Summary
Ross Bell is an engineering leader with 14 years of experience who has transformed teams and systems across startups and scale-ups, currently leading engineering at Discord. He excels at turning crisis teams into high-performing organizations, having restored accountability and relationships quickly while setting durable performance standards. Ross has driven major business impact—most notably delivering Kin’s first enterprise data product that saved over $10M annually and improving engineering velocity through SDLC observability and cultural change. He combines hands-on product engineering (Rails, Postgres, Elasticsearch, React) with people-first management, hiring and developing engineers through growth and difficult transitions. A repeat founder and operator, he scaled a B2B SaaS to $650K ARR and raised venture capital while serving as lead architect and CTO. Based in the Chicago area, he’s pragmatic about production reliability and pragmatic adoption of AI tools to boost developer productivity.
14 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
BS Computer Science, BS Computer Science at University of Nebraska at Omaha