Ryan Balfanz
Senior Software Engineer at reddit, reddit-archive; Previous: Netflix, Square, Mint.com/Intuit; ShiftMedical, Cuecal
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolRyan Balfanz is a Senior Software Engineer with 16 years of experience building scalable backend systems and leading engineering efforts from startup to scale. He led backend development at Cue, the world's first social calendar acquired while he was Lead Software Engineer, and now shapes community infrastructure at Reddit. His background spans high-growth startups and major platforms including Square and Netflix, plus founding CTO experience in healthcare tech, giving him a pragmatic product-focused engineering lens. Ryan blends solid academic training in physics and computational methods with hands-on production experience, often mentoring engineers and advising startups as an angel investor. Based in San Francisco, he brings proven expertise in shipping reliable systems at scale and a knack for turning research-flavored problem solving into operational products. An unexpected thread through his career is a longstanding interest in teaching and mentorship, from university TA roles to formal mentoring at Bloc.
16 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
B.S. Physics Mathematics, B.S. Physics Mathematics at Illinois State UniversityM.S. Computational Condensed Matter Physics Electrical Engineering, M.S. Computational Condensed Matter Physics Electrical Engineering at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
English
Stackoverflow
681reputation
47kreached
3answers
0questions
pyodbc
top-1%
macos
top-5%
Github Skills (171)
sendgrid10
django10
reddit10
webapp10
selected-item10
django-project10
docker-stack10
pyodbc10
send-sms10
homebrew10
balena10
javascript9
docker-compose9
linux9
rest9
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
RyanBalfanz/homebrew-cask
May 2015 - Dec 2018
A CLI workflow for the administration of Mac applications distributed as binaries
Contributions:12 PRs, 17 pushes, 8 branches in 3 years 7 months
cliworkflowdistributed-applicationsadministrationbinaries
Mystopia/fantastic-doodle
Feb 2017 - May 2019
Full-featured Django project skeleton
Contributions:52 commits, 12 PRs, 31 pushes in 2 years 2 months
django-projectdjangodockerdocker-composeheroku
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.