I’m a software engineering leader with a passion for developing sensible systems with healthy bones and building products that delight.
My background is as a frontend-focused engineer with full-stack comfort and a knack for bridging design and engineering. I’m strong in technical leadership, building maintainable systems, and rolling up sleeves to make sure a feature ships.
As a manager, I aim to be transparent and tuned in to whatever motivates, frustrates, and/or energizes my team. I just want everybody to have a good time while accomplishing things.
Technologies and Tools
- Languages & Frameworks: TypeScript, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, React/JSX, Next.js
- State management: Redux, MobX
- Styling: Emotion, Styled Components, Tailwind, ACSS
- Design Systenm: Storybook, Style Dictionary, Token Studio
- Testing & QA: Vitest, Playwright, Jest, Cypress
- Build tools: Webpack, Gulp, Gatsby
- Design Tools: Figma, Adobe Creative Suite
Work Experience
Suno
Engineering, Web
September 2024 to present
Suno is a platform for music creation. In addition to being a tool for creating music using generative AI, it is also a social platform for discovering and engaging with music creators.
I joined as an early member of the engineering team with a focus on frontend web. As the team has grown I have been the tech lead for the Content feature pod and most recently the engineering manager of the newly-formed Frontend Core pod.
- Feature development, coordination, web implementation
- Comments and replies, in-app notification panel, homepage redesign, and in-app promos (feature launches, contests)
- General cross-team support (bug fixes, architecture discussion, code review)
- Web infrastructure and codebase hygiene
- Consolidating duplicative components and improving extensibility for future needs
- Accessibility improvements, especially WCAG conformance and UX usability
- Investigating performance issues in Next.js app (render cascades, UI jank)
- Identifying opportunities to pay down tech debt from the sprint to MVP
- Socializing improvements to frontend practices through documentation and presentations
- Design system and workflows
- Organizing colors, icons, typography, and components for engineering handoff
- Style Dictionary and custom tooling workflow
- Project management improvements
- Collaborating with other engineering/product leads to align on process
- Configuring Linear for better visibility and collaboration (cycles, labels, dashboards)
- Tightening up meeting agendas and rituals
Tinder
Engineering Manager II, UI Platform
March 2022 to September 2024
Tinder is a well-known dating app with iOS, Android, and Web apps.
I led the cross-platform engineering team responsible for the systems and workflows that enabled consistent UI across iOS, Android, and Web at Tinder. We were the engineering arm of Tinder’s Obsidian design system.
- Determined requirements and built components that balanced configurability and consistency
- Bridged the gap between design and implementation via libraries and tooling
- Enabled feature teams to focus on product-specific work by consolidating boilerplate and centralizing design decisions
- Accelerated cohesive product development through better design-to-engineering handoff
- Led engineering-wide migration to design tokens across multiple codebases through tooling and status dashboard
- Synchronized design tokens using Style Dictionary as single source-of-truth for engineers and designers alike
- Built pipeline to elimate error-prone manual interpretation of designs
- Automated publishing of versioned libraries for deliberated controlled upgrades, reducing lag between design and engineering
- Cross-platform dark mode
- Leveraged usage of design tokens to prototyped a version of dark mode on Web
- Tested hypothesis that dark mode would have neutral-to-positive user behavior impact
- Built momentum to prioritize support for dark mode across iOS and Android
- Component library across design and engineering
- Cross-platform implementation of components, including React (Web), UIView (iOS), Jetpack Compose (Android), and Android View
- Collaborated on consistent specifications with thoughtful platform-specific variations where appropriate
- Icon library
- Workflow for processing SVG icon assets exported from Figma
- Support for layer name convention to allow dynamic programmatic recoloring across platforms: React components (Web), vector drawables (Android), and SF Symbols (iOS)
- Documentation and internal tooling with usage guidelines and interactive demos in Storybook (Web), Showkase (Android), and the iOS demo app
- Organized team morale events including virtual game hangouts and a well-deserved trip to Disneyland
Staff Software Engineer, Web Platform
August 2017 to March 2022
I joined as the team was preparing for the global launch of the Tinder Progressive Web App, rapidly implementing features to reach parity with the native mobile apps.
