Derek Moore

I design, build, and ship software people enjoy using.

Senior Software Engineer at Firsthand

Full-stack software engineer
6 years shipping production web apps
Atlanta, GA · Remote
github.com/derekcmoore
in/derek-c-moore

About

I'm a full-stack engineer who's been shipping production web apps for six years.

Right now I'm at an AI startup building the SDK that puts AI-generated experiences on publishers' sites, mostly in TypeScript, React, and Python. Before that it was payments and insurance checkouts in Rails and Vue. Every job so far has come with a different stack, and picking up the next one is just a normal part of the work at this point.

I also spend a good chunk of time mentoring, interviewing, and talking through architecture with the team. I like taking things from an idea to production, and I care about the unglamorous parts: tests, performance, and UIs people don't have to fight with.

Full-Stack Development · UI/UX Design · AWS & CI/CD · Agile · AI & LLM Integration · Mentorship

Where I've worked

Experience

2019 to now

2025 to now

Senior Software Engineer at Firsthand

Remote · June 2025 to present

Owned the embeddable site-experience SDK end to end, designing and shipping a v2 rewrite that streams AI-generated UI over Server-Sent Events
Delivered interactive AI agent experiences for major consumer brands and publishers from design through launch, covering video, commerce, and full analytics instrumentation
Built a themeable Lit web-component catalog with a CI-enforced design-token contract, enabling per-brand styling deployed via CDN

4 more

Led front-end development of new analytics dashboards for campaigns and experiments, including a reusable React charting library
Improved production reliability end to end, leading incident response for in-app WebView failures, hardening SSE streaming, and eliminating 2,900+ noisy Sentry events across 2,500+ users
Raised engineering quality by introducing Vitest unit testing, expanding Playwright end-to-end coverage, and cutting PR CI time and cost by reusing builds and rerunning only flaky tests
Created internal tooling for previewing and configuring campaigns, enabling teammates and non-engineers to self-serve changes that previously required engineering time

TypeScript
React
Lit Web Components
Python
Playwright & Vitest
CI/CD & Observability

2022 to 2025

Senior Software Engineer at Simply Business

Remote · June 2022 to June 2025

Rebuilt the checkout experience and product cross-selling flows
Refactored third-party API integrations, cutting page load times by 60%
Implemented an A/B testing framework and ran tests measuring customer impact and conversion
Mentored 5+ engineers through their career growth

6 more

Coordinated changes directly with partners and customers throughout implementation
Co-led a discovery initiative on application questionnaires and processes
Conducted 10+ technical and culture-fit interviews
Built new features and maintained multiple services and shared company gems
Facilitated recurring architecture discussions to keep changes aligned with company standards
Tested changes thoroughly with RSpec and smoke tests

Ruby on Rails
Vue.js
AWS ECS/Cloud
RSpec
A/B Testing
Agile & CI/CD

2020 to 2022

Software Engineer at PaymentSpring

Remote · May 2020 to June 2022

Rewrote an internal admin tool in Ruby on Rails and Vue.js, improving end-user productivity across the UI and back end
Helped build production and UAT environments on AWS with CloudFormation, using Parameter Store, ECS, CodePipeline, and Lambda
Refactored a recurring-payment scheduler onto AWS ECS scheduled tasks

6 more

Maintained Ruby on Rails microservices
Wrote RSpec and Jest unit tests across multiple microservices
Led weekly syncs on product progress and future development
Worked directly with product users to fold their feedback into development
Implemented internationalization across multiple Rails applications
Directed a team of engineers and business staff during an innovation week

Ruby on Rails
Vue.js
AWS ECS
CloudFormation
Jest Unit Tests
AWS Lambda

2019

Software Engineering Intern at Don't Panic Labs

May 2019 to August 2019

Designed and built a modular project-management tool using service-oriented design patterns
Developed responsive client interfaces integrated with backend service layers
Wrote automated unit and integration tests across the stack

2 more

Set up CI/CD pipelines to automate application validation
Deployed and hosted the front-end and back-end solutions on Azure

Modular Architecture
RESTful APIs
Unit Testing
CI/CD Pipelines
Cloud Deployments

What I do

High-fidelity frontend

Crafting responsive, accessible interfaces that feel alive, with modular state management and spring animations that add polish without getting in the way.

React · Vue.js · TypeScript / ES6+ · Sass / SCSS · UI/UX & Accessibility

Backend and APIs

Building clean, secure, well-tested APIs and services, then making them fast. Refactoring legacy paths and third-party integrations has cut page load times by as much as 60%.

Ruby on Rails · Python · RESTful APIs · Relational SQL · Performance Tuning

AI product engineering

Shipping LLM-powered experiences that hold up in production: embeddable SDKs that stream AI-generated UI in real time, schema-validated model output, and the analytics that measure whether any of it actually works.

AI Agent Experiences · Streaming UI (SSE) · LLM Tool Orchestration · RAG / Vector Embeddings · Structured Output Validation

CI/CD and cloud

Shipping code safely and predictably with containerized services and deployment pipelines, plus hands-on AWS work with ECS, Lambda, and CloudFormation when the job calls for it.

AWS ECS / Lambda · CloudFormation · Parameter Store · Docker · CI/CD Pipelines