Waypoint 01 · Trailhead Portland, OR

Stephen N. Rico

Senior Software Engineer · Integrations Platform Technical Lead

Mapping reliable routes through complex systems.

I’m a Senior Software Engineer and integrations technical lead building event-driven platforms, data pipelines, APIs, webhooks, and operational tooling for high-trust nonprofit infrastructure.

I’m also an active cognitive neuroscience researcher studying misophonia, neuroperception, and behavioral measurement — a background that shapes how I model systems, reason from evidence, and build tools for hard-to-diagnose problems.

hello@snrico.dev LinkedIn GitHub Resume PDF

Peak traffic

Fundraising spikes

Backpressure, filtering, bulkification, retries, and delivery integrity near ~1M messages/hour.

Data integrity

Safer donor data

Migration, sync, and reconciliation routes designed for correctness and recoverability.

Platform leverage

Reusable patterns

Backend reliability work adopted beyond the original integrations team.

Technical leadership

Ambiguity ownership

Discovery, design reviews, mentorship, incidents, roadmap tradeoffs, and support handoff.

Waypoint 02 · Field Notes selected systems

Field Notes

Examples of the terrain I work in: event-driven integrations, donor-data movement, Salesforce platform limits, reconciliation, and production reliability.

Field note

Event-Driven Nonprofit CRM Sync

critical system

Mar 2026

Kept donor and transaction data aligned across Salesforce/NPSP and Nonprofit Cloud during peak fundraising traffic.

  1. Salesforce / NPSP
  2. Event relay
  3. Queue + workers
  4. Nonprofit Cloud
Problem
High-volume giving windows exposed queue pressure, Salesforce limits, partial failure, and data-trust risk.
Route
Filtered noisy events, bulkified downstream work, queued processing, and preserved replay/recovery paths.
Result
Improved peak reliability, reduced unnecessary processing, and created reusable sync patterns.
  • TypeScript
  • AWS SQS
  • EventBridge
  • Apex
  • Aurora RDS
Field note

Nonprofit Cloud ETL + Reconciliation

critical system

Aug 2025

Built ETL and reconciliation paths for customer-facing Nonprofit Cloud data movement.

  1. Source records
  2. Mapping engine
  3. Reconciler
  4. Customer data
Problem
Implementations needed flexible mappings, recoverable loads, and confidence after migration.
Route
Built integration resources, a mapping engine, sync tooling, and reconciliation views.
Result
Reduced onboarding risk and made future data correction workflows more repeatable.
  • TypeScript
  • Salesforce APIs
  • Apex
  • SQL
  • ETL
Field note

Graceful Failover Framework

platform route

Mar 2025

Created backend reliability patterns for AWS ECS services on Aurora RDS.

  1. ECS service
  2. Connection pool
  3. Failover path
  4. Aurora RDS
Problem
Transient database and connection issues needed predictable degradation instead of opaque incidents.
Route
Standardized connection management and failover guidance for service owners.
Result
Improved recovery behavior and gave backend teams a shared operational pattern.
  • Node.js
  • AWS ECS
  • Aurora RDS
  • MySQL
  • CloudWatch
Waypoint 03 · Ridge Line technical leadership

How I lead technical work

I’m aiming for technical-lead and staff-level engineering roles where the work requires architecture judgment, implementation depth, operational ownership, and translation across product, support, customer, and engineering boundaries.

Model the system before optimizing it

I map data flow, ownership boundaries, failure modes, rate limits, and operational recovery paths before committing to an implementation route.

Build for the people who inherit the trail

I care about clear interfaces, documentation, runbooks, testability, observability, and tools that make the next engineer or support partner faster.

Treat reliability as product work

Retries, idempotency, reconciliation, PII-safe debugging, and graceful degradation are not backend trivia — they are the customer experience of integration platforms.

Lead through evidence and translation

My research background shows up in engineering leadership: define the question, instrument behavior, account for noise, and translate findings into decisions people can act on.

Waypoint 04 · Field Station experience

Experience

GoFundMe / Classy — Remote

Senior Software Engineer, GoFundMe Pro Integrations

critical system
  • Architecting bidirectional Salesforce/NPSP and Nonprofit Cloud sync for enterprise nonprofit integrations, including high-stakes donor-data migration workflows supporting eight-figure annualized donation volume.
  • Leading roadmap input, technical discovery, and scope shaping for API, webhook, ETL, and iPaaS/vendor evaluation tradeoffs; authoring PRDs and SOPs across engineering, product, support, and customer-facing stakeholders.
  • Co-presenting integrations architecture at Salesforce TDX 2026 with Salesforce Product Management leadership, covering Event Relay / Pub/Sub API design for bidirectional NPSP and Nonprofit Cloud sync.
  • Leading AI coding-tool rollout and training across the team using GitHub Copilot, Augment Code SDD, Claude, Cursor, and an internal AI orchestration agent swarm to standardize AI-assisted implementation, test generation, and design iteration.
  • Mentoring a team of 5+ engineers through design reviews, pairing, incident analysis, and coaching.
  • Contributing to Backend Engineering Council architecture reviews and an event-driven council maintaining internal SNS/SQS packages.
  • Supporting hiring for Software Engineer, Product Manager, and Engineering Manager roles with technical evaluation and calibration for integrations-platform engineering needs.

