Laurel Taylor

Objective

To continue my career as a senior software engineer in a growing company, where I can contribute while continuing to develop my technical skills, creativity, and passion for engineering new software solutions.

To continue my career as a staff front-end web developer in a good company, that has good people, and will let me contribute the stuff I know but will also let me learn more. I have a personal focus on mobile/responsive, performance, and websites that have an impact on something.

Experience

• Staff Software Engineer
  Thryv
  Chandler, AZ
  SE III March 2017 - June 2018 (1 yr 3 mos)
  Senior June 2018 - Dec 2023 (5 yrs 6 mos)
  Staff Dec 2023 - Present
  • Technical lead on Content Sharing, Automation Builder, Invoices & Quotes, and Reporting teams for small business CRM software.
  • Member of frontend leadership team, which decided on the direction of the site's frontend technologies and platform.
  • Transitioned frontend code to using a monorepo full of smaller, independent sections, rather than a bloated monolith.
  • Lead front-end developer on site rebranding.
  • Set up analytics and messaging software (Drift, Intercom, Amplitude, Salesforce messaging) for web and mobile apps.
  • Led biweekly department-wide software demos and frequently presented at quarterly company meetings.
  • First woman Staff-level engineer at the company.
  • Built a number of award-winning internal tools during quarterly hackathons: connecting mentors, organizing teams, keeping track of hackathon projects, and maintaining feature flags across multiple environments.
  • Founding member of the company's AI Initiatives team, and frequent presenter to help other developers start using AI in their day-to-day coding.
  • Started off at Infusionsoft, which then rebranded to Keap, which then was acquired by Thryv, so I've been through it :)
  • Larger company with about 120 people in Product Development, split across ~16 teams
  • This was the first time I worked as a tech lead. It was rare for the lead of a team to be a frontend developer, so I think that says a lot about my personality and leadership qualities.
  • Working with React Native for mobile apps is the best! I'm glad we jumped on that wagon early.
  • I gave special emphasis on working with remote employees pre-pandemic, and making them feel included on a team by involving them in discussions, participating in team builders, and making sure everyone in the department understood and empathized with the best ways to communicate with them.
  • In addition to leading PD demo meetings, I was also on the tailgate committee that organized quarterly company team builders, the team that organized hackathons, the Diversity & Inclusion team, the Culture Club team, founder of the promotion process support group, and organizer of weekly PD happy hours. I bring the fun!
  • I have a lot of thoughts about AI and how it's changing the way we code. I'm a big fan of Cursor right now (Sept 2026).
• Intermediate Software Engineer
  Orion Health Inc
  Scottsdale, AZ
  October 2014 - March 2017 (2 yrs 5 mos)
  • Lead front-end developer in Scottsdale office of multinational company.
  • Built single-page jQuery and ReactJS web applications for health information in a fully agile development environment.
  • Presented Git, React, ES6, and Gulp/browserify web tooling brownbag sessions for instructing new hires.
  • Winner of a hackathon for a project that displayed recent health-related tweets on SVG maps.
  • Small-ish team of about 15 devs/QA
  • I was basically the only frontend dev there lol
  • We did mainly ReactJS apps, with Redux thrown in for sanity. There's some jQuery but lots of people thought it was old, even at the time. These apps need a robust framework to work off, though, because they're huge, and jQuery was an adequate choice.
  • Content: health information, big data, really fast queries (in Elasticsearch) to narrow down the patient population to what you want to see.
  • I did a lot of talks on some n00b stuff like Git, which I love, and I want everyone else to love it too (and use just command line plz). I also am drinking the ES6 koolaid because it is SUPER AWESOME and at this point can't believe that we ever didn't have it natively on browsers, or had to resort to using babel to get it to work. Gulp and browserify were also really useful at the time; we really needed them to coordinate the building of our million node libraries, but thankfully that's not really necessary anymore. Webpack worked much better.
  • I learned SO MUCH STUFF here, mainly React and how new technologies are COOL and it's great when your work environment lets you use them.
  • However, being the only frontend person on a team is way less cool, and I work better in a group I can bounce ideas off of.
• Senior UI Developer
  HomeAdvisor.com
  Denver, CO
  January 2011 - October 2014 (3 yrs 9 mos)
  • Built and maintained consumer acquisition section of major website, including home page, Cost Guide, ProFinder, consumer account, and service request submit path.
  • Transformed UX and design specifications into high-quality HTML/CSS/JS.
  • Implemented robust client-side solutions with AJAX and JSON.
  • Key developer in site re-branding, leveraging expert Java and front-end knowledge.
  • Transformed scriptlet-ridden JSP pages into a clean MVC approach.
  • Participated in the interview process of hiring new web developers.
  • Pretty large team of about 60 devs; 6-8 who did mainly frontend
  • The site was going through a rebrand, and I built a lot of the really well-traveled pages during that, like the home page, Cost Guide, ProFinder. Also the "My Account" pages and important stuff like the submit path.
  • "Building" basically meant a total redesign of everything; there were scriptlets everywhere and they needed to get pulled out and replaced.
  • We went mainly with the servlet MVC approach, but on some pages we got to do AJAX calls to rest APIs, which was fairly new at the time!
  • My favorite part was taking PSDs from the design department and translating that into HTML/CSS. I like the attention to detail that it requires.
  • I did a fun internal image crowdsourcing project, which was based on one that I'd made during one of our "free time" days. They said it saved the company what would have been about $3 million in stock image fees.
  • I really loved this job!!
• Tools Developer
  Lockheed Martin
  Denver, CO
  June 2010 - January 2011 (7 mos)
  • Worked closely with customers and users to develop useful, reliable web tools.
  • Used expertise in Spring framework and Hibernate to maintain a cohesive tool suite.
  • Part of a small-group, agile environment involved in all areas of the development cycle.
  • Small team, about 6 devs total.
  • We all did full stack, working on internal tools like bug tracking
  • This was where I got into frontend development, since I was the only one on the team who really cared what the pages looked like for our customers.
  • We had to support browsers like Netscape, which had really fun and entertaining bugs that made pages break when you put in things like HTML comments or used relative paths. How I longed for IE6...
• Software Engineer Associate
  Lockheed Martin
  Goodyear, AZ
  June 2009 - June 2010 (1 yr)
  • Updated existing Java code to reflect new software functionality based on customer requirements.
  • Translated legacy C++ code into new Java codebase.
  • Developed, implemented, and tested web service applications using paired programming techniques.
  • Did a lot of translating C++ code into Java.
  • We used paired programming, because the codebase was so large and hard to understand.
  • Ask me about a fun SOAP message bug from a black box that couldn't be opened.

Education

• Bachelor of Science, Computer Science
  University of Georgia
  Athens, GA
  June 2009
  • GPA: 3.8/4.0
  • HOPE Scholarship Recipient (All tuition covered)
  • Dean's List
  • Graduated Magna Cum Laude
  • Minor in Japanese Language & Literature, because I am That Nerd