Stephanie Wilkinson
Product & Engineering Leadership
CONTACT
SUMMARY
Thirteen years building products from prototype to scale. Built an enrollment platform adopted into Vanderbilt's graduate curriculum, and invited to be a guest lecturer. Built an accreditation system, secured board funding, and licensed it to associations nationwide. Hands-on technical background: built production systems in Ruby and Elixir, designed data integrations with major platform providers. Platforms serve 76K monthly active users across 1,700+ organizations.
EXPERIENCE
NAIS · Software for schools worldwide
- › Product Ownership. Hired to build one application. Within six years, owned technical direction for every platform at NAIS—nine production services, 76K monthly active users, 1,700 schools. Scope expanded through successful delivery.
- › Team Leadership. Scaled engineering from 5 to 22 across three countries, including engineering managers and technical leads. Manage product and platform teams.
- › Industry Recognition. Invited as guest lecturer to Vanderbilt's Peabody College (#2-ranked Educational Administration program) to train M.Ed. students on Market View, the enrollment platform my team built.
- › Security Architecture. Led security audit that found critical vulnerabilities in legacy SSO. Shipped a feature-complete replacement built on Phoenix LiveView in 6 weeks with zero downtime for 250K users.
- › Platform Launch. Led NAIS.org redesign—improved navigation, vector site search with Azure AI, consolidated Resource Center. Won Kentico CMS Site of the Month (November 2025).
- › AI Development. Presented at AI Symposium (2025) on AI-powered enrollment analytics my team built. Featured case studies from Peddie School and Phillips Exeter Academy. First to ship AI-powered enrollment analytics in the independent school market.
- › Partnerships. Brokered API partnerships with Blackbaud and Veracross—met with senior leaders at both companies, negotiated favorable terms. Integrations replaced spreadsheet uploads and improved data quality.
- › AI Support. Deployed AI-powered support across three NAIS data products. Trained chatbots, built conversation flows, authored the knowledge base, created product tours. 81% AI resolution rate. 100% CSAT.
- › Reliability. 99.988% uptime across nine production services. Implemented monitoring (Sentry, UptimeRobot) and incident response processes.
NAIS · Software for schools worldwide
- › Product Launch. Built Market View from idea to launch—defined requirements, designed the UX, wrote the prototype in Elixir/Phoenix, hired the team to scale it.
- › Team Building. Joined as first engineering hire. Built team to 5, set technical direction, established budgets. Promoted to Senior Director within 18 months.
- › Systems Integration. Elixir lacked TDS drivers to connect to Microsoft Dynamics. Wrote a Ruby API as an intermediary layer between the legacy server and the Elixir app, unblocking development rather than waiting for the migration.
- › Data Quality. 1,700 schools had to navigate a confusing workflow to update their records—slow, error-prone, 30 minutes per request. Built a self-service tool that cut updates to 5 minutes and ensured correct data flows across all downstream applications.
CAIS · Software for schools in California
- › Technical Innovation. Built the Accreditation Portal from scratch as sole engineer—frontend, backend, database, design. First app to accredit independent schools online, anywhere. Reduced accreditation processing time from weeks to minutes.
- › Product Leadership. Led Accreditation Portal v2. Secured board funding, then structured licensing deals that required codebase contributions. Turned paying customers into my engineering team—managed developers across three associations shipping to one product.
- › Team Development. Early adoption as a growth strategy. Put engineers on Rails 5 Action Cable when it was released—learned it, shipped with it, documented it publicly. Our writing became community references before most teams had even tried the feature. One developer's visibility from that work landed them a senior role at GitHub.
Pivotal Labs · Agile software consultancy
- › Selection. Chosen from a global pool of prospective women/nonbinary engineers for RailsGirls Summer of Code fellowship.
- › Technical Contribution. Built a REPL tool for learning the Ruby Standard Library. Pair and mob programmed daily with Pivotal engineers. Presented the project at Rocky Mountain Ruby (Boulder, CO).
GOVERNANCE & VOLUNTEERING
Hollywood Schoolhouse
- › Board Contribution. Served on Committee on Trustees, and Committee on Head Evaluation.
Ruby in Hollywood
- › Leadership. Founded the only weekly Ruby programming group. Led weekly meetups, organized presentations, Capture the Flag events, and more.
RailsGirls
- › Volunteering. Coached girls, women, and nonbinary aspiring coders for several intensive weekend workshops.
EDUCATION
General Assembly, Los Angeles
Web Development Immersive
Ruby on Rails, Javascript and Angular.js.
University Of California, Riverside
Bachelor of Arts | English
Linear algebra, calculus, computer science (C++). Full scholarship & honors.