Chad Linden

Chad Linden

Lead / Senior Full Stack Engineer · I fix hard problems.

Greater Minneapolis–St. Paul Areachad.linden@gmail.comlinkedin.com/in/chad-lindengithub.com/chadlinden

Senior full-stack engineer with over a decade of experience building and stabilizing production systems that people depend on. I've led major product rewrites, shipped customer-facing features end-to-end, and worked deep in the backend to solve problems that only appear under real load: concurrency failures, background processing issues, and systems that need to evolve without breaking trust or uptime.

My background leans backend and platform (PHP, Go, Python, TypeScript, JavaScript, MySQL, Postgres, Redis, AWS, and many more) but I'm comfortable working across the stack when it helps the product. I do my best work in product-driven teams that value judgment, ownership, and steady execution.

EXPERIENCE

  1. Jun 2024 – Present
    Minneapolis, MN

    Holodeck

    Lead Software Engineer, Independent Consulting

    • Independent software consulting practice. Client engagements in production backend and platform work, and AI systems.
    • Replaced a single blind model call with a bounded state machine that gates every generated story through an evaluation step before publishing; anything that fails routes to review instead of shipping.
    • Built a news intelligence pipeline that pulls dozens of sources, dedupes by content hash, clusters related coverage, and emits a cited daily report, collapsing hundreds of raw articles into one reviewable digest.
    • Built a golden-set evaluation harness so clustering changes could be measured against fixed cases instead of eyeballed.
    • Built a watchlist and alerting system over auction data: scheduled scraping, bid-velocity snapshots, rule matching the source site's own search can't express, and once-per-match webhook alerts.
    • Moved inference off a paid hosted API onto a local model server, removing per-query cost and the network dependency.
  2. Oct 2024 – Mar 2025
    Atlanta, GA

    SynapseMX, Inc.

    Lead Software Engineer

    • Re-architected an aircraft maintenance and tracking system to support white-label deployment and DoD contract requirements.
    • Implemented comprehensive audit logging to ensure traceability and compliance.
  3. Jun 2023 – May 2024

    Ramp Health

    Lead Software Engineer

    • Rescued a translation pipeline that had been broken for ~1 year by replacing a MySQL-backed Laravel queue with AWS SQS.
    • Designed a multi-stage background processing system that increased throughput from ~1 translation every 30 minutes to millions of records processed in ~1 week.
    • Expanded platform support from English-only to five additional languages with per-user preferences and account defaults.
    • Built a SAML identity provider integration enabling ~40,000 Johns Hopkins users to authenticate using existing credentials.
    • Stabilized CI/CD by consolidating multiple conflicting staging environments.
  4. Mar 2020 – 2023
    Ham Lake, MN

    NACS, Inc. (now part of Ascential Medical & Life Sciences)

    Application Engineer

    • Worked on medical device manufacturing automation systems supporting tooth aligner production lines for a Fortune 500 company based in Minnesota.
    • Learned Visual Basic and Azure on the fly and delivered production features.
    • Built scanning and tracking workflows maintaining chain-of-custody from production line through shipment.
  5. May 2022 – Dec 2022
    Minneapolis, MN

    OurFamilyWizard

    Lead Software Engineer

    • Led frontend and mobile engineering standardization across ~5 teams, unifying tooling, workflows, and CI/CD practices.
    • Eliminated major DevX bottlenecks by embedding React hot reload inside the Java/Spring production shell, reducing turnaround from ~1 week to ~1 day.
    • Migrated Webpack to Vite to improve build speed and developer feedback loops.
    • Root-caused repeated "site down" incidents to an intermittent primary MN network routing leg and coordinated upstream mitigation.
  6. Sep 2016 – May 2022

    When I Work

    Lead Software Engineer

    • Led the rewrite of the company's flagship scheduling application (used by ~70% of customers), migrating a large Backbone.js codebase to React with ~90% test coverage.
    • Designed and delivered the company's first AutoScheduler product as a solo engineer, producing an MVP in weeks instead of a projected 3–6 months.
    • Solved a high-contention concurrency failure where thousands of users simultaneously claimed shifts by replacing ineffective mutexes with Redis-based coordination.
    • Built a Go-based metadata service backed by DynamoDB to store cross-team configuration and UI state.
    • Introduced a global super-admin authorization model across monolith and microservices with zero downtime.
    • Integrated Clair's on-demand pay platform, enabling a new revenue stream contributing to a ~$200M acquisition.
  7. Dec 2013 – Jul 2015

    Ohnvoy LLC

    Full Stack Engineer / CTO

    • Built high-volume auction tracking systems aggregating thousands of auctions across hundreds of sites.
    • Ingested millions of transactions daily and developed dashboards for revenue and KPI tracking.
  8. Dec 2012 – Dec 2013

    Ohnvoy LLC

    Full Stack Engineer

  9. Apr 2002 – Apr 2009

    U.S. Air Force

    Staff Sergeant

TOP SKILLS

Platform Engineering · Distributed Systems · Back-End Web Development · Certification: PHP, MySQL programming

EDUCATION

  • M.S., Software EngineeringUniversity of St. Thomas · 2028
  • Bachelor's, Entrepreneurship / Entrepreneurial StudiesMetropolitan State University · 2009 – 2011
  • Air Force Leadership School
  • General EducationCommunity College of the Air Force

WRITTEN UP