Rocky Warren

Senior Staff Engineer leading AI strategy at Clipboard. CISSP and AWS Certified Solutions Architect and Security Specialty with over twenty years of experience shipping and maintaining tested, distributed, secure systems—from thousand-line microservices moving billions of dollars each year to multi-million line GPS guidance systems. I deliver customer value utilizing object-oriented, functional, statically-typed, dynamic, and database languages. I lead teams as a Founding Principal Engineer, Architect, Product Manager, and Startup Co-founder.

github.com/therockstorm linkedin.com/in/rockywarren rocky.dev

Skills

JavaScript TypeScript Python Scala React NextJS Java C# Bash Shell Kafka PostgreSQL AWS ECS AWS RDS DevOps DynamoDB Svelte Pricing Strategy Dynamic Pricing Cybersecurity Docker Cloud Security Cloud SIEM Continuous Integration Redis DevSecOps Continuous Delivery REST APIs Distributed Systems

Recommendations

CEO describing a Fortune 100 company's reaction to a demo I created: "Slam dunk with [Company]! Thank you for all your efforts on this! [Company VP] was visibly and vocally excited. I think his voice cracked a little when he exclaimed, 'how did you do that!'."
CTO: "Rocky embodies a Principal Software Engineer. He can identify the most important problems, work out different solutions, and choose the most appropriate way of moving forward. He'll then own that solution and see it through to the end. He's also never content with his current skill set and always wants to continue growing. Whether it's books, classes, or certifications, he's willing to put in the work to better himself and the team."
VP of Product: "If no one is telling you, it's appreciated how intentional you are with growing our collective knowledge and being a champion for training. Thanks for doing this stuff, Rocky. I've also been hearing great things about your contributions and speed-of-delivery. The leadership team is impressed."
Technical Lead and Manager: "He's a one-man wrecking crew, one of the most productive engineers I've worked with."

Experience

Warren Park

Advise engineering organizations on agentic delivery to ship customer value faster while raising the verification and quality bars.

Founding Advisor Dec 2025 - Present (5 mos)

Remote

Increased AI-written code by over 80% in two months, doubling merged pull requests and tripling production deploys per engineer.
Leveraged multi-agent consensus to reduce flaky test failure rates per PR by 85% in six weeks; see the playbook.

Clipboard

Uplift your community with the marketplace that connects patients and students with vetted care.

Senior Staff Software Engineer Mar 2024 - Present (2 yrs 2 mos)

Remote

Defining and leading Clipboard's AI strategy: Condensed our best practices into AGENTS.md rules with learning feedback loops and shipped them to 30+ microservices across a 3M+-line codebase.
Marketplace pricing: Re-architected pricing for our $1B+ GSV marketplace to a real-time, per-worker rules engine enabling rapid experimentation that increased margins by multiple percentage points, resulting in 8 digits of additional yearly net revenue. The rules engine library is now adopted across multiple products.
Notification platform migration: Led company-wide migration from Braze to Knock across thousands of notifications and 10+ teams, built migration tooling and AI prompts to make the process as painless as possible. Negotiated vendor contracts and contributed to vendor open-source repos to unblock teams.
Platform and CI modernization: Transitioned the company from weekly releases to continuous delivery and trunk-based development across 50+ microservices. Reduced CI flakiness by 50%, cut linting time 100x by switching from ESLint to Oxlint, and introduced the strictest TypeScript Go configuration.
CI reliability and code quality: Reduced CI flakiness by 85% and built autonomous agents for continued improvements. Added fast agent guardrails, introduced the strictest TypeScript configuration, and reduced linting time by 100x.
Engineering culture and leadership: Defined Staff Engineering at Clipboard and introduced a formal mentorship program pairing senior and staff engineers. Established ADRs and a technical design review process through a senior engineer committee. Founded the Security and Staff+ teams.

Staff Software and Security Engineer Mar 2023 - Mar 2024 (1 yr)

Remote

Platform modernization: Transitioned the company from weekly releases to continuous delivery and trunk-based development across (at the time) 50 microservices.
Migrated thousands of documents and processes from Confluence to Notion to improve knowledge discovery and collaboration.

Brale

Launch and benefit from your stablecoin.

Principal Software and Security Engineer Aug 2022 - Mar 2023 (7 mos)

Remote

Fostered security culture by enforcing temporary AWS credentials, password managers and AWS Secrets Manager, and hardware security keys for Git SSH access.
Encrypted sensitive data using 256-bit AES-GCM envelope encryption backed by AWS KMS, random initialization vectors, and tagged ciphertexts for quarterly rotation. Searchable fields use HMAC SHA-512 hashes.
Built SIEM on Datadog ingesting application, CloudTrail, GuardDuty, VPC flow, Route53, and load balancer logs. Achieved 95%+ cloud security posture management (CSPM) rule findings passing for PCI, SOC 2, and GDPR, with alerting on new findings and anomalous activity.
Ran vulnerability scanning and penetration testing with Nessus and Burp Suite; statically analyzed and fuzzed smart contracts with Slither and Echidna.