- Introduced a Redux state management approach using normalized data schemas at the API boundary, improving clarity of business logic and insulating the app from backend changes
- Led improvements to the React component library, increasing stability, composability, and consistency with the design system
- Feature development, including supporting high-priority projects for teams that lacked dedicated web resources
- Support for “area of interest” cropping of an avatar version of a member’s profile picture so their face was visible
- CRM campaign management UI, including previews, custom rich text editor based on extended Markdown, and localization
- In-house feature flag and experimentation and platform, including the data architecture to support asynchronous loading of flags and accurate analytics to correlate with experiments in event logging. Also built the experiment management and results UI
Splash
Senior Software Engineer
August 2016 to August 2017
Splash provides the tools to build beautiful event pages, collect information about guests and customers, and manage and analyze that data.
- Rewrote bundling process to improve build times and enable faster development, shaving cumulative hours off feature development time
- Introduced industry-standard tools and practices to make existing codebase more modular and transparent
- Implemented UI for third-party integrations platform, collaborating closely with another engineer who built the backend API
- Established new React component library and a compatibility bridge with existing Backbone codebase
Tumblr
Staff Engineer
April 2015 to August 2015
Tumblr was the best microblogging platform that there ever was.
Tumblr has a codebase forged over years of product innovation. As the Web Client Staff Engineer, it was my job to make sure that things in the frontend world didn’t get too hairy. I helped keep our developers on the same page and happy and was the advocate for the user’s browser in architecture reviews.
- Maintained and improved Tumblr’s Backbone-based frontend framework
- Migrated build system from Browserify to Webpack, reducing build times by ~80%
- Evangelized frontend development practices, presenting Lunch & Learns and mentoring junior engineers
- Enhanced Tumblr’s Open Source presence, upgrading the official JavaScript API client and implementing a web version of Apple’s Live Photo technology
- Balanced IC work with cross-team leadership, driving new initiatives and keeping developers aligned
Product Engineer
October 2012 to April 2015
- Worked on the Creator Tools team building posting features with various media formats
- Built the second iteration of Tumblr’s WYSIWYG theme editor where they could get a realtime preview of their theme, which was a combination of HTML and custom tags, and other styling configurations
- Hid a fun little easter egg in the audio player that showed a dolphin swimming around in the equalizer after the audio player was idle for a bit
- Gave life to an interactive animated anthropomorphic photocopier assistant named Coppy–introduced on April 1st and sadly living less than 24 hours. May he rest in peace.
Moda Operandi
Frontend Developer
February 2012 to October 2012
Moda Operandi is a luxury online fashion site that facilitated ordering directly from designers.
- Frontend development of e-commerce platform, including product and collection pages and checkout experience
- Worked with in-house creative team and outside agencies to implement redesign and seamless integration of storefront and backend
Heavy, Inc.
Developer
July 2010 to January 2012
Heavy was a media entertainment site targeted toward a young male demographic that gradually focused more on sports and news.
- Built “Rich-media takeovers” (that’s a nice way of saying “intrusive Flash ads,” but despite their nature, they could still look pretty neat)
- Maintained the WordPress theme for the site and plugins for our editors to manage content
Splintertek, LLC
Simulation Developer
January 2009 to August 2010
I worked for a few different subcontractors at Lockheed Martin, but Splintertek was the last one before I moved to New York. I worked on a few non-Lockheed Flash e-learning simulations there.
Lockheed Martin
Programmer Analyst (subcontractor)
August 2008 to August 2010
In my first job out of college, I worked on the TSA version of the game Myst. This “Courseware” was a hybrid of Flash and JavaScript, used for web-based training for employees of several government agencies.
- Built SCORM-compliant e-learning software using Flash
- Worked with 3D modelers and animators to build interactive point-and-click simulations to use as training material for machine operations, repair procedures, and other communication protocols
- Implemented a framework to seamlessly transition between interactive scenes in a virtual environment using full-motion video transitions
- Built a tool to lip sync a virtual avatar to an audio track with captions
Other Points of Interest
Open Source Contributions
I always appreciate seeing other developers who graciously share their solutions on the internet through npm and GitHub. I contribute to these projects when I can, especially when I come across a utility that doesn’t seem to exist or a feature that is missing or broken.
Take a look at my Github page to see some of the things I’ve worked on.
Hipster City Cycle
Once upon a time, I worked with a few folks I knew from college on an iPhone game about a bicycle-riding hipster cruising the streets of Philadelphia, PA trying to blow through his trust fund by throwing parties–a quaint and dated concept now, but really cool at the time. Aren’t we due for an “indie sleaze” revival, or something?
I helped design many of the levels and gameplay elements and drew all the artwork myself in a pixelated Maniac Mansion-inspired style.
Education
University of Pennsylvania
BSE in Digital Media Design
Contacting Me
If you’d like to contact me in some professional capacity, please send an email or a LinkedIn message.
keith@mcknig.ht