Summary
Joe Rinehart is a seasoned software engineer and developer relations leader based in Asheville, North Carolina, with over 20 years of experience guiding teams to ship reliable software at scale. He blends hands-on engineering with a strong emphasis on communication, recognizing that high-quality dialogue across teams and customers underpins every successful product. His career spans roles from IC to startup founder and director-level leadership in SaaS healthcare, where he was the first full-time engineering hire and later managed a half-dozen consultancies, steering a reorganization that empowered mental health providers via APIs, backend microservices, and modern UX. At TherapyAppointment, he grew the engineering team to nine, implemented data-driven SDLC and security practices, and delivered hundreds of deployments while reducing costs and time to market. In his current role at Buf, he champions Protobuf-driven architectures and developer education to help projects distribute deployment, embrace events, and scale across environments. Outside work, he’s a longtime speaker and technology evangelist who enjoys ultra-endurance cycling and mentoring as a dad.
19 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Northwest University