Rafe Colton
Director Of Engineering at Expensify
Portland, Oregon, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRafe Colton is a pragmatic engineering leader and Director of Engineering in Portland with over a decade of hands-on experience building and operating resilient systems, leading SRE teams, and shipping full-stack software. He progressed from site reliability engineering into management at Expensify, where he balances operational ownership with people leadership—coaching managers, driving policy, and handling performance and compliance across multiple teams. Technically fluent in Go, Ruby, and infrastructure tooling (Terraform, Ansible, Docker), he’s contributed backend stability work to distributed-database projects focused on active/active failover and WAN replication. Comfortable in audit-heavy environments (SOC 2, PCI, SOX) and CI/CD ownership, he brings a bias for action paired with an empathetic, mentorship-first approach. Outside the office he’s built teams and products from scratch—having launched web platforms, membership programs, and custom monitoring—showing both strategic vision and willingness to roll up his sleeves.
12 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science, Bachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science at University of Pittsburgh
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (6)
c-language10
sqlite10
cprogramming-language10
database-design9
testing8
git7
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
Expensify/Bedrock
Apr 2020 - Jan 2023
Rock solid distributed database specializing in active/active automatic failover and WAN replication
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:182 releases, 214 reviews, 224 commits in 2 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Rafe primarily contributed to back-end functionality, as evidenced by changes to jobs and server-side logic. Their work includes reverting a change related to job retries, modifying the process of handling status commands and implementing a test for these commands. Furthermore, the user updated the SQLite database code with an fts5 bug fix and refactored portions of the code, demonstrating a focus on database and server-side stability and functionality.
rockdistributed-databasedatabasefailoverreplication
rafecolton/janus
Feb 2016 - May 2021
Contributions:4 pushes in 5 years 3 months
vim-pluginvimdistributionvim-distribution
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