Scott Batson

Charleston, SC · sbatson5@gmail.com · scottbatson.dev · aspiring-reader.com

GitHub · LinkedIn · YouTube

Staff engineer who ships consumer products users love and levels up the engineers around him. My product intuition comes from being a user first — a writer, editor, and reader on the platforms I build — and I sweat the details that make software feel fast, reliable, and considered. I'm also an avid writer — a background that has become an unexpected superpower in the AI era of software development, where clear thinking and clear writing are how you get the most out of both people and models.

SKILLS

TypeScript, JavaScript, React, React Native, Node.js, Ruby, Rails, Elixir, Phoenix, PostgreSQL, HTML, CSS, Design Systems, Web Performance (Datadog RUM, Core Web Vitals), CI/CD, AI-assisted development, Mentorship, Technical Writing

EXPERIENCE

Medium; Remote — Staff Software Engineer

April 2025 - PRESENT
The home for human writing on the internet
  • Ship features writers and editors love: the per-post earnings dashboard and status pages for the Editor Partner Program, a suite of editor tools (bulk actions, auto-decline, off-topic tags, editor assignments), and featured-image focal point control — born from a cross-team ideation workshop I organized between Engineering and Content, then refined through user feedback.
  • Known on the team for pairing technical depth with product intuition earned as a writer, editor, and reader on the platform itself — I build for Medium's users because I am one.
  • Treat performance as user experience: built Medium's first real-user monitoring (RUM) dashboard in Datadog, tracking Core Web Vitals and latency by page type for the first time — now how the web team measures whether the product actually feels fast.
  • Raised the bar for design/eng collaboration (as flagged independently by three design partners): as Web Guild Lead, drove the first Figma Code Connect coupling of Medium's design system to end design/code drift, and authored the styling migration proposal (Fela → Tailwind).
  • Served as interim Engineering Manager for five senior engineers while continuing Staff-level IC output — rebuilt sprint ceremonies, coached every direct report (all five rated leadership "exceeds expectations"), and shifted the team from output-focused to impact-focused work.
  • Held up by company leadership as the model for what "maker" should mean going forward. Write regularly on Medium about engineering and product — the same product-thinking-through-writing that shapes how I build.

Threadable; Remote — Head of Engineering

August 2023 - April 2025
Social e-reader and book discovery platform
  • Took the product from prototype to a live, revenue-generating app as the engineering org's leader — owning architecture, CI/CD, and performance monitoring as traffic and data grew.
  • Managed and mentored a team of four engineers; established code review culture, sprint process, and the bridge between founders and contributors.
  • Shipped the hard parts myself: the real-time social layer that renders hundreds of live reader comments inside a book with low latency, a custom EPUB parser (Ruby) and reader (Swift), and AI automations for genre assignment, insights, and conversation summaries.

Upstatement; Boston, MA — Lead Software Engineer, Engineering Manager

April 2019 - August 2023
Design and engineering studio
  • Grew Threadable from prototype into a client engagement worth more than $3M in revenue as lead engineer.
  • Managed apprentice and junior engineers — many in their first tech job — and started initiatives to reach engineers from underserved communities and atypical backgrounds.
  • Led high-impact civic and media projects: COVID Protocols (living treatment guidance for doctors), PBS NewsHour election graphics (live AP results via portable Web Components), and Moms Demand Action's mobile app.

Netflix Studios; Remote — Lead Software Engineer

March 2017 - April 2019
  • Led Prodicle Move, a PWA used by production crews on Netflix Originals around the world — working directly with users on set to shape the product, including leading i18n efforts.
  • Helped maintain a shared Rails API powering more than fifty front-end apps, and led Prodicle Contacts through rapidly evolving GDPR requirements.

Society of Grownups & Snap Surveys; Boston, MA / Portsmouth, NH — Full Stack & Front End Developer

April 2011 - December 2016
  • Led an Ember rewrite and a Node → Elixir/Phoenix API migration at Society of Grownups; mentored developers new to the stack and cultivated a culture of thorough, positive code review. Earlier, built and hosted client surveys and reporting at Snap Surveys.

WRITING

Aspiring Reader & scottbatson.dev

I write constantly — book reviews and reading culture at aspiring-reader.com, and engineering and product essays at scottbatson.dev. Years of writing (and a B.A. in English) taught me to structure ideas, anticipate a reader's questions, and cut what doesn't matter. Those are the same skills that make documentation people actually read, TDDs that build consensus, and precise prompts that get real leverage out of AI tools.

PROJECTS & OPEN SOURCE

Firestore Jest Mock

Created and open-sourced a testing library that lets teams make assertions about Firestore queries — now downloaded around 20,000 times a week, with over 2 million downloads total.

Programming Video Tutorials

Screencasts on Ember, Phoenix, and WebAssembly with over 100,000 views — featured in Ember Weekly and Elixir newsletters and shared by the creators of Ember and Phoenix.

Open Source Contributions

Collaborator on ember-cli-flash, top contributor to the official Ember Guides, and contributor to epub.js, react-native-webview, Ember.js, and more.

EDUCATION

Southern New Hampshire University; Manchester, NH — Graduate Level Coursework - Software Application Development

January 2014 - May 2015

4.0 GPA across seven courses covering SDLC, e-commerce, and operating systems.

Great Bay Community College; Portsmouth, NH — Programming Certificate

September 2011 - May 2013

4.0 GPA - Certificates in Web Development and C#.

University of Maine; Orono, ME — B.A. English

September 2004 - May 2008

NCAA Division 1 Scholar Athlete — Cross Country; Track & Field.