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Cole Oliver Cofer

Senior Software Engineer & Tech Lead · Portland, OR

coleocofer@gmail.com linkedin.com/in/colecofer github.com/ColeoCofer

Summary

Senior Software Engineer and Tech Lead with six years building and scaling backend systems in fintech. I design high-throughput APIs in Go and Java, tune PostgreSQL until it behaves, and lead a team of five while staying hands-on. I was the early adopter of agentic AI tooling on my team and now help others use it well. Outside work I ship things end to end: a Steam game, iOS and watchOS apps, and the occasional website that pretends to be an operating system.

Experience

Apex Fintech SolutionsPortland, OR · March 2020 – Present

Senior Software Engineer & Tech Lead (Sept 2024 – Present) · Software Engineer II (Oct 2021 – Sept 2024) · Software Engineer I (Mar 2020 – Oct 2021)

APIs at scale: Design and maintain high-performance REST and gRPC services in Go and Java serving millions of requests a day, with an emphasis on clean boundaries and predictable latency.
Technical leadership: Promoted to Tech Lead. Guide a team of five on API design and system architecture while continuing to ship code.
Scaling: Led the modernization of legacy services to run horizontally in the cloud, and owned our team's role in a company-wide initiative to absorb a 5x traffic increase (roughly 200 to 1000+ RPS).
Performance: Cut response times by 40% through query optimization, read replicas, and deliberate query planning in PostgreSQL.
AI-assisted development: Lead advocate for agentic tools such as Claude Code on complex tasks. Helped teammates fold them into their workflows while being clear-eyed about their limits.
Mentorship: Mentored several junior engineers and interns from first commit to confident contributor.
Cross-team work: Partner with product, frontend, and infrastructure teams to deliver cohesive API solutions.

InComm Digital SolutionsPortland, OR · June 2018 – March 2020

Software Engineer Intern

Built and maintained backend microservices for an e-commerce platform in C# and .NET.
Wrote comprehensive automated test suites with Cypress and AVA, raising deployment confidence.

Independent Products

SonaSteam · planned late 2026 Hardcore precision platformer about an orphaned bat who navigates by echolocation. Built in Godot 4 with a four-person team under the studio name C'mon Betsy. Began as our 30-day Game Off 2025 jam entry and has grown into a full release with hand-crafted levels, speedrun modes, achievements, and eight languages.

RadishiOS + watchOS · App Store, coming soon A calorie and macro tracker you buy once. 700,000+ foods searchable offline, barcode and label scanning, Siri voice logging, and an Apple Watch companion. No accounts and no backend: data stays on device or in the user's own iCloud.

Beardsman's BakeryWeb · live, 2025 Ordering site built for a friend who bakes and sells pastries out of his home. Weekly menu with per-item stock, first-come pickup slots, and a passcode-protected baker's panel. React and Vite on the front end; the entire backend is a Google Sheet driven by an Apps Script web app, so it runs with no server and no monthly cost.

ImuaiOS + watchOS · in development Watch-first workout tracker for paddle sports (dragon boat, SUP, outrigger, kayak). On-device stroke detection, stroke rate, distance per stroke, GPS routes, and native HealthKit workouts. Zero-server by design.

Brew: Coffee CalculatorApple Watch · App Store, 2022 Published watchOS app for dialing in coffee ratios from your wrist.

Earlier2013 – 2019 Latte Art Analyzer, an iOS computer-vision app scoring latte art with OpenCV (2018). AI Tower Defense, a Pygame game with genetic, Q-learning, and neural agents (2019). Barista Bud, a coffee app on the Windows Phone store (2013).

Education

Portland State UniversityPortland, OR · 2015 – 2019

B.S. in Computer Science

Skills

ProficientGo, Java, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, Kafka, gRPC, Docker, Terraform, Python, Swift & SwiftUI, Git, Bazel, DataDog, Claude Code and agentic AI workflows FamiliarRust, Redis, C#, C, C++, JavaScript & TypeScript, GDScript (Godot), Objective-C

This page is the living version of my résumé. The PDF in the toolbar is the printable copy.

