Seattle, WA · Open to new roles

Russell Transue

Principal Software Engineer / Product / Design

I design, build, and ship enterprise software end to end, from UX elicitation and Figma mockups all the way to production frontend architecture.

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Showcases RealityDraft Map rebuild Priority Tracker
01

About

A principal software engineer in Seattle who designs, builds, and ships enterprise software end to end.

Over more than a decade I've architected frontends, led distributed engineering teams, and owned product and UX. Today I'm building an AI chat product and modernizing a large legacy codebase to Vue with Claude Code at RiverLogic. I move fluidly between writing the design spec, drawing the Figma mockup, and shipping the code.

  • 13+years building software
  • 3disciplines: eng, product, design
  • ∞grids of enterprise data shipped
02

Experience

2015 to Now RiverLogic Inc Redmond, WA

Principal Software Engineer, Product Manager & Designer

Sep 2023 to present
  • Designing and building an AI Chat offering to supplement enterprise BI software (VCO | EO).
  • Using Claude Code to maintain and expand a legacy codebase; strategizing and executing its conversion from KnockoutJS to Vue.
  • Running UX elicitations, producing high-fidelity Figma designs, and writing & prioritizing work in Jira.
  • Interviewing candidates, creating training materials, and mentoring new hires; driving cross-team collaboration and product consistency.
  • Writing technical design specs and release notes in Notion; reviewing pull requests in Azure DevOps.

Principal Software Engineer

Sep 2017 to Aug 2023
  • Built enterprise BI software (EO+) on Azure with ASP.NET and KnockoutJS, using TypeScript, LESS & HTML for data grids, animated displays and icons.
  • Managed a front-end team based in Shanghai with technical documentation and delivery timelines.
  • Architected the EO+ front end with the Flux pattern into reusable components to cut maintenance cost at scale.

Senior Software Engineer

Jul 2015 to Aug 2017
  • Integrated Microsoft Power BI's embedded REST API to add data visualizations.
  • Used MVC (backend) and MVVM (frontend) for separation of concerns; built a REST API for client/server data sync.
2013 to 2015 TIBCO Software Redmond, WA

Software Engineer

May 2013 to Jan 2015
  • Developed and shipped enterprise BI software (Spotfire Metrics) with KnockoutJS, featuring automatic refresh and data syncing.
  • Worked with Spotfire developers in Gothenburg, Sweden to design and implement a REST API data connection for profiling data across many sources.
  • Built data connections to Google Sheets, Excel, Salesforce, and LinkedIn.
  • Consulted for Microsoft and HTC, maintaining SharePoint-based corporate intranets.
2015 OpenTech Solutions Bellevue, WA

Project Manager

Mar 2015 to Jun 2015
  • Managed two junior developers; built a DataTables.js web UI saving toothbrush-study user-testing data to SQL for Philips Healthcare.
  • Wrote requirements, estimated timelines, and reported weekly progress.
2012 to 2013 KP Corporation Renton, WA

Application Developer

Sep 2012 to Apr 2013
  • Built Visual Basic apps to speed sales data entry, mass-emailing, and print imposition.
  • Built tools Microsoft used to track Windows Phone and Surface promotion success.
2011 to 2012 Harvey Mudd College Claremont, CA

Senior Game Programmer, Art Director & Manager

May 2011 to Dec 2012
  • Designed and built an educational game from scratch teaching students about social and political rule-making for a political-studies professor.
  • Managed a team of five, coordinating work between artists and coders. ActionScript & XML, PushButton Engine, Flash Builder.

Microsoft Research Clinic

Aug 2011 to May 2012
  • Designed a stroke-rehabilitation game for the Microsoft Surface in C# on a team of four for Microsoft Research.
  • Coordinated user testing with stroke patients and presented the work at CHI 2013 in Paris.
EDU

B.S. Computer Science, Harvey Mudd College · 2008 to 2012

03

Selected work

01 RealityDraft current build: episode view with captain cards

RealityDraft

Personal project · 2026

A fantasy reality-TV drafting game (React, Vite, Tailwind). Watch it evolve across 1000+ AI-assisted commits.

