Mike Caputo

About Mike Caputo

With over 15 years of software engineering and team lead experience, I consider myself a human-centric engineer. Building high-trust teams, collaborating across the organization, and solving interesting problems is where I thrive. More than just code, I focus on solving problems and delivering value to others: after all, we design and build these tools for humans, not machines. If technology isn\'t making our lives better in some way, then we\'re doing something wrong.A famous, if controversial author once wrote that \"specialization is for insects\". I believe a well-rounded set of skills and talents is an important asset for any human being. In addition to my experience as a software engineer, I have an educational background in history and I am always challenging myself with creative and entrepreneurial projects. I\'ve self-published music albums, founded a crowdsourcing real estate startup, and most recently have been enjoying game development, with a self-published board game and two well-rated PC games on Steam. I\'m passionate about well-designed city spaces, and I\'m an avid walker and bicyclist. I always relish the chance to learn something new and apply that knowledge in creative ways. Skills Summary React (~ 8 years) Node.js (~ 6 years) Vue.js (~ 3 years) Next.js (~ 3 years) Java (~ 3 years) Postgres / SQL (~ 8 years) Miro / LucidChart / wireframing (5+ years) Team lead / project management / scrum leader (5+ years) AWS (S3, 53, Lambda)(~ 3 years) Angular (~ 4 years) Ruby on Rails (~ 3 years) Elixir (~ 1 year) Typescript (~ 2 years) Meteor.js / MongoDB (~ 2 years) HTML / CSS (~15 years) PHP (~ 3 years) Python (~ 1 year) GameMaker / Game development on Steam Platform (~ 4 years)

Experience

1. Staff Software Engineer

   Everyday Speech

   Aug 2024 — Present · Boston, MA, US

   Everyday Speech is a no-prep digital curriculum that makes it easy to teach a wide variety of social, emotional, and communication skills to PK-12 learners of diverse ability levels. The MTSS-aligned curriculum combines video modeling, interactive web games, and worksheets to help special educators and other student support services specialists with tier 2 and 3 interventions and whole-class lessons.As a Staff Software Engineer at Everyday Speech, my current focus is driving process improvements and increasing efficiency within the engineering team and across the organization.• Lead BDD workshops to improve user-centered development across teams.• Implement better sprint planning and refinement rituals, increasing estimation accuracy across engineering teams and reducing regression issues.• Work closely with PMs to introduce engineering refinement before sprint planning, benefiting multiple teams.• Own the migration of end-to-end tests, increasing test coverage and teaching best practices.Establish best practices by introducing high-impact documentation (BDD scenarios, PR annotations, ADRs), increasing shared knowledge across teams, leading to fewer bugs and faster development cycles.• Guide hiring and onboarding of engineers. Impact: Improve team velocity, reduce bugs, and align engineering efforts with business needs. Impact: Strengthen engineering-wide practices, improve team collaboration, and reinforce a knowledge-sharing culture.

Education

• Tompkins Cortland Community College

  A.S., Liberal Arts & Social Sciences

  2004 — 2005

• SUNY Geneseo

  B.A., History

  2006 — 2008