For Help, press F1. It won't do anything, but it felt right.Page 1 of 1

Hi, I'm Cole.

I'm a backend engineer who likes the whole stack, a tech lead who still writes code every day, and a person who apparently could not make a normal portfolio site.

By day I work at Apex Fintech Solutions in Portland, where I lead a team of five building the APIs that sit under brokerage platforms. That work is mostly Go, Java, PostgreSQL, Kafka, and Kubernetes, and the interesting problems are about keeping things fast and boring at scale: horizontal scaling, query plans, read replicas, and preparing systems for traffic that grows faster than headcount.

I was the first person on my team to take agentic coding tools seriously, and I now spend a lot of time helping other engineers get real value out of them. My honest take is that they are a multiplier on judgment, not a replacement for it.

After hours I make things I actually want to use. Right now that means Sona, a precision platformer coming to Steam, and Radish, a calorie tracker with no subscription and no server. I gravitate toward software that respects the user: pay once, works offline, keeps your data on your device.

When I'm not at a keyboard I'm probably paddling, hiking, or overthinking coffee.

Sona Steam · planned late 2026

A hardcore precision platformer about a bat who can't fly yet.

Orphaned before she could learn to fly, Sona is searching a sprawling network of caves for other bats to call family. She sees by echolocation, which costs energy, so you eat bugs to keep the lights on and dodge predators in the dark between pulses. One hit kills. Checkpoints are your friend. Expect to die a lot, and expect it to feel fair when you do.

Godot 4.5GDScriptSteamworksPixel art & music, all original4-person team8 languages

Hand-crafted levels with midway checkpoints and diamond challenges.
Echolocation as a resource: light costs energy, bugs restore it.
Four inputs: run, jump, flap, echolocate. Controller recommended.
Multiple difficulty modes, speedrun timers, Steam achievements and cloud saves.

Wishlist on Steam

This is the original 30-day build. Sona started as our entry to Game Off 2025, a month-long game jam. The build below is that jam version, playable right here. The Steam release has changed a lot since then: new levels, new mechanics, new art, and roughly a year of polish. Consider this the baby photo.

Runs right here in the window. About 90 MB, so give it a moment. Click the game once to give it keyboard focus.

`WASD` / `Arrows`	Move	`Space`	Jump
`Shift`	Run	`E`	Echolocate

Open on itch.io Jam source on GitHub

Four of us signed up for Game Off 2025 with one rule: ship something we would actually want to play. Thirty days later we had a small, mean platformer about a bat, and people kept playing it after the jam ended. That was enough of a signal to keep going.

Since then the project has become a real release under the studio name C'mon Betsy. I work across the codebase in Godot and GDScript: player movement and the feel of flapping, the echolocation system and its energy economy, level tooling, localization for eight languages, and the Steamworks integration for achievements and cloud saves. Making a platformer feel fair when death is instant is mostly a problem of timing windows, and I have opinions about all of them now.

It has also been a useful lesson in the difference between a jam build and a product: the last 20% takes the other 80% of the time, and it is the part players notice.

Radish App Store · coming soon

Track calories and macros. Pay once. Nothing leaves your phone.

Most calorie trackers are a subscription wrapped around a food database. Radish is the opposite: a one-time purchase, a 700,000-item food database that works offline, and no backend at all. Your food diary lives on your device or in your own iCloud, and there is no account to create because there is no server to log into.

Barcode and nutrition-label scanning.
Voice logging through Siri ("log two eggs and a coffee").
Trends that adapt to your actual metabolism, not a formula.
Recurring meal templates so you stop re-logging breakfast.
Apple Watch companion with sync, plus four themes including a near-black Midnight.

