Rockwell Windsor Rice

Software Engineer

Resume: |

Rockwell Windsor Rice is a full-stack software engineer with over 10 years of professional experience building scalable, production-grade web applications. Specializing in Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, and Next.js, he has worked across the entire software development lifecycle—from initial requirements gathering and architecture design to deployment, monitoring, and ongoing optimization. His expertise spans both backend development (API design, database optimization, background job processing) and frontend engineering (responsive UI/UX, modern JavaScript frameworks, accessibility standards). Whether working solo on early-stage products or collaborating within large distributed teams on government contracts, Rockwell brings a pragmatic, results-driven approach to solving complex technical challenges.

Throughout his career, Rockwell has demonstrated a track record of delivering measurable impact. As the sole engineer at Levee Labs for six years, he maintained multiple client applications from the ground up, managing everything from cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP) to database administration (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB). He reduced company expenditures by 42.5% through strategic AWS cost optimization, integrated enterprise marketing platforms (HubSpot, Pardot), and built accessible, WCAG-compliant frontends in close collaboration with designers and stakeholders. In his government contracting work with Oddball and Technatomy on the VA Lighthouse project, Rockwell has modernized mission-critical APIs serving hundreds of thousands of veterans daily. He restored a failing nightly test suite to 95% reliability, mentored new developers through pair programming and code reviews, and refactored legacy systems to improve maintainability and reduce technical debt. His work involves close collaboration with cross-functional teams, building robust RESTful APIs and maintaining production systems with tools like Datadog, Sidekiq and Redis.

Beyond hands-on development, Rockwell is passionate about education and continuous learning. He served as a Session Lead at Udacity from 2021 to 2023, delivering weekly live instruction to 200+ students across multiple cohorts in the Front End Developer Nanodegree program, covering HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Git, and modern development workflows. He has built custom tooling to improve his own productivity (including a Claude AI plugin for Sublime Text) and stays current with emerging technologies like AI-assisted development (current favorite is Claude Code). Rockwell holds an Active Public Trust security clearance and thrives in remote-first, collaborative environments where he can contribute to meaningful projects, mentor teammates, and continuously refine his craft as a software engineer.

EXPERIENCE

Vets-API (Lighthouse Program)

Software Engineer

2023-04-01 - Present

Contract via Oddball (04/23–04/25), Technatomy (06/25–11/25), PingWind (11/25–present) • 06/23 – Present

Engineer on veteran-facing APIs used by 100K+ daily users to submit disability claims and benefits applications.

Continuous ownership across staffing transitions; trusted with development decisions, cross-team initiatives, and incident leadership.

  • Led the team's response to the Shai Hulud 2.0 supply-chain security incident: verified no indicators of compromise across team resources, implemented protections against future infection, and served as the team's point of contact throughout.
  • Designed and delivered an automated power-of-attorney establishment flow, orchestrating multiple external identity APIs asynchronously to remove a manual bottleneck for veterans filing claims.
  • Restored a silently failing nightly test suite whose alerts had been ignored for months, turning it back into a reliable early-warning system for production issues.
  • Built the team's observability foundation: Datadog dashboards for metrics and error tracking that made system health visible and actionable.
  • Led development on a cross-team identity-profile solution that removed submission blockers for claimants, coordinating design and delivery across multiple teams.
  • Mentored incoming engineers on system architecture, team standards, and cross-team communication through pairing and structured code review.

Levee Labs

Software Engineer

2017-04-17 - 2023-03-31

Owned every layer of engineering for client SaaS applications as the company's only developer: requirements, full-stack development, infrastructure, databases, and production operations.

  • Overhauled a custom survey platform to support response weighting, richer customization, and deeper data insights; developed test-first and shipped with zero disruption to the client, including a backwards-compatible migration that preserved years of historical survey data while enabling the new structure.
  • Preserved a premium bookmarking feature for The Old Reader when its third-party parsing service (Postlight Mercury) was decommissioned: adapted the newly open-sourced parser and self-hosted it on AWS Lambda, keeping the feature running for paying users without interruption.
  • Cut cloud spend 42.5% in six months by instituting AWS usage policies and rightsizing resources across AWS and GCP.
  • Brought the company's largest client's front end through a third-party accessibility audit, remediating flagged issues across the application and improving access for users relying on assistive technologies.

TheoryThree Interactive

Software Engineer

2015-06-15 - 2017-01-06

Built custom web applications and interactive installations across a range of stacks.

  • Drove end-to-end development of a custom Learning Management System, owning frontend and backend from concept through delivery.
  • Designed the technical concept for an interactive installation at MMoCA's biennial Design event, using the Web Audio API for a browser-based solution that translated live sound into drawing on a digital canvas, backed by a Node.js server that ran the application and stored the generated images.