Kevin Lyons
Lead Software Engineer

About Me


My name is Kevin Lyons, a Lead Software Engineer at DraftKings, and graduate of MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I have created this site to highlight my resume of academic, professional, and extracurricular accomplishments. A bit about me:

  • Self-motivated, dedicated and intellectually curious young professional eager to take advantage of the many opportunities offered in today's tech landscape

  • Focused on scalable architectures, user-focused web development, data science and machine learning

  • Strong history of volunteer work with proven leadership skills in community programs

  • Passionate about learning and making a positive impact on my community

  • Effective communicator with a proven ability to tell compelling technical stories

Professional


DraftKings

Lead Software Engineer (July 2024 - Present)

  • Lead team of 7 engineers working across 5+ Node/TypeScript repositories, deployed via GitOps and Flux

  • Lead design and implementation of internal tool using react-router to process 25+ exclusion files/week containing PII

  • Lead weekly agile refinement meetings and provide feedback on all technical plans and pull requests

  • Lead response for all Production incidents, interfacing with Engineering, Product & Analytics stakeholders

  • Support hiring via 30+ technical and object-oriented interviews and 8+ campus events to date

Senior Software Engineer (January 2023 - July 2024)

  • Co-led development of Jenkins job to create 15+ new Node microservices, w/ Remix & Fastify templates

  • Led development of reusable components and theme on top of internal library w/ Emotion CSS

  • Co-led integration of third-party bot protection vendor, tarpitting 70% of login requests at origin

Software Engineer (July 2021 - December 2023)

  • Led webview standardization initiative, bringing web login and registration experiences to 2.7+ million unique monthly active users across 10+ iOS and Android apps

  • Led migration to trunk-driven development with automatic deployments via Octo and Bamboo, reducing time-to-merge by 90% to <1 hour

Software Engineer Intern (May - August 2020)

  • Built C# microservice to ingest Zendesk tickets into internal user-level tool receiving 20K+ requests/day

  • Built React frontend & C# backend to visualize AD groups & roles for all 4,500+ employees

Uber




nference

nference

Software Engineer Intern (May - August 2019)

  • Built internal MERN application for manual validation of 100K+ textual records using NLP-powered backend with BERT model

  • Led integration effort with offsite team to unify and migrate 20+ backend MongoDB schemas

  • Coordinated application feature requests from 6 internal users in 1-month of production testing



Uber

Software Engineer Intern (May - August 2018)

  • Built distributed data pipelines on Spark for batch processing of 300K+ driver trip records

  • Integrated with machine learning model that achieved > 0.9 AUC in predicting driver behavior & pricing

  • Updated Cassandra table schemas and Go microservices to fix a bug that affected 50K+ drivers in NYC

Uber




Patriots

New England Patriots

Data Analyst Intern (January - May 2018)

  • Worked with internal personnel to support data-driven analysis efforts using pandas and scikit-learn



Philips Acute Care Solutions Team

Data Science Intern (May - August 2017)

  • Streamlined data from CSV/XML/DICOM image formats to common HDF5 data structure

  • Wrote Python HDF5 data loader for I/O of 20K+ lung nodule crops with preprocessing abstractions

  • Evaluated deep 2D CNNs for multi-label lung nodule classification use case

  • Co-authored patented reinforcement-learning-based clinician support system in coordination with Mass General Hospital (US20210027878A1)





MITx

MIT Professional Education

Teaching Assistant (December 2017 - March 2021)

  • Managed coursework for professional data science & analytics course with 3,000+ students over 3+ years

  • Responded to student questions and troubleshot technical issues in Python & R



Changing Places CityScience Research Team

Research Software Engineer (September 2016 - August 2017)

  • Assisted Master's Thesis student seeking improved data-driven city space allocation for architects

  • Optimized multi-agent Java simulation of 24 hour real-time to 45 second run-time

  • Generated train and test sets of 10K+ cities for supervised learning with JSON + Python data pipeline

  • Utilized linear regression and shallow CNN for traffic volume and solar radiation predictions





Wildcat Connect Mobile Productivity App

Co-Founder and Lead Developer (Summer 2015 - May 2018)

  • Co-founded productivity app for Weymouth HS, winner of 2016 #1 Senior Project Award

  • Integrated push notifications of key events, alerts and custom class groups for students and faculty

  • Built AWS-hosted Express Node.js server with tiered user levels and 2-factor e-mail authentication

  • Maintained for 3+ academic years with 8,000+ downloads



LifeYield, LLC

Full Stack Software Engineer Intern (Summer 2015 and 2016)

  • Optimized all web service calls by 40% via improved XML serialization in C# backend

  • Wrote and deployed log monitor in C# to connect cloud computing environment with Splunk + SQL

  • Integrated load-balanced caching and distributed locking mechanism across replicated web instances

  • Implemented front end enhancements and bug fixes for improved user interface, while keeping MVC structure intact

Education


Massachusetts Institute of Technology
B.S. '20
M.Eng. '21

MEng, Computer Science, with a focus in Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning

B.S., Computer Science

  • 4.9 undergraduate GPA (5.0 scale)

  • For a list of all technical MIT courses I have taken to date, click here.



Weymouth High School '16

  • Valedictorian of 473 Students, 4.9 GPA

  • National Honor Society Chapter President

  • Senior captain of:

    • Varsity Football

    • Varsity Basketball

    • Math Team

Leadership


Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program

Gordon Engineering Leader, Student Leader (September 2018 - June 2020)

  • Developed leadership, teamwork and communication skills in selective program for engineering undergrads

  • Engage in scenario-based practice of professional skills for industry contexts

  • Led team of 5 juniors to develop their own leadership skills in lab-based setting

  • Served as Program Student Leader from January - June 2020, managing over 130 students and 10 staff through the uncertainty of COVID-19 to still deliver a valuable leadership program



MIT Sports Summit

Co-Lead (September 2019 - January 2020), Website Lead (January 2021)

  • Responsible for success of the 2019 summit, coordinating students and faculty

  • Managed 12+ high level industry guests from around sport to attend conference

  • Coordinated across teams spanning logisitcs, marketing, promotions, outreach, and finance

  • Built out content and structure for latest version of website with custom MIT subdomain

  • Returned to support efforts for 2021 summit, managing all website content and logistics





MIT Varsity Football

Linebacker/Special Teams Player (August 2016 - December 2019)

  • Selected to 2017, 2018 and 2019 NEWMAC Academic All-Conference Teams

  • Previously served on Player’s Council to lead team activities and offseason operations



MIT Leadership Training Institute

Project Mentor for High School Students (September 2016 - May 2019)

  • Participated in the same program when I was in high school

  • Created community service initiaive in my town - computer science mentorship program for students in grades 3-8 in Spring 2015

  • Selected to present my findings on campus

  • Invited back to speak about the program after MIT acceptance





Delta Kappa Epsilon Fraternity

November 2016 - June 2020

  • Served as Chapter Vice President and Webmaster

  • Coordinated relationships with MIT, MIT IFC and other MIT groups

  • Previously served as Chapter Community Service Chair, January - May 2017

  • Was responsible for coordinating events for charitable service in the greater MIT community and beyond

Resume and Contact


Resume

You can access a copy of my latest resume here.

Contact

The best way to reach me is via e-mail: [email protected].

I am also available on LinkedIn and GitHub.