SwiftSwiftUIwatchOSSQLite (offline food DB)CloudKit (optional)App Intents / Siri

10 days free with no card required, then $9.99 once, with all future updates included.

Visit get-radish

Beardsman's Bakery Live · 2025

A friend bakes pastries out of his kitchen. This is the storefront.

Brent bakes kouign-amann, cinnamon rolls, and cookies at home in Belvedere Tiburon and sells them by the weekend. He was taking orders by text, which does not scale past about a dozen people. So I built him a shop.

Loads beardsmanbakery.com inside this window. It's the real shop, so everything works.

A menu that knows what's left. Each bake has its own quantity for the day. When it's gone, it's gone, and the page says so instead of taking an order he can't fill.
Pickup slots, five minutes apart. Customers pick a day and a time; once a slot is taken it disappears for everyone else. No two people at the door at once.
No payment plumbing. Cash or Venmo at pickup. There is no card processor to onboard, no fees, and no PCI surface.
A baker's panel behind a passcode. Brent sets the week's bakes, prices, quantities, and pickup windows himself, then starts a new drop when the weekend is over.

The whole backend is a Google Sheet. An Apps Script web app writes each order into it and emails him the moment one lands, so the "database" is a spreadsheet he can sort, and the "admin tool" is a tab he already knows how to read. No server, no database, no monthly bill — the front end is static files on the hosting he already had.

ReactViteTailwindGoogle Apps ScriptGoogle SheetsStatic hosting

Open in a new tab @beardsmansbakery

Imua iOS + watchOS · in development

Imua is Hawaiian for "forward," the racing cry in outrigger paddling.

Apple's Workout app doesn't speak paddling. Imua does: stroke count, stroke rate, distance per stroke, pace per 500m, splits, heart rate, and a GPS route you can review on a map afterward. It covers dragon boat, SUP, outrigger canoe, kayak, canoe, and rowing.

Watch-first. Start, track, and end the workout on your wrist, with water lock on. Big numbers, high contrast, one-second glances.
Stroke detection on device. Cadence comes from the watch's motion sensors, not a paddle-mounted gadget.
HealthKit-native. Workouts save as real HKWorkouts with routes, so they show up in Fitness and count toward your rings.
No accounts, no server. Data lives on your devices and syncs watch-to-phone directly. Pay once.

SwiftSwiftUIwatchOSHealthKitCore MotionCore LocationWatchConnectivity

Imua is the app I wished existed when I started paddling. It's in active development and headed for the App Store.

Brew: Coffee Calculator App Store · 2022

Coffee ratios on your wrist.

A small, focused Apple Watch app for dialing in coffee. Pick a ratio, enter your beans or your water, and get the other number without pulling out your phone with wet hands. It shipped in 2022 and quietly keeps getting used, which is my favorite kind of software.

Building it also produced a tiny open-source side quest: watchOS had no decimal pad at the time, so I wrote one. It's on GitHub as SwiftUI-Apple-Watch-Decimal-Pad.

SwiftSwiftUIwatchOS

View on the App Store

FileEditViewImageColorsHelp

Left click paints with the primary color. Right click paints with the secondary color.640 x 400

Get in touch

I'm open to senior backend and platform roles, and I have a soft spot for developer tooling. Email is best.

BaristaBud.xapMy first published app: coffee-to-water ratios, unit conversion, and a brew timer. Windows Phone, August 30, 2013. The store closed; the idea came back nine years later as Brew.2013

generic_portfolio_template.htmlHero section, three feature cards, a testimonials carousel. Deleted with prejudice.2026

refractometer.receiptThe physical coffee refractometer I was going to replace with software. Still on the shelf.2023

query_plan_FINAL_final(3).sqlThe one that actually used the index. Kept a copy. Deleted the other eleven.2024

Objective-C.hWe had some good times. Mostly bracket-related.2018

sona_level_7_v1.tscnPlaytesters described it as "hostile." It was. Rebuilt from scratch, twice.2026

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