Josh Magness

Software architect with 15+ years designing and scaling high-availability, mission-critical distributed systems in production. I own architectural decisions while staying close to the code, shipping at the boundary of consumer scale, regulated compliance, and rapid iteration. At the University of Maryland I lead a 3-year technical roadmap with a 5-year vision, drive architectural direction across 30+ departments and 12 colleges, and led a 9-person engineering team through an 18-month design system initiative now serving hundreds of applications.

Deep technical fluency across TypeScript, Node.js, React, GraphQL, AWS (EC2, Lambda, API Gateway), Kubernetes, and Terraform, with hands-on experience in reliability engineering (80% reduction in production incidents, 99.9% uptime), performance optimization (90%+ Lighthouse, Core Web Vitals), and cloud migrations (manual FedRAMP-compliant deployments to Infrastructure as Code). I apply AI-assisted development as a first-class engineering practice, redirecting delivery-velocity gains into design reviews, architectural documentation, and engineer mentorship.

Alongside full-time work, I run side ventures end-to-end: CTO of Macro Meals (2016 bootstrap meal-delivery startup, profitable in year one on 20% margins before exit), and founder of Draft Slot — a multi-sport draft-prediction game I’ve evolved from a graduate-school thesis (2019) into a production platform on Laravel, Alpine.js, and Laravel Vapor.

• Distributed Systems & Cloud Architecture: Architect full-stack platforms on AWS with Node.js microservices, GraphQL APIs, and caching infrastructure consuming disparate data sources. Built Under Armour’s real-time Apollo/GraphQL backbone handling tens of thousands of concurrent requests with 99.9% uptime
• Reliability Engineering & Observability: Champion operational excellence through Jest testing, visual regression automation, and monitoring infrastructure. Reduced production incidents 80% while maintaining 99.9% uptime for business-critical applications
• Performance Optimization & Scalability: Achieve 90%+ Lighthouse scores and Core Web Vitals targets through code splitting, lazy loading, caching, queueing, and autoscaling. Architected burst-traffic platform on AWS for national televised contest
• Infrastructure as Code & CI/CD: Evolved manual FedRAMP-compliant deployments to Infrastructure as Code at Alex+Tom, managing EC2, RDS, and load balancer configurations across multiple environments with Jenkins-driven pipelines. Production fluency with Kubernetes and Terraform
• Technical Roadmaps & Mentorship: Own a 3-year technical roadmap with 5-year vision and translate it into tangible 1-year goals. Led a 9-person engineering team through an 18-month initiative and raise the bar on design reviews, engineering standards, and engineer mentorship