A portrait photo of Ross Paffett smiling

👋 Hi! I’m Ross Paffett, a senior software engineering manager. Since 2012, I’ve led Ruby platform engineering teams at LevelUp (acquired by Grubhub), and Ontra.

Since 2025, I’ve led Ontra’s API and integrations platform team, distributed across Chicago, San Francisco and Tampa. At LevelUp and Grubhub, I led three software teams in Boston, Chicago, New York and San Francisco. In all of my roles, I apply rigorous software development fundamentals to platform and service reliability teams.

I’m fascinated by group dynamics and the psychology of group development. At NOLS in New Zealand, I combined that interest with my love of the wilderness. I use the leadership skills I learned every day.

I contribute to fun open source projects. I helped write and maintain a Ruby IRC server named Hector, a Ruby client for the Zulip chat server named Wonder Llama, and contributed some patches to GitHub’s official Ruby client. A few of my contributions to an open source Minecraft client made it into Mojang’s official implementation.

I grew up in Boston, and now live in San Francisco. On weekends, you’ll find me in the wilderness with my friends, wrenching on my car, or holding a camera in an odd stance. Check out some of my favorite photos on my 500px profile.

Sunrise at Xiaoliyuanshan Lookout in Alishan, Taiwan
Sunrise at Xiaoliyuanshan, Taiwan
A Peruvian tree frog in the Amazon rainforest
Tree frog in the Peruvian Amazon
Sunset over Banner Peak in the Ansel Adams Wilderness in California
Sunset in the Ansel Adams Wilderness

You can get in touch with me at ross@rosspaffett.com.