Derek Montgomery
Rails | React | Front-End | AI
Partnering with high-standards individuals to build beautiful, performant, accessible, and exciting software with humans in mind.
Recent Work Experience
- Contributed extensively to the design, development, and success of multiple AI initiatives, including O'Reilly content-powered Answers and custom RAG-based assistants
- Most Impactful for the Business (Runner Up), Best Engineering (Runner Up) - 2024 Winter Hackathon
- Feature-built for Dispatch Connect, a logistics platform used by organizations to manage their own fleet
- Route planning, optimization, visualization; real-time ETAs; status notifications; driver insights, comms
- Led and mentored fifteen individual contributors of the Front-End Development department of iFIT
- Collaborated with project and team leads to cultivate a consistently high-performing FED force
2017 - 2020
Senior Front-End Developer
- Developed training to introduce team to new web APIs (e.g. IntersectionObserver, CSS Grid, WebAssembly), debugging tools, and lawful and empathic web accessibility
- Mentored junior developers in first steps into coding for the web platform
- Lead developer for API architecture, banking network integration, payment processing, security, cron systems, Twilio integration, and admin portal
- Laid foundation for a growing and thriving company
- Feature-built for ZipTours, an app for remote home tours all over the country
- Led WebRTC, telephony/SMS integration, custom scheduling system, and data-driven mapping efforts
Education
Full Sail University
Master of Fine Arts, Media Design
- Marketing agency vision, strategy, process, and management
Tech
- HTML | CSS | JavaScript | Ruby on Rails | React | React Native | Django | Web Accessibility | Datadog | Claude Code
Skills & Competencies
- Full digital product lifecycle leadership
- People leadership
- Semantic, well-structured, scalable code
- UI / UX best practices
- Code reviews
- Unix & servers
- RESTful service architecture
- Data visualization
- Performance optimization
- Web accessibility
- Comprehensive unit/integration testing
- Data security & PCI compliance
- Observability
- Agentic AI Development
What I've Built
- Design systems & component libraries
- Telephony & SMS/MMS systems (Twilio)
- WebRTC real-time video conferencing
- Mobile apps (Expo, React Native)
- Maps integrations
- Workflow tools
- RESTful APIs
- Complex reporting & data aggregation systems
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems
- Native platform integrations (Raycast, VS Code, Cursor)
Brands Served
- Case New Holland
- Caterpillar
- Cedars-Sinai
- Daimler
- Gyve
- Hospital Corporation of America (HCA)
- Herman Miller
- Kaiser Permanente
- Learning Care Group
- NordicTrack
- O'Reilly Media
- Reinsurance Group of America (RGA)
- Symantec
- Thomson Reuters
Industries Served
- Commercial & residential construction
- Non-profit
- Legal
- Real estate
- Healthcare
- Insurance
- Energy
- Technology
- Heavy equipment manufacturing & dealers
- Furniture
- E-commerce
- Finance
- Food service
- Education
- Fitness
- Courier/logistics