Kayla Cross

jun 2024 — now

Arlington, VA
5 days onsite
8 engineers

Senior Software Engineer · Thea

An AI learning platform used by millions of learners across web, iOS, macOS and Android, past a billion questions served. We ship continuously across Laravel, MySQL, React/TypeScript/Inertia, C#/.NET and Swift.

• Primary engineering owner of the hybrid iOS and macOS apps — first implementation through TestFlight and App Store launch, then releases, crash investigations, platform upgrades and native integrations. iOS is ~40% of product usage at 4.9 stars over 22,000+ ratings; macOS 4.9 over 390+.
• Led iOS subscriptions end to end: StoreKit purchase flows, app/web sync, telemetry, error recovery, and edge cases like parental approval.
• Ship full-stack and AI-powered features — assignments, class creation and selection, homepage experiments, model-powered checks and translations, shareable study kits.
• Design mobile-first experiences and reusable React interactions; improve security, developer tooling, production visibility and continuous delivery.

jun — sep 2023

Remote
3 engineers

Full Stack Software Engineer · Koko Labs

Backend systems for Full Sleep, a radar-based sleep tracking device — Java, Dropwizard and Postgres behind the device fleet and its web and mobile apps. Wired Stripe webhooks into signup so the free trial could launch, shipped React/TypeScript/Redux features, and helped steer a redesign of the admin content system.

aug — nov 2022

Remote

Software Engineer IV · Alto Pharmacy

Clinical, pharmacy and delivery software at a $1B health-tech company — Rails with Sorbet strict typing and Snowflake in a microservice architecture. Provider-facing API features for prior authorization and refills, TDD with RSpec, on-call with Grafana, New Relic and AWS.

mar 2021 — aug 2022

Remote
during the pandemic

API Software Engineer · Fundrise

Engineered the quantitative-performance ETL computing investor returns across $2.4B+ on the largest direct-to-investor real estate platform in the US — Spring Batch, Java, Snowflake. Redesigned returns to compute daily instead of quarterly by overhauling JDBC and SQL, and built monitoring with Swagger, Datadog and Sentry.

jun 2018 — mar 2021

Washington, DC
2 onsite / 3 remote

Software Engineer II · Evans and Chambers Technology

web development intern · jun 2018 → 2019  ·  software engineer II · 2019 → mar 2021

Full-stack Groovy on Grails on a security-clearance management platform serving 1,000+ facilities. Drove the move to multi-tenant architecture across Grails, AWS, MySQL and jQuery with Geb UI automation guarding the migration, and cut task load times 92% through SQL and Hibernate tuning. Onboarded a Fortune 500 client with a custom API integration. Arrived as the web development intern, promoted into engineering, company-wide Excellence Award in 2019.

2014 — 2018

Washington, DC

Before engineering · policy and research

Analyst and policy work at Hamilton Place Strategies, New America and the United States Senate — including a method for reading company earnings calls off the Bloomberg Terminal whose findings were cited by The New York Times and The Washington Post.

school

Georgetown, 2017
Flatiron, 2019

Georgetown University · B.S., Foreign Service

Focused on technology and media, with computer science coursework in Ruby and C++.

Flatiron School · Full-Stack Web Development

Attended on the Women Take Tech scholarship from the Kode with Klossy foundation.