Staff Software Engineer · Mobile Lead · Greater St. Louis
I design and ship
real-world software.
I'm Ryan Pliske — a Staff Software Engineer in Greater St. Louis with 10+ years building software professionally, going back to 2014. By day I build enterprise-scale software across mobile, backend, and platform. On the side, I help local businesses get online with websites, apps, and simple tools that save time and serve customers better.
For small businesses
Need help getting your business online?
I help local businesses use simple software to save time and serve customers better — built properly, explained in plain English, with no jargon and no runaround.
Websites
A fast, modern site that makes your business look as good online as it does in person.
Online ordering
Let customers order and pay from their phone — without third-party fees eating your margin.
Rewards programs
Keep regulars coming back with points, punch cards, and offers that actually work.
Payments
Take payments online and in person, set up the way your business actually runs.
Scheduling & booking
Let customers book themselves, with reminders that cut down on no-shows.
Simple custom tools
A small app or tool built around the one thing slowing your day down.
Selected work
Real products, designed and shipped end-to-end.
Kairo
kairo.faith ↗A Catholic AI you can actually trust.
Ask anything about faith, prayer, morality, or Church teaching and get a clear answer with a citation for every claim — grounded in the Catechism, Canon Law, and the GIRM, so it never makes doctrine up.
What's inside
- Web App
- A citation on every answer
- Catechism
- Canon Law
- GIRM
Built with Astro · Hono · Cloud Run · Claude · RAG
Honey Bun
honeybun.family ↗Baby tracking that's with you everywhere.
For the blur of early parenthood: log feedings, sleep, diapers, and milestones in seconds — synced instantly across every device a tired parent reaches for, from the nightstand to the nursery.
Available on
- Apple App Store
- Google Play Store
- Web App
- Alexa Echo Widget
- Apple Watch
Built with SwiftUI · Kotlin · Firebase · Hono · Cloud Run
Writing
Faith, reality, and the design behind it.
Ryan's Substack
ryanpliske.substack.com ↗Essays on Christ, and how reality, love, and teamwork fit together.
Away from the code, I write about faith — the way reality, love, and teamwork correlate, and what it means that God is the ultimate engineer. Read along or subscribe over on Substack.
About
Engineer, builder, problem-solver.
I've been shipping software professionally since 2014 — starting with a PHP web app in college, then native iOS in Swift and Objective-C, and growing into a full-stack engineer who works across mobile, backend, and platform. Today I lead mobile at Kenect and work across the stack: a React Native flagship app, authentication libraries, code-generation tooling, and the agentic AI and Spring Boot services behind real-time messaging.
On my own time I design and ship complete products — Kairo, a citation-grounded Catholic AI, and Honey Bun, a baby-tracking app for new parents. I care about software that feels fast, looks considered, and earns trust.
Experience
Download résumé- 2025 — Present
Staff Software Engineer
Kenect
Mobile lead and top contributor to Kenect's React Native flagship app, driving enterprise-scale work across mobile, backend, and platform. Drove Otto, Kenect's in-app AI assistant — an agentic Spring Boot service that tool-calls into messaging, review, and analytics services. Architected AuthKit (Flutter / React Native) with MFA and account recovery, built the auto-generated KenectClient (TypeScript + Dart) API library, and contributed architecture across the Auth, Messaging, and Notification Spring Boot services. Stood up org-wide Claude Code observability (OpenTelemetry → Grafana) for 100+ engineers, and am designing in-app calling (masked calling / call queue).
- 2021 — 2025
Senior Mobile Software Engineer
Kenect
Top contributor to the React Native / Expo flagship app since 2021. Shipped the push-notification system and performance / observability work (New Relic), and standardized the EAS Build & Submit release pipeline — later extending it to the acquired AutoLabs Flutter app. Plus platform tooling — OpenAPI client generators, Terraform modules, and tracing/logging.
- 2015 — 2021
Senior Mobile Software Engineer
Bayer Crop Science (Monsanto)
Native iOS in Swift & Objective-C and React Native, with Node.js / TypeScript APIs and AWS DevOps. Earned two Pillar Awards — for customer support and for teaching iOS to LaunchCode students.
- 2018 — 2019
iOS Lead Instructor
LaunchCode
Built and taught the iOS curriculum for LaunchCode's programming course (part-time, alongside Bayer).
- 2015
iOS Developer
Asynchrony Labs
Built an Objective-C app using web sockets for real-time peer-to-peer communication, with iOS DevOps on Jenkins.
- 2015
iOS Developer · Contract
Ochre
Shipped "DispoCam" in Swift — image uploads to AWS S3 with a paid Apple Pay subscription, and release automation via Fastlane.
- 2014 — 2015
iOS Developer
University of Missouri–Columbia
First native iOS roles while finishing my Computer Science degree.
- 2014
Web Developer · PHP / WAMP
Food & Agricultural Policy Research Institute
My first professional dev role, during college — built a budget and risk-management simulator for farmers in HTML/CSS/JS, PHP, and MS Access, hosted on IIS.
Education
- 2009 — 2014
University of Missouri–Columbia
B.S. Computer Science · Minor in Mathematics
- 2007 — 2008
Washington University in St. Louis
Biomedical / Medical Engineering
Tools I reach for
- Swift
- Kotlin
- TypeScript
- Dart
- Java
- JavaScript
- Objective-C
- iOS
- Android
- SwiftUI
- Jetpack Compose
- React Native
- Flutter
- Expo
- Spring Boot
- Node.js
- Microservices
- REST / OpenAPI
- LLM Agents
- RAG
- OpenAI / Claude
- AWS
- Google Cloud
- Firebase
- Terraform
- Docker
- CI/CD
- PostgreSQL
- Redis
- New Relic
- OpenTelemetry
- Grafana
Let's build something.
Running a business that needs a website, app, or simple tool? Hiring for a staff-level engineering role? Either way, the fastest way to reach me is email — tell me a bit about what you need.