software
Justin Foley VP of Engineering
2010 to present - Columbus, Ohio
VP of Engineering at Later. 40+ engineers, five product lines, AI-native products. 16 years of fullstack systems and the teams around them. Prior leadership at Shopmonkey, Filevine, iVueit.
Founded ModWeb, WestCowork, Westerville Web. Build the system, unlock souls, ship value daily.
Engineer who designs, sells, and ships: measurement, clarity, trust.
Reach me at justin@modweb.io.
gigs
Later VP of Engineering
February 2025 to present - Remote

Three months to VP. Fastest in company history. Inherited an org mid-turnover, rebuilt the system that produces engineering output, turned 40+ engineers across five product lines into the company's strategic advantage.

The paradigm shift in creator-match and brand intelligence.

AI & Architecture

  • • Shipped Later EdgeAI: semantic creator matching across 16M+ profiles on a custom knowledge graph (SurrealDB partnership). Sub-ms queries, ~460x cheaper per request than legacy, 10-minute workflows now run in seconds.
  • • Built the engineering intelligence platform: 15 modules, 20 teams, 7 domains. Real-time health, quality, productivity, CapEx, AI effectiveness. Killed spreadsheet audits. Showcased across Summit Ventures.
  • • Built a Go MCP server and docs monorepo: manifests, system docs, C4, cross-repo synthesis. Queryable from any IDE, self-updating nightly. Closed a SOC 2 architecture-diagram gap on the way.
  • • Wrote the agentic dev-tooling spec. Engineering's AI strategy at the board level.

Engineering Measurement

  • • Built an R&D classification methodology finance adopted. DX research partners called it "lightyears ahead."
  • • ~5x velocity via AI adoption. Tens of thousands of hours back. Deploys up, defects down.
  • • Built the financial models exec uses to fund engineering. Investment, retention, DX.

Culture & Operating Model

  • • Shipped the Engineering Operating Framework: WIP limits, protected capacity, technical veto, fixed time / variable scope. Tech debt landed on the board agenda.
  • • Replaced meetings with writing. "A POC is worth a thousand meetings" is company shorthand now.

