipulation. Created two websites, one for administrators to easily view and update database content from a web browser. The second was a website that allowed a user to save images and view them in a slideshow.
Education
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Michigan State University
2010 — 2014Bachelor of Science in Computer Science (with Honors)
GPA: 3.72
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Central Michigan University
2009 — 2010GPA: 4.0 (80 credit hours)
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Port Huron High School
2005 - 2009GPA: 4.0 (Graduated Valedictorian)
About me
Hi 👋 I'm Kaitlin. I like learning stuff. Code and not code stuff.
What I'm Known For
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Backend Development
Architecting systems and managing datasets - large and small.
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Building Teams
As an extroverted problem solver I love getting to know people and building cool 💩 together.
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Mobile apps
Professional development of native iOS applications used by tens of thousands of people.
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Web development
From Mom and Pop shop websites to enterprise scale web applications.
Working With Me
Here is what some of my teammates @ Ibotta have said during anonymous end of year feedback:
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"We operate at a high caliber with Kaitlin as part of the team and it shows. She keeps our team's development at a high standard."
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"Kaitlin approaches problems with a very analytical mind. Her experience as a manager shows in how she can dive into work and know what needs to be done next, and pick at the chinks in the armor of a project. On top of that I believe she has has a strong technical background."
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"Kaitlin consistently brings a high level of attention to detail that's invaluable to our squad. Her thorough approach helps the team catch overlooked steps, bugs and good measures that impact the quality of the work we do as a team. She takes the time to carefully document decisions to help us remember the "why" of things now and avoid tribal knowledge for future. She inspires me to put more effort in what I do and to stop and think about how it impacts others - to particularly be mindful of cognitive load."
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"Kaitlin has been an exceptional mentor, consistently demonstrating her depth of knowledge and curiosity. She has a natural talent for breaking down complex technical concepts, making her an invaluable resource when working through implementations or brainstorming new ideas. Her dedication to learning and understanding concepts thoroughly reflects her commitment to excellence, and her ability to teach back what she learns makes her an effective and inspiring mentor."
Top skills
Skill | Years of Experience | Last Used Professionally |
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Backend Systems Design | 3 years | 2025 |
Frontend Systems Design | 6 years | 2020 |
Engineering Management | 2 years | 2022 |
AWS Serverless Technologies (API Gateway, Lambda, SNS, SQS, DynamoDb, Terraform) | 3 years | 2025 |
Automated Testing (Integration/Unit Tests) | 8 years | 2025 |
Site Reliability Engineering | 2 years | 2025 |
Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) | 7 years | 2025 |
Swift/iOS | 4 years | 2020 |
Typescript/JavaScript | 6 years | 2025 |
Vue.js | 1 year | 2016 |
HTML/CSS | 6 years | 2015 |