Be Ford they/them

Vancouver, WA · resume@btf.dev · linkedin.com/in/btfdev

Professional Profile

Engineering leader with over 8 years at Interfolio, with a dual focus on people leadership and hands-on platform architecture. Architect and maintainer of a frontend monorepo powering over a dozen Angular applications, building shared tooling and reducing coordination overhead so engineers can focus on high-impact work. Lead distributed cross-functional teams of up to 11 in partnership with product, legal, and operations. An AI-fluent engineering leader who treats modern AI tooling as core craft: a daily power user of agentic coding workflows who shapes how engineering adopts AI responsibly, setting standards for quality, code review, and safe tool use that reach beyond a single team.

Experience

Software Engineering Lead, Interfolio (Elsevier)

Mar 2023 to Present · Remote

• Platform Architecture: Architect and maintainer of the frontend monorepo, building and sustaining shared tooling, component libraries, and developer infrastructure across a dozen Angular applications.
• Leadership & Talent: Direct a cross-functional team of 11 engineers (6 direct, 5 contractors), driving high retention through mentorship, performance reviews, and career planning.
• AI Engineering Practice: Championed AI-assisted development beyond my own team, establishing agentic coding workflows, spec-driven development, and review standards for AI-generated code that raised delivery velocity while keeping correctness and accountability with engineers.
• Security & Compliance: Oversee platform-level enforcement of federal data protection standards for student records, balancing operational safety with engineering velocity.
• Strategic Planning: Partner with product, legal, and operational stakeholders to define technical roadmaps, translate ambiguous business needs into platform capabilities, and manage resource allocation.

Staff Software Engineer & Team Lead, Interfolio

Mar 2022 to Mar 2023 · Remote

• Architecture: Spearheaded consolidation of legacy frontend applications into a unified modern architecture, improving maintainability, performance, and cross-team consistency.
• Quality Culture: Enforced detailed peer code reviews to eliminate escaped defects and strengthen team cohesion.

Team Lead & Senior Software Engineer, Interfolio

Feb 2021 to Mar 2022 · Remote

• Accessibility: Implemented comprehensive upgrades to achieve WCAG 2.1+ standards across the platform.
• Mentorship: Provided technical guidance to junior engineers, supporting professional development and onboarding.
• Collaboration: Partnered with creative teams on the composition and implementation of detailed user experiences.

Software Engineer, Interfolio

Feb 2018 to Mar 2021 · Remote

Independent Project

Founder & Engineer, DwellHQ

2026 to Present · Private beta · dwellhq.app

• Designed and shipped a full-stack home-maintenance SaaS solo: TypeScript monorepo (Next.js web, React Native/Expo mobile, tRPC, Prisma), with home inventory, scheduling, documents, shared access, and tiered billing.
• Built the AI layer end to end: LLM features on the Vercel AI SDK and AI Gateway with Zod-typed structured output, plus a production MCP server (45 tools, OAuth 2.1) exposing the product to AI agents.

Skills & Toolbox

Engineering Leadership: Distributed team leadership, hiring and career ladders, performance management (Workday), retention, technical roadmapping, cross-functional partnership (product, legal, operations), resource capacity planning, OKR translation.

Platform & Architecture: Frontend monorepo architecture, shared tooling and component libraries, developer infrastructure.

AI-Augmented Engineering

• Agentic Workflows: Daily driver of Claude Code and Copilot/Cursor for multi-file refactors, test generation, debugging, and architectural exploration, with all AI output reviewed before merge.
• Practice & Enablement: Standards for AI-assisted code review, prompt and context engineering, and guardrails for safe, high-leverage tool use across teams.
• Tooling & Integration: Evaluate and integrate an evolving AI toolchain (MCP servers, sandboxed agents, token-optimization tooling, spec-driven development with OpenSpec and SDD) into engineering workflows.

Technical Stack: Angular (NgRx/RxJS/TypeScript), Ruby on Rails (MVC), GraphQL, REST APIs, PostgreSQL/MySQL schema design, AWS, CI/CD pipelines, Git/GitHub flow, full testing pyramid (Jest, Cypress, Playwright).

Education

A.A.S. Web Technologies, Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College