profile image
  • COMPETENCIES
  • Leadership & People:
    • Mentorship & Coaching
    • Cross-Functional Collaboration
    • Developer experience
    • Remote team collaboration
    • Team Building & Hiring
  • Engineering Strategy:
    • Software architecture
    • Technical project management
    • Mobile application development
    • Application security
    • AI-Assisted Development
  • Technical Proficiency:
    • Mobile & web development
    • Analytics analysis
    • UI/UX design
    • CI/CD
  • TECHNICAL SKILLS
  • Swift, SwiftUI, Objective-C
  • Ruby, Python
  • Web Frontend Languages
  • JIRA, Confluence, Git
  • Automated testing
  • Machine Learning / Data Science
    (taking courses)
  • AI / LLM's prompting
    (scripting and prompting)
  • EDUCATION
  • High School Valedictorian
  • BS Computer Science
  • Minor in Mathematics
  • Wake Forest University, May 2007
  • Dean's List & Honor Society
  • SPOKEN LANGUAGES
  • English
    Native speaker
  • Spanish
    Conversational
  • Japanese
    Rusty, was better
  • French
    Street survivable
  • Italian
    Street survivable
  • PERSONAL INTERESTS
  • Father of 3
  • Hiking & Freediving
  • Health & Nutrition
  • Recreational sailboat captain
  • Fixing said sailboat
  • Photography & Videography
  • Martial Arts, Acrobatics, Parkour

Ryan Lons

16yrs industry experience in iOS and web development

Engineering Leader | Principal iOS Developer | Transitioning to Engineering Management

Remote
from Charleston, SC

Experience

(only "recent" listed)
  • iOS Architect at Charles Schwab February 2023 - Present
    Charles Schwab offers investment products and services, eg: brokerage and retirement accounts, online trading

    Leadership & People Management:

    • Mentored junior/mid-level developers, improving team code quality and documentation.
    • Led a cross-functional iOS/Android team in building a new "demo" version of the Thinkorswim app, collaborating with Product, Design, and Backend teams.
    • Initiated and led a developer experience survey, analyzing results and implementing team-wide improvements.

    Strategic & Business Impact:

    • Drove architectural improvements in a 15-year-old legacy codebase, leading refactoring and documentation efforts across.
    • Championed data-driven decision-making, re-establishing analytics pipelines to guide product improvements.
    • Led multi-team efforts across Engineering, Design, Product, and QA to improve cross-functional delivery and coordination.
    • Responsible for coordinating iOS app's "application security" adherence strategy.
  • Lead iOS Developer at Stitch Fix August 2020 - January 2023
    StitchFix is an online personalized styling retail service

    Leadership & People Management:

    • Managed cross-team initiatives, such as implementing strikethrough pricing throughout the iOS application.
    • Contributed to hiring efforts, including screening candidates and participating in hiring decisions for iOS engineers.

    Process & Engineering Improvements:

    • Owned checkout and return workflow improvements, enhancing user experience and reducing errors.
    • Led multiple large-scale refactors of mission-critical workflows, improving performance and maintainability.
  • Product Innovation/ Mobile Lead at Uplift Inc June 2019 - April 2020
    Uplift was a travel fintech company providing short term consumer loans
    • Brought on to help create a product innovation team leading mobile efforts
    • Led a small team of mobile devs creating prototype apps for further vetting
    • Technically assisted team by learning AWS, writing Python, JS, Swift & Java
  • Lead iOS Developer/Architect at Pinn October 2018 - May 2019
    Pinn was a small startup providing biometric & PKI authentication frameworks for partner apps
    • Lead iOS Developer, owned iOS architecture, product & design. Advised android
    • Built company's prototype biometric identification framework
  • Lead iOS Developer at Under Armour March 2016 - Feb 2018
    UA's connected fitness division handled it's digital assets including MyFitnessPal & UA Run
    • Architected and built iOS frameworks for UA apps
    • Frameworks included: authentication/SSO, notifications, rollouts, data sync
    • Worked with UA Run, MyFitnessPal, and UA Shop to facilitate integrations
    • Deployed code to ~100 million users, needed to be bulletproof and quickly fixable
  • iOS Developer at TopTal October 2014 - September 2018
    Toptal is an exclusive network of the top 3% of software devs in the world
    • Architected and spec-ed apps for implementation by third parties
    • All contacts were remote in nature with clients in multiple countries
    • Worked on poorly implemented legacy projects to bring them up to a proper architecture to allow new feature development
  • Cofounder & CEO of Wersda LLC October 2012 - March 2016
    Wersda was a very small, bootstrapped startup for location navigation software for grocery stores
    • Architected, designed and built the API, website, iOS and Android apps
    • Managed product requirements and design. Set expectations for team members
    • Fought hard to keep the product on track and keep the Minimum Viable Product clean
    • Performed user experience testing and rapid prototyping to iterate and test different UI/UX
    • Wrote an "indoor navigation" engine with javascript for vector based rendering