Joe Bandenburg
Lead Software Developer
I’m a tech lead with over a decade of experience, passionate about software engineering, architecture, and solving the big, tricky problems that hold my teams back. I believe in a collaborative approach to development, where everyone’s ideas matter, and we work together to build things that really make a difference.
Experience
Lead Software Developer
CameraForensics
December 2023-Present
  • Fighting online child exploitation by building tools for a global community of law enforcement agencies.
  • Building a culture of collaboration and technical excellence by introducing biweekly retrospectives, championing pair programming and performing group code reviews.
  • Performing large-scale refactors to adopt modern architectural patterns and eliminate technical debt.
Senior Software Developer
Google
April 2019-July 2023
  • Led a multi-year effort to re-architect the CI/CD system for Google Nest to improve scalability and reliability, which increased capacity by 3x and reduced the number of outages by over 90%.
  • Facilitated the growth and success of junior engineers by providing personalized mentorship, leading to significant improvements in their technical abilities and overall performance.
  • Spearheaded the adoption of industry-leading standards for deployment, monitoring and alerting, resulting in a highly reliable system and increased team productivity.
  • Revamped the team's software development process by introducing Agile practices, creating a culture of continuous improvement and a highly adaptable and responsive team.
  • Established and maintained strong relationships with users by actively engaging with them to understand their evolving needs and requirements, resulting in a highly satisfied customer base.
Principal Engineer
limber.
October 2017-November 2018
  • Led product development of a full stack app with multiple frontends, resulting in the rapid and successful launch of several major features.
  • Championed the transition from REST to GraphQL, leading to substantially more code reuse and faster development.
  • Designed and iterated on UI mockups, culminating in a better user experience and improved retention.
  • Performed data analysis to develop data classification algorithms, preventing harmful user actions on the platform.
  • Led company-wide sessions that enabled the company to work together to develop a shared understanding and a clear path forward.
Staff Software Engineer
ForgeRock
July 2015-August 2017
  • Designed and implemented several headline features of the company's flagship product, which received highly positive feedback from customers.
  • Transformed the organization's software development process by shifting responsibility for writing automated tests from a dedicated QA team to the software engineers, resulting in a culture of excellence and increased velocity. Time between product releases was reduced by 50%.
  • Introduced pair programming, mob programming and code kata to improve team productivity.
  • Ran a large-scale project retrospective that allowed the 40-person product team to learn and adapt.
Senior Software Engineer
Scott Logic
October 2013-June 2015
  • Designed and built a high-performance HTML5 charting library, exceeding the customer's expectations for quality and development velocity.
  • Shared advanced expertise in JavaScript with colleagues through an internal training program, increasing the breadth of knowledge within the team.
  • Fostered the development of graduate engineers by building a training course and providing mentorship.
Software Engineer
IMDb (Amazon.com, inc.)
May 2012-August 2013
  • Transitioned a legacy Perl monolith codebase to a set of Java services.
  • Employed monitoring, alerting, automatic failover and horizontal scaling to meet uptime requirements.
  • Gained experience developing and supporting high availability services.
Graduate Software Engineer
SN Systems (Sony Corporation)
August 2010-May 2012
  • Developed a C/C++ toolchain written in C++.
  • Refactored legacy code to improve testability and increase team velocity.
  • Created custom Python tooling to support functional and performance testing.
Projects
Cuppa
Open-source testing framework for Java 8.
December 2015-Now
JavaScript implementation of an advanced cryptographic protocol used by Signal and WhatsApp.
January 2015-June 2015
Qualifications
Master's Degree in Mathematics & Computer Science (MSci)
1st class honours
University of Bristol
October 2006-June 2010
Contact
Interested in hiring me? You can contact me via LinkedIn.