Software Engineer II, GoFundMe Pro Integrations

critical system
  • Designed leaky-bucket and bulkification architecture for peak fundraising traffic, sustaining ~1M messages/hour at ~99.96% processing success on a major enterprise nonprofit customer's largest giving day.
  • Improved Salesforce/NPSP integration scalability by introducing event filtering that reduced downstream processing burden ~60% while preserving data integrity.
  • Increased Nonprofit Cloud orchestration throughput >40%, cutting per-message processing time from 5–10s to 0.5–1s through backend workflow optimization.
  • Designed a reusable graceful-failover and connection-management framework for AWS ECS services on Aurora RDS, adopted by Payments and other backend teams.

Software Engineer I, GoFundMe Pro Integrations

platform route
  • Shipped second-generation Salesforce managed-package architecture using a multi-micro-package structure and secure API-key storage via internal GraphQL/API services.
  • Built the production customer-facing Nonprofit Cloud Phase 1 ETL pipeline and owned Phase 2 as sole developer, adding integration resources, a custom field-mapping engine, data sync tooling, and a data reconciler.
  • Built PII-safe data-redaction tooling enabling production troubleshooting without exposing donor or customer data.

Technical Support Engineer I → Senior Technical Support Engineer

platform route
  • Bridged support and engineering through PRs, code reviews, test coverage, and root-cause analysis across the integration platform, working production-adjacent to engineers before formal SWE transition.
  • Drove production hotfixes and incident analysis for high-severity integration issues, pairing customer-impact diagnosis with code-level remediation and automation.
  • Translated recurring support patterns into engineering-owned stories, bugs, and integration improvements as scope expanded toward formal software engineering work.
  • Built Python automations across database and Salesforce workflows, plus cleanup scripts for the internal customer-operations team.
  • Reduced 30 Salesforce Bulk API operational workflows from many manual steps across 3 systems to ~5 clicks, improving support speed and accuracy.

UC Irvine — Office of Information Technology — Irvine, CA

Senior Help Desk Representative

supporting system
  • Resolved technical support escalations across account, device, network, and application workflows in a high-volume IT environment.
  • Authored troubleshooting documentation and coached junior representatives on diagnostic patterns, escalation hygiene, and customer communication.
Waypoint 05 · Terrain technical range

Technical Terrain

Languages

  • TypeScript
  • JavaScript
  • Python
  • PHP
  • Apex
  • SQL
  • HTML/CSS

Backend & Integrations

  • Node.js
  • Laravel
  • REST APIs
  • GraphQL
  • webhooks
  • event-driven architecture
  • microservices
  • ETL
  • public/private API design

Integration Platforms & Concepts

  • iPaaS
  • Workato
  • Zapier
  • Informatica
  • MuleSoft
  • Svix
  • webhook delivery
  • automation workflows

AWS & Infrastructure

  • AWS Lambda
  • ECS
  • EC2
  • SNS
  • SQS
  • EventBridge
  • Aurora RDS
  • DynamoDB
  • Terraform
  • Docker
  • Kubernetes

Data & Observability

  • MySQL
  • Redis
  • Elasticsearch
  • NewRelic
  • BugSnag
  • CloudWatch

Salesforce

  • Salesforce Platform
  • Nonprofit Cloud
  • NPSP
  • Experience Cloud
  • Apex
  • managed packages
  • platform events
  • REST/SOAP/Connect/NPC/Bulk APIs

Research, Frontend & AI Tools

  • React
  • Angular
  • jsPsych
  • jsSurvey
  • GitHub Copilot
  • Cursor
  • Augment Code SDD
  • Claude
  • AI orchestration agents
  • agentic workflows
  • spec-driven development
Waypoint 06 · Research Plot neuroscience
active lab thread

Active cognitive neuroscience researcher

mindSPACE Lab · University of California, Irvine

Alongside software engineering, I remain active in cognitive neuroscience research focused on misophonia, neuroperception, behavioral measurement, and psychometric tooling. Recent work presented at Society for Neuroscience 2025 paired clinical and research questions with a novel toolkit for recording participant responses to commonly reported misophonic stimuli. The same research practice informs my engineering style: model complex systems, collect observable evidence, account for noisy signals, and build tools that make difficult problems easier to diagnose, explain, and improve.

Waypoint 07 · Summit recognition

Recognition & Speaking

Waypoint 08 · Cache 45.512°N 122.681°W

Contact & Education

University of California, Irvine — B.A. Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience concentration · Mar 2022 · Dean’s Honor List