Summary
Stephen Rushe is a senior developer based in Belfast with 17 years of experience building practical, user-focused web applications across startups and scaleups. He’s strong in Ruby on Rails and the traditional web stack (HTML/CSS, Apache, MySQL/PostgreSQL with PostGIS) and has repeatedly taken engineering roles that blend hands-on coding with platform ownership. His career spans long tenures at companies like ShopKeep and Tascomi through recent senior roles at Lightspeed, Contrast Security, and Patchwork Health, showing a pattern of helping product teams mature their back-end systems. Stephen brings breadth from legacy stacks (Perl, PHP, Subversion) to modern Rails practice, which makes him effective at maintaining and evolving entrenched codebases. Colleagues would describe him as pragmatic about shipping useful software rather than chasing the latest trends, often prioritizing reliability and real user impact.
17 years of coding experience
27 years of employment as a software developer