Devon Estes

Engineering leader with a decade of building software and, for the past several years, leading the teams that build it. I've grown and led backend, mobile, and cross-functional teams across startups and scale-ups — hiring engineers, setting technical direction, and partnering closely with product to turn ambitious ideas into reliable systems. I'm at my best on physical-digital products, where custom hardware and distributed software come together to create something people can actually touch.

I lead the Workout Experience team building the next generation of software behind Beat81's tech-enabled workouts — custom-built hardware and distributed systems that power the screens and devices across our gyms and give participants real-time feedback on every workout. I've grown the team through two hires and two promotions, and together we designed, built, and shipped three new workout experiences on an entirely new technical platform, which has held 100% service reliability since its launch in September 2025. I also introduced the team's on-call rotation and real-time incident response process.

As a Staff Engineer in Remote's Platform and Ecosystem vertical, I led large, cross-team product and engineering initiatives — aligning multiple teams around shared goals and driving them through to delivery. I built the framework for performance requirements and observability across our product, mentored engineers throughout the vertical, and played a central role in defining and improving engineering culture and best practices, both within our vertical and across the broader engineering organization at Remote.

I led the Integrations Platform team at Remote, managing a full-stack team of seven engineers that I grew through a hire and a promotion. I owned the team's roadmap and delivery and coordinated across stakeholders — launching Remote's public API and shipping integrations with three major HRIS providers.

As Head of Engineering I led a backend team and two mobile teams. I owned day-to-day delivery across all three, partnered with the CTO on technical strategy and architecture, and worked with product on prioritization and planning. A large part of the role was improving how the teams worked together and investing in the growth of both individual engineers and my mobile team leads.

As an early member of Sketch's backend engineering team, I focused on raising the bar for the team — teaching, training, and mentoring teammates across the organization while helping build and refine the Sketch Cloud product, including its soft real-time collaboration features. Throughout, I championed code quality and a strong culture of collaboration.

I was brought in to help build and lead a new team in Klarna's newly formed Berlin office, responsible for several business-critical applications with extreme uptime, latency, and throughput requirements. My focus was standing the team up and getting its engineers productive and confident quickly.

Orchard Systems hired me to help build the MVP of their product: an embedded application running on custom hardware, paired with an API serving several real-time clients. An early example of the hardware-meets-software work I gravitate toward, built to be reliable under demanding real-time load.

I helped EducationSuperHighway develop and maintain several applications, including internal tools that let their data science team ingest, analyze, and clean data from unreliable sources. Over time I helped guide their migration from Ruby on Rails to a more robust Elixir and Phoenix stack.