Dillon Shook

Experience#

Staff Software Engineer, Pryon Boston, MA • July 2024 - Dec 2024

• Designed and implemented the next generation of retrieval and generative APIs for the enterprise AI Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) product that handled document metadata, multiple content types, answer matching bounding boxes, and streaming generative results.
• Mentored engineers via pairing sessions working on Python and Typescript SDKs
• Created API for serving dynamic images of ingested content with highlighing applied on matching answer text

Principal Software Engineer, Indigo Ag Boston, MA • Nov 2019 - Feb 2024

• Lead several teams as Tech Lead to ship numerous projects on time while owning technical implementations and collaborating closely with product and design to find the optimal solution for the team to execute
• Managed up to 5 direct reports and guided them through career progression, promotions, technical mentorship, and leadership training
• Top contributor on one of the primary frontend repositories out of 100 other contributors over 2 years
• Drove several tech debt refactoring projects to finish a react router to Next.js migration, consolidated test mocking strategies with Mock Service Worker, and made the app linking and routing strategies consistent across a large frontend application
• Initiated several performance projects to reduce page load time by 50%, improve query time by 40% through parallelization, remove 15k lines of unused code, improve caching, and reduce network requests
• Optimized CircleCI builds to reduce testing time by 22 minutes per run and overall time to ship code by 44%
• Collaborated across teams to publish shared packages used by multiple applications and contributed to a shared React component module
• Created a prototype API in 4 days for an internal dashboard project to allow the team to quickly identify problems with the architecture, api contract, and front end functionality
• Mentored engineers across the organization with book clubs, learning groups, and pairing sessions

Senior Software Engineer, Comcast via OneTwoSee Philadelphia, PA • Dec 2015 - Nov 2019

• Architected and built the Sports Voice platform for Comcast that handles all voice queries related to sports through the X1 voice remote for millions of monthly users
• Designed and built a demo tool site for query testing, cache & schedule viewing, card development, and service testing using React & TypeScript
• Created a query intent expansion language for concisely expressing tens of thousands of example patterns that get expanded into the Natural Language Processing (NLP) agent
• Added localization support for both the UI and voice query phrases supporting 4 languages
• Integrated with services for personalization, YouTube highlights, Splunk & Kafka logging, tuning, and NLP
• Wrote an NLP resolution back end with seasonal priority, Elasticsearch tiered weighting & filtering to accurately match arbitrary voice commands to infographic cards
• Developed infographic cards intended for quick consumption using React including stats, schedules, comparisons, standings and brackets
• Collaborated closely with designers to iterate and finish well ahead of schedule on a full visual redesign
• Expanded on dynamic SVG React components, including an interactive playground for testing
• Started the group-wide adoption of Docker and containerization best practices
• Ported our image generation platform from PhantomJS to headless Chrome with Puppeteer

Tech Lead and Full Stack Developer, WebLinc Philadelphia, PA • Jan 2015 - Dec 2015

• Lead software engineer of a business administration platform for a $25+ million company written in C# ASP.Net MVC, utilizing NService Bus, and featuring over 500 unit tests for business logic verification
• Integrated a responsive mobile layout which was launched to 15+ target devices
• Maintained 8 other E-Commerce websites and integrated Visa Checkout, Vindicia, and PayPal

Lead Solutions Developer, iFLY Indoor Skydiving Austin, TX • May 2013 - Dec 2014

• Built an executive reporting web app from scratch that aggregates over 200 million rows of wind tunnel performance data and Siriusware financial data using ASP.Net MVC and Bootstrap
• Trained other developers in best practices including Git, multi-environment deploys, automated build processes, automated testing, and centralized error logging
• Maintained an e-commerce PHP API that handled transactions with dynamic pricing, promotions, discounted bulk account pricing, demand shaping, and recommendations

Software Engineer, Charfen Institute Austin, TX • June 2011 - May 2013

• Primary author of internal applications that managed clients, assisted business processes, and reported metrics. Built using ASP.Net MVC, MS SQL Server
• Earned the company’s MVP award in 2012 and was a primary contributor to development processes including switching from SVN to Git and setting up a standardized build process

Personal Projects#

BreezyTerm April 2024 - Aug 2024

• Created a terminal emulator focused on user experience and great autocomplete using Electron and Svelte 5

Roch Dog Dec 2023 - July 2024

• Part time CTO for https://rochdog.com, a dog friendly hotel certification process with over 300,000 dog friendly hotels. Rewrote the site from scratch in one month with a new mobile first responsive design, i18n support including translated urls, SEO optimized, and 90+ lighthouse scores using SvelteKit and Tailwind CSS

Macrocosm June 2018 - June 2022

• Built a 2d mobile game that leads the player through 7 interconnected stages starting at the beginning of the universe all the way to managing colonies on a galactic scale
• Implemented gameplay for many distinct game types inspired by snake, OSU, tower defense, Civilization, and trading games

Solaria Tactics Sep 2015 - Apr 2018

• Multiplayer tactics card game featuring a custom domain specific language to specify cards’ gameplay actions and events
• Created 3d Maps with destructible objects, advanced pathfinding, many unit types (melee, ranged, flying, cleave, piercing, taunt,cloak), all working in multiplayer over websockets to a Node.js backend

Skills, Platforms & Technologies#

Highly Proficient#

TypeScript, JavaScript (ES7, Node.js), C# (Unity, ASP.Net Core, LINQ), JS Libraries / Tooling (Next.js, React, Svelte, Express, Lodash, Webpack, Babel, Vite, Yarn, Lerna) UI / Styling (Styled Components, Tailwind, Sass, Flexbox) Deployment (Docker, CircleCI, Kubernetes) Misc (Git, VS Code, Vim, Redis, Elasticsearch, Cypress, NLP, Dialogflow, Puppeteer)

Education#

Bachelor of Science, Computer Science.
New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology