Salem Cobalt#

Lead Frontend Architect, Design Systems#

Work Experience#

Principal Frontend Engineer, Knapsack (May 2020 - Present)

• Massive overhaul and expansion of Knapsack's design system platform over the past 15+ months using the best-of-class tools, libraries, and services.
• Strategic focus on the "front-end of the front-end" however day to day responsibilities are considerably more comprehensive. A few examples include:
  • Building, testing, and shipping product features and improvements in React and Typescript; rapid prototyping and iteration
  • Writing out GraphQL mutations / subscriptions to Hasura backend
  • Expanding and improving our Sass-based CSS architecture (ITCSS + BEM); CSS custom properties
  • Writing E2E and component-specific tests in Cypress; VRT using Percy
  • Orchestrating complex user flows in XState
  • Testing and improving front-end perceived performance
  • Front-end build tools (Webpack, Rollup, esbuild)
  • Deployment + delivery-related infrastructure (Github Actions, Heroku, Vercel, NPM)

Lead Front End Architect, Pegasystems (July 2016 - May 2020)

• Front-end development lead & creator of the Bolt Design System which powers the majority of the front-end UI across Pega’s 5+ corporate sites and 7+ microsites
• Responsible for planning, building, documenting, testing, releasing, & maintaining the design system’s front-end deliverables and infrastructure
• Some critical contributions over the past 4 years have included:
  • Developing a system of centrally maintained, shared UI components with deep backend CMS integration
  • Progressively enhanced (basic no-JS functionality), server-side rendered (SSR) web components powered by Preact & LitElement
  • Creating the scalable Sass-based CSS architecture used by front-end, and backend developers, designs, and content authors
  • Modern front-end tooling used by front-end and backend developers (Gulp, Webpack, Webpack Dev Server, Babel, Rollup, Terser, Eslint, Prettier)
  • Automating component documentation & demos via schemas
  • Per-branch deploy previews, continuous releases to NPM + Github
  • Bolt's testing infrastructure (Travis, Jest, Puppeteer, VRT, Nightwatch.js)

Front End Architecture Consultant, Digsup (June 2019 - Present)

• Freelance front-end consultant for local real estate tech startup; mentor and coach for small team of front-end devs & designers
• Led major front-end architectural refactor + design system buildout; Storybook implementation to build and maintain the app’s React-based UI components; Lerna-managed monorepo; Sass architecture

Pattern Lab Core Maintainer (June 2018 - Present)

• Core maintainer of the open source Pattern Lab project on Github; contributed to major UI overhaul (web components, Preact, Redux)

Front-end Architect, Genuine Interactive (March 2012 - March 2016)

• Responsible for leading front-end development and architecture for multi-billion dollar companies like Akamai, Panera Bread and Lysol.

• Collaborated with teams of designers, frontend / backend devs, and stakeholders on building large scale responsive / mobile sites