Sam Livingston-gray
Staff Software Engineer at Valimail
Portland, Oregon, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolSam Livingston-gray is a Staff Software Engineer with 17 years’ experience based in Portland, Oregon, who specializes in rescuing and modernizing legacy Ruby on Rails codebases so teams can sustainably ship for years. He has held senior engineering roles across startups and mid-size companies—including LivingSocial, Renewable Funding, Real Geeks, New Relic, and currently Valimail—bringing deep practical experience in long-running product code health and incremental refactoring. Sam pairs hands-on coding with pragmatic architectural improvements, focusing on maintainability, testability, and developer velocity rather than flashy rewrites. He documents his approach publicly (FAQ and hiring preferences), signaling a thoughtful, process-oriented engineer who values predictable delivery and team fit.
17 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Computer Science, BS, Computer Science at Portland State UniversityAS, Computer Science, AS, Computer Science at Portland Community College
Github Skills (153)
testing10
pair-programming10
ruby10
refactoring10
sidekiq10
password-policy10
jruby10
aws-sdk10
paths10
sdk9
libgit29
aws9
api8
rake8
python8
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
geeksam/sqrbl
Jul 2009 - Sep 2009
Contributions:32 commits in 2 months
geeksam/fluent-refactoring
Jul 2013 - Jun 2019
Contributions:48 commits, 2 pushes, 3 branches in 5 years 11 months
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