Kit Pearson

Director of Engineering

I am currently the Director of Engineering at SamCart, building and leading cross-functional teams committed to helping creators sell and market their content to the world.

Prior to SamCart, I worked at National CineMedia for 2 years (2018-2020), where I was promoted to Engineering Manager of Noovie.com, the digital companion to the Noovie preshow in movie theatres across the country. My team built a content publishing platform that consistently led to Noovie content rising to the first page of Google search results for high-value keywords.

Between 2017 and 2018 I worked as a Senior Software Engineer at Cyndx, an early stage startup. As a full stack engineer, I contributed to every aspect of the company’s product, including the application code, designing and building the cloud infrastructure that powers the Cyndx machine learning engine, and leading the data engineering practice.

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EXPERIENCE

Samcart | Director of Engineering, Austin, TX 2021 - present

Oversee several teams including DevOps, SecOps, Quality Assurance, and Support Engineering. Work with team managers to set goals and identify key performance indicators. Establish processes and standards for maintaining secure, scalable infrastructure.

Identify work units well suited for outside teams. Establish and maintain relationships with multiple outside vendors. Manage consultants’ work-streams to allow SamCart to quickly augment technical capacity around app development, scale, and security.

National CineMedia | Engineering Manager, Culver City, CA 2019 - 2021

Lead multidisciplinary, distributed engineering team to build and deploy highly trafficked web property. Created quality assurance process using automated systems as well as non-technical resources. Modernized CI/CD pipeline in CircleCI. Managed vendor relationships.

Established agile best practices across multiple cross-functional product and engineering teams. Ensured high quality code and infrastructure through pair programing and code review. Coached and mentored team leads. Oversaw hiring for senior-level engineering roles.

Cyndx Networks | Senior Software Engineer, Santa Monica, CA 2017 - 2019

Architected highly scalable infrastructure in AWS. Leveraged Docker to deploy containerized applications to AWS ECS and Fargate. Designed and implemented CI/CD pipelines using Gitlab hosted on AWS infrastructure. Responsible for maintaining web security. Mentored junior engineers and managed hiring process.

Built features for web applications across full stack using Ruby, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, React, Python, and Bash. Implemented developer CLI for deploying and monitoring production applications.

Yoshirt | Lead Backend Engineer, Los Angeles, CA 2016

Responsible for Yoshirt’s backend Ruby on Rails API. Designed Yoshirt’s backend to maximize native architecture. Design considerations included support for a unique in-app graphic design tool, a specialized order system allowing for user-generated assets to be passed to vendors. Connected Yoshirt systems to a wide range of vendor systems. Handled large fluctuations in traffic.
Ruby, JsonAPI & JavaScript

Flexa | Software Engineer, Pasadena, CA 2015 - 2016

Built the admin dashboard for tracking user engagement and driving conversions. The interface allowed for quick asynchronous updating of user information.
Ruby, JavaScript

Logical Reality Design | Web Developer / Consulting, Pasadena, CA 2014

Worked in teams to build client projects. Built features, identified and fixed bugs on client applications.
Ruby & JavaScript

PROJECTS

FullStack LA Meetup | Organizer of a biweekly meetup focused on building core programing skills. We use pair programing, language agnostic challenges and open-source contributions to foster an environment which engages all skill levels.

EDUCATION

Turing School of Software and Design | Web Application Development with Ruby, Rails & JavaScript
2014 - 2015

Otis College of Art and Design - Environmental Design
1998 - 2000

SPECIALTIES

module DEVELOPER
  TOOLS = {
    languages:   [:ruby, :python, :java, :php, :javascript, :bash, :sql],
    dev_ops:     [:aws, :docker, :kubernetes, ci_cd: [:gitlab, :circleci]],
    frameworks:  [:rails, :react, :nextjs]
  }
end