Our mission is to solve the biggest challenges in health using science. We want to help people live healthier and longer. Working directly with the world's leading scientists and clinicians, Elysium translates advances in science and technology into effective and scientifically sound health products that work.

VP of Engineering

- Mentored first-time managers to succeed in their new roles - Facilitated and assisted with large project kickoffs - Helped establish engineering KPIs for site performance and quality - Participated in reorganization of company goals and product, engineering, and design structure - Increased Plated's recruiting brand and visibility throughout NYC's Ruby community - Led projects related to investor due diligence and financial accounting for engineering team

Director of Engineering

- Led a major refactor of the codebase to pay off technical debt and deliver new features - Led a major redevelopment of all core UI, increasing retention by 150% over a year, half of that increase occurring after a single release - Managed and mentored engineers, promoting junior and mid-level developers to senior and lead positions. - Brought in agile software development practices including iteration planning, retrospectives, and test-driven development.

Lead Engineer

Led a team to launch a new feature that allows learners to practice what they have learned by allowing them to make, share, and edit web projects while remaining in the familiar Codecademy interface. Improved the team's best practices including code design, refactoring, and TDD. Automated server provisioning and configuration with Chef/EC2.

Senior Engineer

Led implementation of Agile/XP development processes and continuous deployment with automated full-stack testing. Lead team of up to 3 developers doing both pair and solo programming along with XP/TDD mentorship. Participated in implementation of Lean product development processes. Automated service provisioning and configuration with Chef and Fog (on Rackspace Cloud). Scaled Flavorwire.com traffic 10x (since I started) with capacity for 100x.

Lead Developer

Sliced and implemented new homepage, sidebar, and footer using modern HTML/CSS practices and an in-house template system/web server.

Front-end Developer

Founding director of FIUSM.com. Implemented and launched the first version of FIUSM.com using Ruby on Rails and assisted FIU's Student Media group in the transition from an old-style media organization consisting of a newspaper and a terrestrial radio station into a modern news and entertainment organization with web, print, and broadcast radio presence. Managed all technical work including development and cloud hosting, both internal with FIU's VMware cluster and external cloud providers (Linode).

Online Director - FIU Student Media

Worked alongside Hashrocket to assist Cyloop into transitioning from a Java shop into a Ruby on Rails shop. Launched the new version of Cyloop as the official "Music" section of MSN.com.mx and MSN.com.br.

Ruby on Rails Developer

Helped Todobebé upgrade their legacy site from Rails 1 to Rails 2 and launch their redesign.

Optimized and rebuilt team's technology infrastructure that involved web development, audio streaming, and game server management. All servers were dedicated bare-metal boxes. Later acquired by DirecTV as the Championship Gaming Series.

Director of Technology

I've been working with Ruby and Ruby on Rails for over a decade. I have built many applications with it, both from scratch and inherited. I've done a lot of refactoring, TDD, scaling, and even work with the internal core.

I've been working with JavaScript for a decade and a half to create rich and fast interfaces for applications. I keep myself up to date with the fast evolving technologies around JavaScript, yet have a practical and pragmatic approach towards getting things done with JS. JS has a bad rap for how easily you can create spaghetti code with it. My years of professional experience have taught me the art of writing maintainable code in JavaScript.

For a decade and a half, I have been working with HTML and CSS to create beautiful and fast web interfaces. I also have expertise with SEO, webpage structure, new browser APIs, and new browser CSS functionality.

My SQL is strong when it comes to most tasks related to running a database-backed application. I am not a data analyst, so the SQL experience that I can provide is more relevant to someone trying to build a high-traffic application that is database-backed.

I have plenty of experience with jQuery, but it is not my preferred tool of choice for building applications that will last longer than 6 months.

I have plenty of experience with MariaDB and MySQL, but it is not my preferred database of choice when starting a new project. Postgres is much superior and has a more stable roadmap.

I have a lot of advanced techniques from working with Git. Outside of just being an expert at creating and managing commits in a highly active codebase, my experience includes: recovering lost data, merging repositories, splitting repositories, and re-writing history for archival purposes or for fixing long running inconsistencies.

I used CoffeeScript heavily back in the day, but the world has moved on to ES6 and what's coming next. I can read and write CoffeeScript if necessary, but do not recommend for new projects.

I have seen the evolution of DevOps from the AWS was just getting started to the vibrant ecosystem that it is now, especially with technologies like Docker, Ansible, and others. The important experience you'll get from me, is that i can tell you exactly when you DON'T need such technology and can avoid overcomplicating your stack too early in your project. My expertise is not just in implementation, but finding the right time to implement.

I have worked with Wordpress extensively when I have needed to, including writing themes and plugins. I also have experience with CraftCMS which is coming out to be a solid alternative to websites that are not necessarily blogs.

Have built very large websites with React for large startups that are no longer startups. Plenty of React/Redux and Server-Side Rendering (Universal/isomorphic apps) experience. I love to use React/Redux on the web without completely rewriting how the web has worked for decades. I write React apps that degrade gracefully for misbehaving clients or clients that have fully turned off Javascript. I also have newly coming professional React Native experience. I have not released the app yet, but I am very familiar with the React Native APIs and I also have Native iOS (Swift) exposure from a previous engagement.

Senior Software Engineer - Startup Experience

Rick Martínez

Rewrote almost all of Plated's consumer facing code to focus on a subscription model, increasing customer retention by almost 2x.

Personal details

Rick M.

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