  • Product
  • React
  • AI
02 Rebuilt map view with clustered markers (demo, fake data)

Map view rebuild

Enterprise frontend

Rebuilding a cramped, slow map view into a clustered, layered, fast one. Before and after, shown clean-room with fake demo data.

  • Mapbox GL
  • Frontend
  • Refactor
03 Priority Tracker board view (demo, fake data)

Priority Tracker

Personal tool

Jira tickets, Azure DevOps PRs, and custom work items synced into one drag-and-drop priority board.

  • Python
  • Productivity
  • Integrations
04

AI Chat for Enterprise BI

RiverLogic · since 2023

A natural-language chat experience layered onto enterprise BI (VCO | EO). I own the UX elicitation, the Figma designs, and the frontend build, extending a legacy codebase with Claude Code.

  • Product
  • UX
  • Vue
  • AI
05

KnockoutJS to Vue modernization

RiverLogic

Strategized and executed the migration of a large legacy enterprise frontend from KnockoutJS to Vue, decomposing it into reusable components to cut long-term maintenance cost.

  • Architecture
  • Vue
  • Migration
06

RuleChangers

Harvey Mudd College

An educational game teaching students about social and political rule-making, built from scratch for a political-studies professor. I led a team of five across art and code.

  • Game
  • ActionScript
  • Leadership
 07

MOcean Stroke-Rehab Game

Microsoft Research

A C# game on the Microsoft Surface for stroke rehabilitation, published as "Stroke Rehabilitation With A Sensing Surface" and presented at CHI 2013 in Paris.

  • C#
  • Research
  • HCI
04

UX Design

I own the design half too: UX elicitation, high-fidelity Figma, and shipping the result. The gallery pairs recent Figma work with interface design I did back in the 2010s.

See UX work
05

Skills

AREAS
  • Frontend Engineering
  • Fullstack Engineering
  • Engineering Management
  • Product Management
  • UX Design
LANGS
  • TypeScript
  • JavaScript
  • C#
  • HTML
  • LESS
  • SQL
FRAMEWORKS
  • Vue
  • SpreadJS
  • Node.js
  • ASP.NET
  • powerbi-client
  • Mapbox GL
  • Highcharts
TOOLS
  • Azure
  • Claude / Claude Code
  • ChatGPT
  • Webpack
  • Vite
  • Git
  • VS Code
  • Visual Studio
  • Jira
  • Notion
  • Figma
  • Photoshop
06

Art

Tapestry (2020), a large geometric abstract painting by Russell Transue: interlocking circles built from radial lines, checkerboards, and concentric arcs in orange, cobalt blue, and teal.
“Tapestry” · 2020 · Acrylic, latex & oil on wood and corkboard

I paint big geometric abstractions the same way I build software: from a plan, a grid, and a lot of math.

I studied Experimental Animation, Fundamentals of Art, and Drawing at Harvey Mudd alongside the CS degree. The full gallery has process sketches and the math behind the paint.

See all art Animations on Vimeo
07

Interests

Beyond the code and the canvas.

  • Gardening Growing things slowly, the patient opposite of shipping software. See photos
  • Super Smash Bros Ranked top 10 in Western Washington in 2016 to 2017. The competitive scene still pulls me back. See pics & clips
  • Motivational speaking Hyping people up to go chase the scary, ambitious thing.
  • Sky diving Jumping out of perfectly good planes for the view and the rush.
  • Yelle comme un enfant Yelling like a kid, in French and otherwise. It's good for the soul.
08

Get in touch

Have a role, a project, or a problem worth solving? I'd love to hear about it.

Connect on LinkedIn

Or send a message directly. It lands straight in my inbox.