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Joseph Ferrairo

@josephferrairo

Senior Engineering Manager at Houlihan Lokey who led a securities system rewrite, cutting feature delivery from months to weeks.

United States

Message

What I'm looking for

I’m looking for work where I can improve organizational velocity by establishing practical processes, tooling, and team culture. I value pragmatic solutions that fit the organization, whether that means modernizing legacy systems or getting more from what already works.

At Houlihan Lokey, I lead a cross-functional team across a Rails valuation engine and a .NET securities database. I led the rewrite of an undocumented securities system, cutting feature delivery from months to weeks while preserving full parity.

At Houlihan Lokey, I also replaced a synchronous Excel add-in with an asynchronous model and unified two engineering teams under one Scrum and GitHub Flow approach. The teams moved from biweekly releases to multiple daily deploys.

At Polywork, I built and led an 11-person cross-functional engineering team. I rebuilt the hiring process into a four-stage funnel, growing the team from 2 to 11 engineers in 18 months with 89% retention.

As Lead Software Engineer at Polywork, I led a rewrite of the web application with three engineers, using a Rails-native stack that cut feature delivery from over a month to roughly two weeks. I also managed the seven-week migration from Heroku to GCP.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Senior Engineering Manager

Current

Houlihan Lokey

Apr 2024 - Present (2 years 6 months)

Lead a cross-functional team of 14 engineers and contractors across Software Engineering, QA, and Product Management, with full architectural ownership of two production platforms. Led an 18-month rewrite of an undocumented legacy securities system, cutting feature delivery from months to weeks.

Ruby on Rails .NET Scrum GitHub Flow CI CD Architecture Leadership

Director of Engineering

Polywork

Feb 2022 - Apr 2024 (2 years 2 months)

Built and led an 11-person cross-functional engineering team, owning hiring, onboarding, performance, and culture. Rebuilt the hiring process into a four-stage funnel, scaling the team from 2 to 11 engineers in 18 months with 89% retention.

Team Leadership Hiring Onboarding Performance Management Agile Scrum

Lead Software Engineer

Polywork

Oct 2020 - Feb 2022 (1 year 4 months)

Led a full rewrite of Polywork's web application with a Rails-native stack, cutting feature delivery from over a month to roughly two weeks. Drove an end-to-end Heroku-to-GCP migration in 7 weeks with minimal downtime.

Ruby on Rails Turbo Stimulus Protocol Buffers Heroku GCP GitHub Actions CI CD PostgreSQL Redis

Software Engineer

Quip

Jul 2019 - Oct 2020 (1 year 3 months)

Designed and shipped a scalable REST API for Quip's e-commerce application. Architected GraphQL endpoints for a smart brush mobile app and led a major Rails version upgrade.

REST APIs GraphQL Ruby on Rails Backend Development

Software Engineer

The Tylt

May 2018 - Jul 2019 (1 year 2 months)

Introduced Test Driven Development and built a robust test suite for a Ruby on Rails CMS and API. Built a redirect management feature by integrating with the Fastly API.

Ruby on Rails Test Driven Development Fastly CMS APIs

Associate Software Engineer

Liaison International

Oct 2016 - May 2018 (1 year 7 months)

Delivered features and bug fixes for a graduate admission portal, building fundamentals of shipping production software. Performed code reviews and upheld testing standards.

Ruby on Rails Code Review Testing