Tania Rascia

Principal Software Engineer

Email: hello@taniarascia.com | GitHub: @taniarascia

Experience

Balto AI

Principal Software Engineer
April 2021 – Present

  • Feature ownership: Own major product features across web and Electron desktop applications, from API contracts through UI to release: a coaching and performance analytics experience, full-text search across playbooks and call transcripts, real-time notification systems, and AI-powered authoring workflows backed by LLM endpoints.
  • Design system: Created the front end design system and component library and drove its adoption across every product surface, with consolidated theming, cross-app visual parity, and white-label branding support.
  • Complex migrations: Planned and led incremental framework migrations, landed alongside normal feature work with no feature freezes: migrating off a legacy UI framework, converting the charting layer to a more performant library, moving the test stack from Jest to Vitest, and upgrading off an end-of-life Node version.
  • Technical direction: Set the modernization roadmap for both applications, sequencing React, Electron, and tooling upgrades, scoping a monorepo extraction, and writing internal style guides that make AI-assisted development consistent across codebases.
  • Architecture consolidation: Consolidated duplicate architecture, merging two audio/video player implementations into a single shared media system validated against an exhaustive test matrix covering playback, seeking, transcripts, and error recovery.
  • Hackathon winner (2021): Balto Chat, where Balto's AI technology meets chat, helping agents by adding real-time guidance, clickable suggestions, notifications, warnings, and encouragement.

Yum! Brands

Senior Software Engineer
March 2020 – April 2021

  • Devised a strategy for migrating systems from the various Yum! brands (Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, KFC) to one unifying, modern platform for menu management.
  • Led and mentored a team of five developers to develop and architect a Backend For Frontend (BFF) system to facilitate communication between a front end and multiple microservices.
  • Designed and engineered a TypeScript API utilizing model view controller (MVC) design patterns, also serving as POC for the first of many TypeScript services for the company.
  • Wrote a single sign on (SSO) authentication and authorization system utilizing AWS Cognito, OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect and PKCE flow.

DAIS Technology

Lead Front End Software Engineer
August 2018 – March 2020

  • Architected an internal, resuable Node.js/React platform for implementing secure authentication and routing used across all DAIS front end applications.
  • Led and mentored a team of three developers creating interactive and intuitive user interfaces in React and Vue.
  • Cross-trained the automation and SDET teams to maintain and add new features to internal applications.
  • Established company conventions/standards and documented all internal processes.
  • Hackathon winner (2019): DAIS Hub, a one-stop-shop for accessing and updating repositories, microservices, and deployments across multiple environments.

RateYourSeats.com

Web Developer
January 2018 – August 2018

Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises

Web Developer
June 2015 – June 2017

Skills

  • Languages: TypeScript, JavaScript (React, Redux, Vue), Node.js, GraphQL, SQL, HTML5, CSS3, Python, Bash, PHP
  • Front End: Design systems and component libraries, Electron desktop applications, build tooling (Vite, Webpack), testing (Vitest, Jest, React Testing Library), incremental framework migrations, performance optimization
  • AI: AI-assisted development workflows, including internal style guides and master prompts for AI coding tools, and product features built on LLM endpoints
  • Back End: REST API design, MVC architecture, Postgres, SQL
  • Auth and Security: OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, SSO, JWT
  • Infrastructure: AWS (EC2, Route 53, RDS, S3, CloudFront), Linux/UNIX administration

Open Source and Writing

  • Writing: Author of taniarascia.com, a technical blog with 175+ articles on web development, reaching over 3 million readers a year at its peak.
  • Publications: 40+ articles for DigitalOcean, SitePoint, LogRocket, Codrops, and others, including the 32-part How to Code in JavaScript series.
  • Book: Understanding the DOM (DigitalOcean, 2020), a free ebook on the Document Object Model.
  • Open Source: Projects with 20,000+ combined stars on GitHub, including TakeNote, New Moon, Keyboard Accordion, and a Chip-8 emulator.
  • Talks: Developing a WordPress Theme from Scratch (WordCamp Chicago, 2017), Getting Started with React and Getting Started with Vue (Chicago JavaScript, 2018 and 2019).

Education

Robert Morris University

Bachelor of Professional Studies, Culinary Arts
2007 – 2011