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Ryan A. Koval

Software Engineering, Architecture & Management

ryan@ryankoval.comhttps://ryankoval.comhttps://github.com/rkoval


Aug 2021 – present

Roblox, Engineering Manager

  • Working primarily within the Guilded team after its acquisition, Ryan directly managed 6+ engineers by facilitating the RoGRO corporate review process and by providing radical candor to bolster the performance of his direct reports
  • As technical lead, he steered 7+ projects and product initiatives involving 40+ personnel across engineering, design, community, trust & safety, and beyond
  • He pioneered a ChatGPT integration that allowed for a multiplayer chat experience with the LLM, fueling AI adoption within the product.
Nov 2018 – Aug 2021

Guilded, Software Engineer

  • Ryan was integral to the original core engineering team that secured a $7M Series A funding in April 2020 and ultimately the $90M acquisition by Roblox in August 2021.
  • He spearheaded recruitment and management helping grow the engineering team from 7 to 21+ people with less than 15% turnover over two years.
  • He employed growth engineering to elevate the product from effectively 0 to 110k+ DAU/0.9M+ MAU over 3 years
  • He directed many product and engineering initiatives from end-to-end, including gathering user requirements, collaborating with the UX design team, and shipping code to production
  • He served as a versatile full-stack engineer across web, desktop, mobile, backend, devops, CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, moderation/abuse, data stores, developer experience, and more
Feb 2016 – Oct 2018

LTK (formerly rewardStyle and LIKEtoKNOW.it), Senior Software Engineer

  • Ryan led front-end development for a self-service collaborations portal, where he managed an international team
  • He helped craft two major versions of a screen-scraping infrastructure used to gather data from all influencers for a customer-facing recommendation engine and general business intelligence
  • He helped transition the organization from a two-week deploy cycle to rapid continuous delivery by designing and implementing new core infrastructure patterns
  • He revived multiple legacy node.js analytics projects plagued with stability problems and general disrepair
  • He overhauled infrastructure configuration for another failing project in charge of syncing critical internal data throughout multiple systems
Nov 2015 – Feb 2016

Bottle Rocket Studios, Lead Engineer

  • Ryan utilized his Scala experience to rapidly accelerate development of a complex eCommerce ordering solution for multiple high profile fast food and fast casual restaurants
Nov 2013 – Oct 2015

Slalom Consulting, Consultant

  • Ryan constructed core components for nearly all aspects of a multi-million dollar system prison telecommunication investigative tool
  • He was designated as an authority to navigate Scala-centric AWS data processing pipelines for a prominent agricultural enterprise
Aug 2011 – Oct 2013

Credera, Consultant

  • Ryan interacted with and developed for nearly all aspects of a multi-million dollar automotive eCommerce website, which contained over 50 technology integrations and spanned over both desktop & mobile platforms.
  • He captained front-end integration team of a classic Spring MVC implementation for a marketing tool used by an international marketing giant.

Sep 2015

Certified ScrumMaster® – Scrum Alliance

Oct 2011

Oracle Certified Professional – Java SE6 Programmer – Oracle


Southern Methodist University

  • Bachelor of Science, Computer Science (minor in Mathematics)