A software engineer who keeps ending up responsible for the whole system.

I’m Joey King. I work where business needs, technical systems, and people meet, and I’m moving deliberately toward roles with larger ownership and, over time, leadership.

Most recently I spent three and a half years as a software engineer at USAA, working on internal platforms, workflow automation, legacy modernization, and developer tooling. Before that I was an application developer at Centuri Group, contributing implementation and go-live support across six internal applications.

Over time my work grew past the code. I owned a shared service from its first research spike through production support. I made the release and rollback calls on a platform modernization. I led a three-person team to first place in an innovation competition, and I directed two intern cohorts. I also helped my team adopt AI-assisted coding by showing, with real examples, where it helped.

How I work

Building is my strongest stage, and I’m drawn to what happens after launch: watching how people actually use a system and refining what isn’t working. Deciding has grown with ownership, through calls like cutting scope to meet a deadline and rolling back a release that reproduced an old bug.

The stage I most want to grow is understanding problems directly with the people who have them. I’ve often worked a step removed from end users, and I expect more direct contact to sharpen my judgment about which questions to ask.

Where I’m headed

I’m looking for roles with larger ownership across software engineering, technical programs, technical operations, and internal platforms, with a path toward leadership. I’m completing my MBA in IT Management, expected February 2027, to pair engineering depth with the business side of running systems and teams.

On my own time I’m building two open-source Go projects that are still in development: a small runtime for bounded, approval-gated agents, and a dependency-upgrade assistant built on it.

Outside of work

I’m usually somewhere between a guitar, a piano, and another system I’ve decided to overthink.