Hiring & Team

  • • Redesigned hiring: killed take-homes, AI-graded screens, live coding with AI. Three hires in my first 90 days while onboarding myself. CPO wants to extend it beyond engineering.
  • • Coached a director toward VP readiness, a staff engineer to promotion, a TPM into staff-executive positioning.
  • • DX data, Culture Amp, financial modeling at the exec table. Retention as a systems problem.
Partnerships: SurrealDB and Encore.dev (founders), GetDX. Engineering leadership core.
Systems thinking. People, process, platform.
Shopmonkey Engineering Manager (M4) • Product Manager
March 2023 to February 2025 - Remote
  • • Enterprise messaging infrastructure: NATS streaming, AWS SES, Telnex. Real-time notifications, email, SMS at scale.
  • • Multi-provider payment platform with Finix and Stripe. Hundreds of merchant migrations. Subscription engine for multi-company franchises.
  • • Turned around a high-risk v1 to v2 platform migration. Cross-departmental coordination, structured feedback loops, Platform Toolbox for ops.
  • • Technical due diligence on BNPL integrations (Sunbit, Affirm).
Filevine Lead Senior SDE
2021 to 2023 - Remote
Led Filevine's largest feature team: billing, timekeeping, activity, tags. Interviewed dozens, hand-picked the team, recruited one of the company's top engineers and a star designer.
Total rework of the tagging system. Massive footprint. Dramatic performance gains. Every customer migrated, engine swapped mid-flight.
Built the very complex contenteditable powering Filevine's notes. Caret management and TreeWalkers, the whole deep end.
Frontend in Svelte. Introduced the first unit tests, Storybook, and a custom Svelte state-management pattern. Full-time Svelte since 2019.
ModWeb Founder
2014 to present - Columbus, Ohio
Boutique software agency. Pitched, sold, designed, shipped dozens of products. B2B sales, contracts, full SDLC ownership, strategic consulting.
Selected work:
iVueit CTO
2018 to 2021 - Columbus, Ohio
CTO. Led a ground-up platform rebuild on Go, gRPC, IaC, Svelte. Cut over with minutes of downtime.
Migrated legacy app to AWS, built an API on the legacy DB that unlocked customer automation and revenue growth. Redesigned admin and end-user flows: less manual work, sharper survey accuracy, less fraud.
Helped founders with sales, fundraising, and strategy.
WestCowork Founder
2018 - 2021 - Westerville, OH
Created a coworking space in Uptown Westerville in an old Masonic Temple.
Brick and mortar, literally. Folded 18 months into the pandemic (offices are so 2019). Doubled as the Westerville Web staging and afterparty venue.
Dropoly CTO
2011 to 2014 - Dayton, Ohio
Employee #2, first technical hire. Wore every hat: sales, fundraising, team expansion.
Built an inverse energy model web app for homes: NOAA weather plus utility bills plus home surveys, predicting the impact of behavioral and physical changes.
Pivoted into K-12 energy education aligned to Ohio Learning Standards. Sold into schools through utility partnerships.
University of Dayton Developer
2010 - 2011 - Dayton, Ohio
Developed a web application to optimize internal operations of the Department of Residence Life.
Epic Systems Developer
2010 - Madison, Wisconsin
Experimental UI/UX design for nursing station scheduling kiosk.
Brief engagement between undergrad and grad school. Built a 3D coverflow UI in C# WPF (those were times). Rendered only the active album, so thousands of items scrolled at high frame rate.
buzzwords
Languages
JavaScript/TypeScript
HTML/CSS
Go
Bash
CoffeeScript (RIP)
UI Libraries
Svelte
React
Redux
Tailwind
Flutter
Tools & Utils
Rollup
Ramda
Webpack
Cordova
Docker
Product
Lean MVP Strategy
Prioritization
Realtime Design
UI/UX
People
Public Speaking
Community Design
Technical Sales
Growth
Dev Happiness
Databases
Postgres
MongoDB
MySQL
MariaDB
CockroachDB
Frameworks
Meteor
Feathers
Express
Next
Too many to count
community
Westerville Web Founder
2017 to present - Westerville, Ohio
Monthly meetup at the intersection of tech, design, and business. 1000+ members, 35+ events, 47+ speakers.
Meteor Columbus Founder
2017 to 2019 - Westerville, Ohio
Meteor framework meetup. Where I cut my teeth on technical community building. 200+ members, 20+ events.
volunteer
WeConnect Datacenter Board Member
2020 - Westerville, Ohio
GiveBackHack Mentor
2018 - Columbus, Ohio
St. Paul School STEAM Advisory Board
2017 to 2019 - Westerville, Ohio
YMCA Board Member
2016 - Westerville, Ohio
speaking
Emcee 55+ Events
2017 - present
Grab the mic, energize the room. Available.
Generate All The Things NewRX
2018 - Newark, Ohio
Generative app scaffolding in React, Redux, Meteor.
Groovin with Bodymovin Westerville Web
2017 - Westerville, Ohio
Pure SVG animation in React with Bodymovin.
Finite State Gumball Machines St. Paul School Code Club
2017 - Westerville, Ohio
Finite state machines via interactive gumball-machine exercise. Young minds, blown.
Meteor Magic Pillar Plugged In
2016 - Columbus, Ohio
Technical inception via slide deck. Live deployment as performance art.
competition
Omnibus GiveBackHack - 1st Place
2016 - Columbus, Ohio
Realtime COTA bus tracking MVP application.
LocalFlow Startup Weekend - 3rd Place
2015 - Columbus, Ohio
Local guides build activity sequences for unique experience flows through a city.
education
Master of Science Computer Science
University of Dayton, Ohio
Focus on graph algorithms and computational reflection.
Bachelor of Science Computer Science
University of Dayton, Ohio
Minor in math. RA, WUDR DJ, founder of Cycling Club, Men's Rowing.