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Caleb Hornbeck

GitHub|LinkedIn|calebhornbeck.dev
Senior software engineer with 10+ years across the full stack and into production infrastructure. Measurable impact: 7% operating expense recovery via a multi-team payment integration, server monitoring scaled from 16 to 150 nodes, and production queries cut from 30 seconds to under 2.
Employment
Contract Senior Software Engineer|ByteCabinet
September 2025 - Present
  • Replaced a brittle WP EasyCart implementation for a defense equipment retailer with a custom OpenCart build, including a native extension for automated distributor FTP sync and drop-ship API fulfillment, eliminating all manual order processing.
  • Optimized a production ecommerce search query from 30 seconds to under 2 via targeted database indexing.
  • Built a full event registration platform with tiered pricing, early-bird discounts, per-event capacity limits, and abandoned cart recovery.
Online Grader - IT/CS|BYU Pathway Worldwide
January 2026 - August 2026
  • Built a Chrome extension redesigning the Canvas SpeedGrader workflow from manual-step to auto-advance with override, shrinking a 5-minute grading task to under 30 seconds.
  • Integrated local LLM inference via Ollama to automate rubric-to-submission matching, reducing manual review time per submission.
Senior Software Engineer|Scriptive
August 2024 - January 2025
  • Proposed, designed, and built the Author Portal, eliminating recurring spam submissions and consolidating author communication from three tools into one, reducing process management time by an estimated 50%.
  • Discovered hardcoded production database admin credentials in phpMyAdmin configuration exposing public admin access; remediated overnight, investigated for unauthorized access, and authored the incident report.
  • Took over and led development of the flagship SaaS platform from an inherited codebase, establishing quality standards while delivering features and systematically addressing technical debt.
Software Developer / Systems Administrator|ApplicantPro
December 2018 - August 2024
  • Led Stripe and AvaTax integration across multiple engineering teams, shifting tax liability to customers and recovering 7% in operating expenses while eliminating 20 combined monthly hours of manual overhead from accounting and billing.
  • Deployed Zabbix across a fleet of 150 servers (up from 16), standardizing role-aware monitoring and multiplying observable metrics 10-100x per endpoint, alongside Ansible for configuration management.
  • Architected Graylog log aggregation from zero across 150 servers and multiple codebases, becoming the observability foundation the DevOps team later used to build an in-house APM platform
  • Contributed to a planned, incident-free migration of the flagship ATS platform from end-of-life CentOS 6 infrastructure, maintaining service continuity for 10k clients and 150k users at 1k+ requests/second.
Associate Partner — IT|The Intelitech Group
March 2017 - December 2018
  • Architected a Graylog log aggregation pipeline from default configuration to a production-grade system with structured streams, index sets, and processing rules, eliminating daily manual IP blacklisting and automating firewall-level blocking of repeat offenders via pfSense integration, saving 30-60 minutes of daily manual work.
  • Deployed high-availability pfSense firewall pairs across office and datacenter with OpenVPN site-to-site failover configuration.
  • Led phone system modernization from aging physical PBX to new virtualized PBX VoIP platform, later foundational for company-wide remote work.
  • Served as significant technical respondent during a successful SOC2 audit, demonstrating Graylog and pfSense security controls in real-time to auditors.
Education
Bachelor of Science in Software Development
Western Governors University
December 2021
Certifications
  • CompTIA Project+|September 2018
  • CIW User Interface Designer|May 2018
  • CIW Advanced HTML5 & CSS3 Specialist|January 2018
Skills

Languages: PHP, HTML, CSS, JS, TS, Bash, Go, C#

Backend: Laravel, Mako, .NET, Node.js, REST, APIs

Frontend: Vue.js, Inertia.js, Bootstrap, Tailwind

AI & LLM: Ollama, GitHub Copilot, OpenCode, Codex, Claude, prompt engineering

Databases: MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB

Cloud: AWS, GCP, Linode, Azure, Cloudflare

Systems & Servers: Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, Rocky Linux, Apache, Nginx, IIS

DevOps & Containers: Docker, KVM, Ansible

Networking: pfSense, WireGuard, Tailscale

Monitoring & Observability: Zabbix, Graylog

Copyright © Caleb Hornbeck 2014 - 2026