Katherine Aurelia

I am a software engineer with twenty years of experience, most of it on the systems companies run on internally rather than the ones they sell. I am good at inheriting an application that already exists and making it more reliable, whether that means migrating it off a legacy component or redesigning the relational schema underneath it.

I grew up in Philadelphia and studied computer science at Drexel. I then spent almost thirteen years at Condé Nast across three roles, beginning on the support side and working up into custom application development. The project I point to most often is the Golf Digest course rankings system. The legacy PHP application behind it was corrupting data and losing logs, so I proposed replacing it outright and got approval from the Editor-in-Chief. I designed the relational schema by hand, then built the front end and the API, and roughly 1,200 course reviewers used it across multiple rating cycles. I also wrote a modular Java tool that automated recurring data transfers between companies and cut about half a day of manual work every week.

Then came close to seven years at Cubic. For the first stretch I was sole maintainer of an internal innovation-management platform on AngularJS, Node, Express, and MongoDB in Docker, inherited with no handover and no other engineer on it, covering the front end, the back end, the database, and the servers underneath.

Most recently I worked on Umo Mobility, a transit fare payment platform, on the passenger portal riders use to register fare cards and add funds to them. I migrated its authentication off a legacy internal system onto OAuth and Keycloak. It was a live application handling money movement, so I built a feature flag service first and gated the migration behind it, letting the cutover happen without a coordinated release. I also wrote a reusable Flutter authentication module against AWS Cognito, with the Lambda handlers and API Gateway integrations behind it, as part of a planned authentication modernization.

My strongest interest is back-end and full-stack work in JavaScript, TypeScript, Node, and SQL, and I want to go deeper on the cloud and data side. Flutter and Dart are the newest tools I picked up and the ones I most want to keep using. I also have real time in Angular and AngularJS, and I am one of the few people who will say out loud that maintaining a legacy AngularJS application sounds like a good week. Copilot and Claude Code are part of my daily workflow, and I treat what they produce as a draft rather than an answer.

Outside of work I build small things and fix old ones: a Chrome extension that scores job postings against a stored skills profile, a Quake source port running natively on Apple silicon, and vintage hardware repaired to the component level.

I am in Philadelphia and staying here, looking for engineering work with clear priorities and a team I can actually talk to, local or genuinely remote-friendly.