CJ Salem

Software Engineer

Kansas City, MO

14+years of experience
400+hours of mentorship provided
13+major projects delivered

14+ years of experience — 9+ of them at a managed security services provider — now working across six engineering teams to solve the problems that fall between them.

Broad experience across data pipelines, CI/CD, and infrastructure — deeper experience in web development and API design.

Invested 400+ hours mentoring junior engineers; prior experience leading offshore engineering teams.

Programming Languages

TypeScript/JavaScript (Node.js)GoPythonPHP/LaravelSQLBashHCL/TerraformOCamlHaskellGleam

Frontend & Mobile

ReactNext.jsProgressive Web AppsReact Native/ExpoNative iOS/Android

Cloud & Infrastructure

Google Cloud Platform (GCP)Amazon Web Services (AWS)KubernetesDockerTerraformHashiCorp VaultArgo CDArgo WorkflowsGitHub ActionsJenkins

Data & APIs

PostgreSQLMongoDBRedisBigQueryElasticsearch/ELKGraphQLREST/OpenAPIKafka/RabbitMQGCP Pub/SubSQS/SNS

Security & Identity

Okta SSOOAuth2/OIDC/SAMLRBAC/ABACSOC2 ComplianceSIEM platforms (Chronicle, QRadar, Splunk ES)

Observability

PrometheusGrafanaOpenTelemetryDatadog

Testing

JestCypressPlaywright

Practices

Test-driven DevelopmentPair and mob programmingEvent StormingMentoring

Spoken Languages

English (Native)Spanish/Castellano (Conversational)

Cyderes(formerly Fishtech Group)

Jan 2018 – Present

Managed security services provider.

Staff Software Engineer

Jul 2025 – Present

  • Work across six engineering teams — Web, Mobile, DevOps, Data Engineering, Analytics Engineering, and Alert Infrastructure Engineering — solving problems that fall between them.
  • Served as a technical liaison between engineering teams.
  • Lead a company-wide migration from Google Cloud Platform Secret Manager to HashiCorp Vault.
  • Took over an AI-powered risk-reporting prototype from the VP of Engineering and shipped it to production, adding auth and closing security vulnerabilities along the way.
  • Ran cross-team discovery and proofs of concept to help leadership choose which vendors and tech stacks to adopt.
  • Wrote auditing and compliance automations to help the Director of Software Engineering meet SOC 2 requirements.
  • Authored & tested disaster recovery playbooks for our customer-facing production systems.
  • Migrated all customer data-collector integrations from a legacy Firestore system to a modern GitOps workflow.

Senior Software Engineer

Jun 2022 – Jul 2025

  • Recovered a stalled, high-visibility release of Client Portal: fixed memory leaks crashing production pods and resolved UI and performance issues ahead of deadline.
  • Created an internal dashboard for our Security Operations Center (SOC) to triage security event queues and meet client SLOs.
  • Established an Architectural Decision Record (ADR) process backed by GitHub Issues for the Web Engineering team.
  • Designed the Web Engineering team's technical interview process and conducted interviews with candidates.
  • Facilitated Event Storming sessions across engineering teams, earning feedback like 'Thanks! We should really do this more often.'
  • Led pair and mob programming sessions, investing 400+ hours of mentorship across the teams.
  • Built a hackathon project - an internal Slack-powered kudos tracker and scoreboard that let engineers recognize each other's work.

Software Engineer II

Mar 2020 – Jun 2022

  • Designed, built & maintained the company's customer-facing Client Portal with React & JavaScript.
  • Migrated customer-facing Client Portal from JavaScript to TypeScript.
  • Optimized Client Portal performance and reliability with a Redis cache and other fallback mechanisms.
  • Added metrics and observability to Client Portal with Prometheus & Grafana dashboards.

Software Engineer

Jan 2018 – Mar 2020

  • Built the company's first (now legacy) security-event pipeline with AWS Lambda, SQS, and ELK.
  • Designed, built & maintained an internal data collector management portal using React, GraphQL, and Firestore.

Active Logic Labs

2017 – 2018

Custom software development consultancy.

Software Engineer

2017 – 2018

  • Built thanks.io, a direct-mail automation platform, including a customer dashboard, handwriting-style CGI engine integration, and geolocation & map discovery. It remains commercially active, serving 5,000+ businesses.
  • Learned conversational Spanish in under 6 weeks to manage a remote engineering team based in Central America.

Greymetal Technologies LLC

2012 – 2017

Self-founded IT services and software business.

Founder / Owner

2012 – 2017

  • Ran an independent IT-contracting and software practice for five years — development, client relationships, and delivery.
  • Owned and operated two prepaid-mobile retail locations (Boost Mobile, T-Mobile, Cricket).
  • Developed a point-of-sale integration in PHP/Laravel on Raspberry Pi edge devices that connected to Clover's POS API, then licensed it back to Sprint Prepaid Group.

Freelance

2008 – 2012

Web and graphic designer and developer.

Web & Graphic Designer

2008 – 2012

  • Worked with a range of clients to deploy and maintain small business websites built on WordPress, Joomla, and custom PHP.
Hobbyist PolyglotFunctional ProgrammingRetro MotorcyclesBushcraftMandolin & Accordion