Summary
Senior Ruby on Rails engineer with 15+ years building high-traffic, backend-heavy SaaS products — including helping launch SurveyMonkey CX from zero. For the last few years I’ve focused on integrating AI and LLMs into Rails applications: calling models from app code, experimenting with retrieval (RAG) and agentic frameworks, and keeping that work isolated behind background jobs so the rest of the app stays fast. I care about the production details — timeouts, retries, failure handling — that decide whether an AI feature is a demo or a dependable part of the product.Experience
Independent Consultant / Freelance Engineer — Rails & AI · 2022–Present- Consulting and freelance Ruby on Rails projects.
- Experimenting with the latest agentic AI frameworks and building my own developer tooling.
- Open-source reference code and write-ups at github.com/bullrico/code_examples.
- One of five engineers who launched SurveyMonkey CX within a six-month timeline.
- Built a custom Apex package to sync CX survey responses into customers’ Salesforce instances.
- Built an NLP system to automatically tag and categorize survey responses via the platform API.
- Created custom report generation, enterprise SSO, and a self-serve localization admin (
.pofiles) for customer-success teams.
- Led the rewrite of an aging Rails application into a faster, more reliable, more maintainable codebase.
- Designed backend RESTful APIs and introduced automated testing and CI, reducing defects and deployment time.
- Built full-stack Rails applications for clients including TED Ed and The Smithsonian.
- Worked closely with creative and design teams to ship polished, interactive web experiences.
- BlueLeaf — Front-end Developer (2012): UI for a wealth-management tool for financial advisors.
- Pathable, Inc. — Front-end Developer / Lead Designer (2011): led a production UI redesign of an events platform.
- Dynamo — Front-end Developer (2010): Rails/jQuery/Haml/SASS client work.
- Savvy Apps — UI Designer / Front-end Developer (2009): Facebook apps reaching 1.5M daily users / 100M installs across 12 languages.
- Sebesta Enterprises — Full-stack Rails Developer/Designer (2007–2009): designed and shipped a social-networking app end to end, including PayPal subscription billing.