Founding Principal Engineer Jan 2022 - Aug 2022 (7 mos)

Remote

Architected cost-efficient, secure cloud infrastructure across multi-account, multi-region, multi-subnet VPCs protected by WAFs, with automated IAM and resource provisioning via AWS Organizations and CDK IaC.
Proposed and implemented multi-party computation (MPC) asset custody enabling multi-blockchain custodial wallets. Authored ERC-20 compatible Solidity smart contracts, coordinated external audits, and built automated multi-blockchain deployment infrastructure.
Rolled out SAML SSO company-wide with phishing-resistant FIDO hardware security key MFA and automatic IdP user provisioning.
Built CI/CD pipelines shipping on each two-person-controlled merge, Renovate/Dependabot supply chain protection, and secure-by-default CDK constructs (least-privilege policies, private S3 buckets, encryption at rest).

Vertex Software

Build and collaborate on cloud-native 3D digital twin applications.

Principal Technical Lead and Product Manager, APIs & SDKs Aug 2020 - Jan 2022 (1 yr 5 mos)

Remote

Managed and mentored the API team, driving product discovery and prioritization. Focused on customer satisfaction via interviews, step-by-step guides, interactive demos, a CLI, and always up-to-date API code samples. Implemented "No Meeting Wednesday" and asynchronous stand-ups to increase focus time.
Created uptime and availability tests with automatic rollback and alerting, enabling continuous delivery.

Principal Software Architect Sep 2019 - Aug 2020 (11 mos)

Remote

Built public REST APIs from scratch to OpenAPI, JSON:API, and CloudEvents specifications. Inter-service communication via Kafka and gRPC. Code coverage >90%.
Architected distributed, streaming, event-driven systems delivering sub-second bill of materials (BOM) and scene updates on CAD models with hundreds of thousands of BOM lines. Search over hundreds of millions of pieces of CAD metadata via Elasticsearch and Postgres full-text.
Created core libraries and build plugins to reduce duplication, improve security, and multiply the engineering team's productivity.

Dwolla

Operate ACH and real-time bank payments at scale without the infrastructure.

Principal Software Engineer Jun 2016 - Sep 2019 (3 yrs 3 mos)

San Francisco, CA

Transitioned most business-critical database table from mutable to immutable, enabling point-in-time user balance queries, robust statements, and snapshots. Snapshots led to 200x faster database queries and 75% reduction in overall database deadlocks.
Migrated webhooks to serverless Lambda functions, scaled to millions of daily messages, reduced peak delays from hours to minutes, cut costs by 50%, and launched with zero downtime.

Lead Developer Jul 2014 - Jun 2016 (1 yr 11 mos)

San Francisco, CA

Led development of API responsible for moving billions of dollars per year while decreasing partner "time to first API call" from hours to minutes with step-by-step guides and SDKs.
Led Instant Bank Verification, cutting account verification times from three days to a few seconds via 3rd party integration. Built as containerized, auto-scaling microservice.

Senior Software Engineer Jul 2012 - Jul 2014 (2 yrs)

Des Moines, IA

Led company's foray into microservices with Dwolla Credit, integrating credit provider to inject millions in buying power into network. Mitigated partner downtime with caching and fault-tolerant background processes.
Won internal hackathons by reducing ACH clearing times and allowing account creation via API. Each influenced what are now best-selling products.

Crucible Commodities

Trade commodities in real time.

Co-founder Jul 2014 - Dec 2016 (2 yrs 5 mos)

San Francisco, CA

John Deere

Create more sustainable food production for tomorrow through precision agriculture technology.

Technical Lead Jan 2008 - Jul 2012 (4 yrs 6 mos)

Des Moines, IA

Led CommandCenter, a 2M+-line in-cab self-driving GPS guidance display now factory-installed in all large-scale John Deere vehicles worldwide. Released on schedule with all known defects closed. Coordinated fortnightly meetings of 25 tech leads across 150+ developers.
Organized the company's first Hackathons. After votes from 200+ employees, won both with customer analytics, predictive keyboard, touch screen gestures, and Tetris. Demoed results to CEO and staff.

Software Engineer Intern May 2006 - Jan 2008 (1 yr 8 mos)

Des Moines, IA