Drew Stephens
Senior Software Engineer at Netflix
Virginia, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolDrew Stephens is a senior software engineer with 18 years of experience building high-performance server-side systems and web applications, currently at Netflix. He blends engineering leadership with deep hands-on backend work, previously holding staff and director-level roles at ClassPass, American Express, and startups he helped found. An active open-source maintainer, Drew contributes notably to FasterXML’s jackson-module-kotlin and has improved serialization strategies in widely used projects like Rails’ activerecord-session_store and Dropwizard Metrics. He’s comfortable refactoring complex libraries for testability and robustness, and his contributions show attention to migration-safe changes (hybrid serialization) and edge cases around Kotlin value classes and null handling. Based in Virginia, Drew pairs pragmatic engineering with a history of scaling both systems and teams across startups and large organizations.
18 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Rochester Institute of Technology
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (19)
kotlin10
json10
marshalling10
testing10
value-objects10
java10
ruby10
dataclasses10
javas10
activerecord10
val10
reporting-services10
metric10
json-serialization10
serialization9
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
FasterXML/jackson-module-kotlin
Mar 2020 - Jan 2022
Module that adds support for serialization/deserialization of Kotlin (http://kotlinlang.org) classes and data classes.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:47 reviews, 307 commits, 75 PRs in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Drew primarily contributed to the core functionality of the Kotlin module, focusing on improvements to serialization and deserialization support for Kotlin classes and data classes. Their contributions involved the creation of a builder for the KotlinModule, enabling more flexible configuration. The user also addressed specific issues related to value classes, JSON property annotations, and the handling of null values within collections and singletons, enhancing the module's robustness. Further, the user added tests to validate the corrected behavior of the module.
deserializationserializationkotlinjacksonjson
rails/activerecord-session_store
Dec 2015 - Feb 2016
Active Record's Session Store extracted from Rails
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:11 commits, 1 PR, 22 comments in 2 months
Contributions summary:Drew focused on enhancing the ActiveRecord session store functionality. They implemented configurable serialization options, including Marshal, JSON, and a hybrid approach for migrating existing data. The contributions involved modifications to core files, including `active_record/session_store.rb`, `active_record/session_store/session.rb`, and supporting test files, ensuring the session data could be serialized and deserialized using different formats. They also addressed and fixed deserialization issues.
ruby-on-railssession-storerailssession-cookieruby
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.