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Tessa Anderson

FullStack Software Engineer

Software Engineer based in Chicago, IL, USA. I specialize in software development and maintenance.

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Work Experience

What If Media Group

Software Development Engineer II

Mar 2024 — Present
  • Partnering with the Website Engineering and Content Engineering Teams to assist in the migration of critical user-facing websites, directly contributing to 80% of the company's revenue, and driving a 10-20% increase in key performance indicators (KPIs).
  • Served as one of four Tech Leads on the development of a client revenue portal delivered in 4 months, created to enhance operational efficiency and empower clients with secure, self-service access to performance analytics.
  • Successfully integrated Volt as a new SMS Service Provider, resulting in the delivery of over 21.5 million messages with a 96% success rate.
  • Completed the creation of Onvoy, an SMS Internet Service Provider, handling over 6,000 daily sends.

Charboys

Marketing Team Member

Feb 2022 — Present
  • Served as scriptwriter and on-camera talent for CharBoys Samuel Adams commercial partnership, developing branded video content and appearing in advertising campaigns for beverage industry marketing initiatives.
  • Created branded video content that generated over 2,000 views and enhanced brand awareness for beverage marketing campaign.

Northwestern University

Teaching Assistant

Aug 2018 — May 2025
  • Instructed 50 + Bootcamp Coding students to master programming concepts, development tools, language syntax, problem-solving skills, and best coding practices in web development.
  • Utilized small group instruction and one-on-one tutoring to facilitate student learning in software development, teaching 3-5 students per session programming fundamentals, debugging techniques, and coding best practices.
  • Assisted in debugging 15+ instructional and student applications to ascertain clean, robust, reusable code.

What If Media Group

Software Development Engineer I

Jul 2022 — Feb 2024
  • Fulfilled role as Tech Lead for a team of five software engineers to build modernized Content Management Systems for What If's Email and SMS marketing channels, resulting in a 63.6% increase in efficiency.
  • Led a team of four professionals, driving the development of a sophisticated system that facilitated seamless domain purchases and streamlined management of DNS data, which reduced manual processing time by 60%.
  • Led 10 weekly team meetings over 2 months to prioritize and review feature requests while uncovering, addressing, and resolving team member questions, challenges, and perceived obstacles.

What If Media Group

Software Development Engineer

Oct 2019 — Jul 2022
  • Successfully facilitated the optimization and testing of our client unsubscribe management system, utilizing a third-party API for 3000+ users.
  • Effectively optimized daily campaign selections that target 400+ campaigns of 1000+ users each.
  • Integrated new software API libraries into existing codebases to monitor and analyze business performance across paid marketing channels for 30+ marketing affiliates.

8th Light, LLC.

Software Developer

Mar 2019 — Sep 2019
  • Developed software applications over 7 months utilizing clean architecture patterns and SOLID principles with a focus on scalable system design and agile development methodologies.
  • Built and refined application prototypes using modern web technologies; performed comprehensive testing of web applications while maintaining 90%+ test coverage through test-driven development (TDD) and automated testing frameworks.

Featured Projects

Strapi

Serve as an Individual Contributor to this open-source headless CMS project with 50M downloads, 66.9K GitHub stars, 72K active developers, and 8.6K forks.

Source
Strapi

Activist

Assist as an Individual Contributor to this open-source activism project with 398 GitHub stars, 321 forks, and 164 contributors.

Source
Activist

Content Creator

Fulfilled role as Tech Lead for a team of five software engineers to build modernized Content Management Systems for What If's Email and SMS marketing channels, resulting in a 63.6% increase in efficiency.

Source
Content Creator

About Me

Hi, I’m Tessa, a passionate software engineer with a knack for crafting seamless digital experiences. I’m a detail-oriented problem solver who loves writing clean, scalable, and reliable code. Whether it’s untangling complex challenges or automating the mundane, I focus on building thoughtful technical solutions that elevate the user experience. With 6+ years of full-stack engineering and technical instruction, and 5+ years as a healthcare professional, I bring cross-domain expertise to platform development and open-source contributions, helping organizations scale and improve lives through purpose-driven technology.

Tessa Anderson