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Joe Karow
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Looking for a hands-on engineering role · Alexandria, VA or remote

Hi, I’m Joe.
I build software for people doing good work.

I’m a full stack TypeScript engineer. I was the first full-time engineer at InReach, a nonprofit LGBTQ+ resource platform, where I rebuilt the legacy application end to end: architecture, API, database, CI/CD and a translation pipeline covering 10+ languages.

Experience

Sep 2026 to present

Virtual Coffee, Technical Maintainer (volunteer)

  • Moved membership applications and four public forms from Airtable to PostgreSQL, and community events from Craft CMS to Google Calendar.
  • Built vc-bots, a Cloudflare Worker running the community’s Slack and Zoom automation: a co-working room with live presence, event announcements from Google Calendar, a weekly host availability check-in and new-member welcomes.
  • Built an admin panel with user management, section-level permissions and Slack sign-in.
  • Added Sentry error monitoring, a Vitest suite with a CI test job, CodeQL scanning and edge-level bot blocking.
  • Upgraded the codebase to Next.js 16 and TypeScript 7.

Sep 2022 to Oct 2024

InReach, Lead Software Engineer

  • Led the ground-up rewrite as a TypeScript monorepo (Next.js, tRPC, Prisma, PostgreSQL), migrating listing data from MongoDB. About 2,600 commits and 297 merged pull requests in two years.
  • Built the internationalization architecture from scratch with i18next and Crowdin, taking listing translations from hand-typed Spanish fields to 10+ languages with human-reviewed translations and Redis caching.
  • Designed a taxonomy of 122 typed listing attributes in 13 categories with shared translation templates, so facts like age eligibility are translated once per language instead of once per listing.
  • Designed GitHub Actions pipelines for linting, tests, CodeQL security scanning, visual regression checks, database migrations, deployments and translation sync.

Aug 2021 to present

JoeKarow.dev, Independent work

  • Web applications and static sites for small and medium-sized business clients.
  • Shopify development for an agency across two client storefronts: theme customization and cleanup, custom interactive storefront features, landing pages.

Aug 2015 to Aug 2021

Hilton, Director of Finance

  • Built a daily sales tax reconciliation application combining POS, property management and financial system data. It cut monthly filing from 4+ hours to under 30 minutes and held variances under 0.5% on $10M in monthly sales.
  • Built further tools that reduced month-end close from 60+ working hours to under 24.

Things I’ve built & helped build

Virtual Coffee logo

Virtual Coffee

Open source Next.js site and Slack automation for a developer community of more than 1,200 members. As volunteer Technical Maintainer I moved the site’s data to PostgreSQL, built an admin panel, and wrote the Cloudflare Worker that runs the community’s Slack and Zoom bots.

View Contributions for Virtual Coffee(opens in new tab)
CIB Mango Tree logo

CIB Mango Tree

For Civic Tech DC, built a shared Unicode tokenizer service for the tool’s analyzers, with fixes and tests for multilingual edge cases such as Korean text. The tool helps researchers and journalists detect coordinated inauthentic behavior in social media data.

View Contributions for CIB Mango Tree(opens in new tab)

Skills

Languages

  • TypeScript
  • JavaScript
  • Python
  • SQL

Frontend

  • React
  • Next.js
  • Mantine
  • HTML
  • CSS
  • Web accessibility
  • Internationalization (i18next, Crowdin)

Backend and data

  • Node.js
  • tRPC
  • PostgreSQL
  • Prisma
  • Drizzle
  • Redis

Infrastructure and tooling

  • AWS (Cognito, Lambda)
  • Cloudflare Workers (Durable Objects)
  • Vercel
  • Netlify
  • GitHub Actions
  • CI/CD
  • Sentry
  • Turborepo

Also worked with

  • Go
  • Swift
  • Kotlin
  • MongoDB