Work Experience
If you’re interested in hiring me, please take a look at my resume, GitHub, LinkedIn, or email me at sam@samlowe.dev.
Lead Software Engineer
- Led a team of five engineers, reporting directly to the CTO, to build a Django employee portal and mobile app that automates business records, stores documents securely, assigns work to employees, and visualizes business insight for the CEO
- Designed and built the platform end to end: a Docker container for Django, a PostgreSQL database, pre-commit hooks, and a CI pipeline through GitHub Actions, and continuous deployment of staging and production environments through Railway. Set up database backup buckets and verified full restoration capability
- Ported a 15,000-line Node/Express monolith and roughly 180 flat-file JSON backend modules onto Django, migrating one business domain at a time with no downtime; the platform now runs as a 20+ app Django stack
- Cut over the entire application from West Coast to East Coast servers, bringing latency down from 100ms to 5ms for our Boston-only user base
- Reduced full-suite test time from 30 minutes to 5 by parallelizing tests and diagnosing and fixing CPU pegging
Data Analyst
- Analyzed poll data with Python’s data analysis and visualization libraries, both for public press releases and for polls commissioned by campaigns around the country
- Designed the weighted single transferable vote algorithm used to simulate outcomes for the 2025 New York City mayoral primary poll, which was featured in the New York Times
- Built and led the data pipeline and PDF-report generator behind an internal FastAPI platform for compiling cited, district-level electoral and demographic reports nationwide, from a 1,700+ dataset pipeline spanning Census, electoral, and campaign-finance sources
Software Engineering Co-op
- Designed and prototyped a Go microservice and API to parallelize data processing
- Took ownership of an in-progress cron job and cleanup script and drove it to production, clearing dozens of gigabytes of stale log files out of storage and preventing further buildup
- Added features and unit tests to a Django back end, working with SQL, Python, Docker, and Kubernetes
Back-End Engineer
- Built KLIP, a proof-of-concept app for a wearable device that allows runners to alert trusted contacts or emergency services if they feel unsafe while running
- Integrated Google Maps, RapidSOS, Bluetooth, and MySQL into our Django back end alongside a team of two other back-end engineers
- Led weekly standups to discuss team progress and priorities and to resolve issues