Kate Donaldson
Senior Software Engineer
Oak Park, Illinois, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolKate Donaldson is a senior software engineer and technical leader with 11+ years building backend-first, well-modeled products across regtech, govtech, healthcare, and food security. She combines hands-on Ruby on Rails and serverless engineering with people-first management, having led teams, mentored engineers, and driven pay equity and DEI initiatives that shaped hiring, compensation, and culture. Kate has delivered complex integrations and data pipelines—designing resilient SFTP, REST/GraphQL, and flat-file orchestration into centralized data lakes—and improved CI/CD and deploy processes for faster, safer releases. As a contributor to open-source projects like a human-essentials inventory system and Jenkins API tooling, she blends product-minded engineering with pragmatic DevOps improvements. Based in Oak Park, IL, she also consults with small companies and founders to translate business vision into scalable software and sustainable org practices. Notably, she repeatedly pairs technical delivery with strategic change (e.g., leading a command-level data strategy and a company-wide pay equity audit), showing equal fluency in code and organizational design.
11 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
Film Production, Film Production at Florida State UniversityWeb Development, Web Development at Harper CollegeBachelor of Science Theatre Education Theatre Design/Production History Education, Bachelor of Science Theatre Education Theatre Design/Production History Education at Illinois State UniversityDiploma General, Diploma General at Rolling Meadows High School
Stackoverflow
101reputation
4kreached
3answers
3questions
Github Skills (19)
ruby-rails10
rspec10
open-source10
rails10
travis-ci10
cicd10
ruby10
build-automation10
jenkins10
jenkins-ci10
postgresql9
nom8
ssh6
ruby-on-rails6
instance-variables6
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
arangamani/jenkins_api_client
Oct 2017 - Mar 2018
Ruby Client libraries for communicating with Jenkins Remote Access API
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:41 commits, 43 PRs, 30 pushes in 5 months
Contributions summary:Kate's primary contribution involves updating the project's infrastructure and build processes. They modernized the Jenkins setup by updating URLs and ensuring HTTPS usage. Furthermore, they integrated Travis CI for continuous integration and delivery. Additional contributions include merging code changes to address various merge conflicts.
jenkinsapiapi-accessjenkins-serverruby-client
rubyforgood/human-essentials
Oct 2018 - Oct 2018
Human Essentials is an inventory management system for diaper, incontinence, and period-supply banks. It supports them in distributing to partners, tracking inventory, and reporting stats and analytics.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:8 commits, 2 PRs, 13 comments in 2 days
Contributions summary:Kate primarily contributed to the back-end of the application by adding features and improving existing functionality related to requests. They added controller and feature specs and refactored the request feature spec. The user moved query logic to the controller and added helper scopes to the models. The user also updated views, models, and controllers, implementing features like summing quantities and improving code quality through Rubocop fixes.
inventorymanagement-systemstatisticsinventory-management-systemflows
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