Ryan
Johnson_

CareGuide

Lead engineering for Nanny Lane (Next.js + Ruby on Rails + GraphQL) and own DevOps across all CareGuide consumer brands.

• Took ownership of all DevOps after a third-party vendor exited; ramped up on Terraform and Kubernetes in a week, then drove modernization across 12+ workspaces — Terraform Cloud with PR-based plan/apply, ArgoCD GitOps, NGINX → ALB ingress migration, Cloudflare → Terraform import, and self-hosted Redshift (replacing a vendor-managed BI warehouse for significant annual savings).
• Designed and led PR-per-branch ephemeral staging environments — every PR provisions an isolated namespace, Postgres database, Elasticsearch index, DNS, ALB ingress, and Cloudflare Zero Trust access — eliminating static-staging contention and unblocking AI-assisted parallel feature development.
• Built Agent Smith, an autonomous coding agent system on the Claude Agent SDK; generic engine plus per-product adapters that integrate with the PR staging system to let agents validate their own work via the end-to-end test suite.
• Led overhaul of Nanny Lane's Stripe subscription stack — unified payment flows, 3DS compliance, race-condition protection, orphaned-subscription prevention — and drove the business-model shift from free-tier to paid-required tiers via a 4-month controlled rollout.
• Architected a custom Elasticsearch indexing system that scores fields by update cost, queuing cheap updates immediately and deferring expensive ones; separately, lifted mobile PageSpeed scores from the low 70s into the 90s and added ~30K Good URLs in Google Search Console by overhauling Cloudflare caching for landing pages.

CareGuide

• Built CareGuide's end-to-end signup and onboarding flow from scratch — multi-step Next.js wizard backed by Rails + GraphQL — covering user creation, location, services, plan selection, and payment (with Apple Pay).
• Owned a major graphql-ruby gem upgrade (~37K-line diff) and the corresponding frontend binding updates — foundational platform work that touched every feature in the application.
• Led a complete redesign of the messaging/inbox system — conversation states (favorite, archive, unread, interested), filters, real-time unread counts, phone-call integration, and optimistic UI — across both Next.js and Rails.

Torstar Digital

• Tech lead for a 4-person engineering team working on thestar.com (React, Node.js, Adobe Experience Manager); shared architect responsibilities with peer tech leads.
• Built a serverless application end-to-end using AWS Lambda (Node.js), AppSync, and Aurora Serverless on the Serverless Framework.
• Migrated a legacy application onto a modern stack of Next.js, TypeScript, and Apollo GraphQL.