William Long

applying for

Staff Engineer, Experimental Projects

15 years turning a few sentences into products that generate real revenue. From $120k to $600k in ad revenue. From zero to $1M+ ARR. From IC to leading a team of 10.

I bring my real self to work. Always interested in learning and helping others grow.

Work Experience

Chief Architect, PaycheckCity

Symmetry Software

2018 - Present

  • Lead a team of 10 building payroll products generating $1.9M+ ARR
  • Built PaycheckCity Payroll with Stripe integration — 1,500 users, $280k ARR
  • 2022-2023: Embedded with Gusto team on payments & filing product
  • 2024-2025: Built Payments & Filing POC, grew team from 4 to 10

Software Developer

Symmetry Software

2011 - 2017

  • Modernized PaycheckCity.com from IIS to Spring MVC — grew revenue from $120k to $600k and users from 2M to 10M+
  • Built Calculators by Symmetry — Symmetry's first public-facing API
  • Launched fully responsive website in 2013
  • 2012: Built PhoneGap iOS and Android apps (later removed due to maintenance complexity)

Junior Software Engineer

Computer Guidance Corporation

2009 - 2010

  • Converted legacy UI pages to JSPs with modern CSS styling
  • Fixed Java bugs in enterprise construction management software
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Credentials

Certifications

  • 2022 Certified Payroll Professional (CPP) - PayrollOrg
  • 2021 Fundamental Payroll Certification (FPC) - PayrollOrg
  • 2020 Angular Certified Developer - Angular Training

Hackathon Wins

  • 2025 AI Tax Engine - Built browser-based tax engine using Amazon Bedrock
  • 2016 Paycheck OCR Reader - Scanned paychecks to verify W4 accuracy

Side Projects

Verifitly

SaaS platform for validating business ideas. AI-powered landing page generation, waitlist collection, and viability scoring. Turn an idea into a testable product in minutes.

  • SaaS
  • AI
  • Validation

Tahoe Dev

Full-stack development consulting. Specializing in web development, AWS cloud infrastructure, automation, and enterprise applications.

  • AWS
  • Spring Boot
  • Angular

Legal Case Management

Exploring RAG retrieval with Amazon Bedrock knowledge bases for legal document management. Work in progress.

  • Bedrock
  • RAG
  • AI

Static Site Generator

Infrastructure-as-code approach to static site deployment. Terraform + Bash scripts for repeatable AWS deployments.

  • Terraform
  • AWS
  • IaC

How I Work Today

AI-Assisted Development

My current coding assistant is Claude Code Max. I typically have 2-3 projects open simultaneously, switching contexts as needed while maintaining focus on each workstream.

Spec-Driven Development

I use GitHub Spec Kit for spec-driven development. It's token-intensive, but I find implementations are more accurate once I've updated the plan, specs, and tasks upfront.

Exploring Sub-Agents

I've started experimenting with sub-agents — using them in basic ways for now, but actively learning how to run them concurrently and optimize my workflows. Always looking for ways to compound productivity gains.

When I'm Not Coding

Family & Coaching

My kids are 8, 10, and 11. I coach my oldest and youngest kids' soccer teams. Finding the right work-life balance is important to me — only 6 years until college, and I want to make the most of them.

Outdoors

Three annual trips: a week of skiing in February, 3-4 days camping at the lake the first weekend of October, and summers in Lake Tahoe — where we were married. I try to take 2 weeks off and work remotely another 2.

Always Learning

Reading, exploring new technologies, and building side projects at night. Always interested in learning new concepts.