Derek Fons

• Lead the Buyer Intent team, guiding technical direction, architecture decisions, and cross-team alignment.
• Led the launch of Signals, a feature that surfaces changes in companies users follow, becoming a foundational part of the product roadmap and driving continued feature development.
• Shipped a shared library that expanded the product's surface area beyond a single product, increasing adoption across teams.
• Built stronger team cohesion by fostering collaboration, group problem-solving, and more direct engineer-to-engineer communication.
• Mentored engineers both within the team and across other teams, supporting career growth and navigating performance challenges through direct, empathetic feedback.

• Promoted to Technical Lead II within 7 months based on technical impact and leadership contributions.
• Contributed to early Signals development and cross-team technical discussions that shaped the feature's direction.

• Delivered review system for teachers and classes while working cross-functionally with design. Improved engagement by 20% and increased buyer confidence.
• Enhanced class listings to include state standards and curriculums to improve discovery.
• Lead engineer on multiple UX improvement projects that leveraged A/B testing to make informed decisions to increase conversions.
• Presented on topics around React performance & TypeScript improvements which was met with support and adoption.
• Improved unit and end-to-end testing to improve CI/CD times and increase code coverage.
• Mentored and paired with other engineers.

• Gathered business requirements to architect and deliver a responsive web app for booking wellness appointments and account management for over 200 retail stores.
• Set up tooling for CI and CD with build, linting, testing, and deployment to AWS.
• Developed iOS and Android booking and account management apps.
• Refactored custom and 3rd party integrations for the marketing website built ontop of Webflow. Reducing monthly costs by 70%.
• Optimized lighthouse scores to improve SEO and accessibility on marketing website.

• Led the redesign of CrossFit.com to deliver a modern and performant experience.
• Built custom prerendering pipeline with Puppeteer and Node to optimize performance and SEO.
• Developed and deployed a video-based learning web platform that was used by affiliates and trainers. Used Shopify for subscription management.
• Worked with designers to build out a custom video experience that worked across all devices.
• Established frontend architecture and documented best practices for the engineering teams.
• Created a shared design system and component library with StoryBook to be used across the organization.

• Led a team of 5 developers to build and maintain a social experience tools.
• Delivered photo booth experience for the NFL to be used at the Super Bowl.
• Worked closely with Target to build out social media analytics dashboards to track engagement.
• Collaborated with project management to establish Agile methodologies and best practices to increase efficiency and transparency.

• Taught a 12-week course on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to students looking to transition into web development.
• Ran multiple workshops on Ruby on Rails and JavaScript.

Ruby ● Sinatra ● ElasticSearch ● JavaScript ● Objective-C

• Developed iOS app for retail support to diagnose battery issues and have better communication with customers.
• Built and managed internal tools to run static analysis on iOS app store apps to provide insights to multiple teams in the organization.

PHP ● MySQL ● JavaScript ● HTML/CSS ● Ruby on Rails ● iOS Development

PHP ● MySQL ● JavaScript ● HTML/CSS ● Ruby on Rails ● Flash ● Graphic Design ● SEO

Mentored engineers through G2i, focusing on engineering challenges and supporting their career growth. G2i published an article about the experience and the engineers I mentored.

Taught web development courses and workshops with The Iron Yard and General Assembly covering Ruby on Rails, React, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Also spoke at the UT Austin Coding Bootcamp about my journey into engineering.

I was a guest on the Building with people for people podcast talking about inclusivity and accessibility in web development.