Steve Regester
Engineering Manager
Southwest Washington | Portland Metro Area | Remote-friendly
Summary
Engineering manager with 15 years building software, including security products - malware research tooling at Lookout, the crowdsourced pentesting platform at Synack, and AI-driven binary analysis at Delphos Labs. Since 2021 I have led small, remote, asynchronous engineering teams at two companies: Studylog Systems, a pharma-research software company, and Delphos Labs, an AI security startup. I hire for talent over experience, set roadmap with stakeholders by cutting each ask to its minimum valuable version, and coach engineers toward independence. Most recently a founding engineer at DesignForge AI, which shut down in October 2026; now moving back into engineering leadership.
Leadership Highlights
- Managed a team of three engineers at Studylog Systems and again at Delphos Labs: hired, ran performance reviews, and set roadmap with stakeholders.
- Led fully remote, asynchronous teams and ran biweekly 1:1s with my direct reports.
- Negotiated roadmap with stakeholders by cutting each ask to its minimum valuable implementation, shipping it with quality, then iterating (yes / no / wait).
- Hired for talent over experience using a staged, conversational problem-solving interview. One of my reports later followed me to my next company.
- Coached an engineer from frequent review feedback to pull requests that needed none.
Experience
Founding Engineer - DesignForge AI
| May 2026 - Oct 2026- Built an Electron desktop application that drives Ansys HFSS electromagnetic simulation through an LLM agent interface, on the Anthropic API and Claude Agent SDK.
Founding / Staff Software Engineer - Delphos Labs
| Jul 2024 - Mar 2026First engineer at a VC- and In-Q-Tel-backed cybersecurity company using AI to automate binary reverse engineering; managed a team of three.
- Managed a team of three engineers: hired, ran performance reviews, and set roadmap with stakeholders.
- Hired and mentored engineers, ran code review, and established security-first development practices.
- Led the design of the platform architecture - SaaS product, database, and API layer - and the build of the distributed pipeline (Celery, RabbitMQ) that runs reverse-engineering workloads reliably at scale.
- Delivered the analyst-facing product in React Router v7 / Remix, including real-time dashboards, in partnership with security researchers who turned manual reverse-engineering workflows into reviewable, automated artifacts.
- Built AWS infrastructure from scratch with Terraform, plus CI/CD, feature flags, and observability.
Software Engineer - Descript
| Mar 2024 - Jul 2024- Monetization engineering for a widely used audio and video editing product - implemented in-app paywalls and subscription upgrade flows.
Director of Engineering - Studylog Systems
| Aug 2021 - Oct 2023Led all web and cloud engineering at a pharma-research software company: managed a team of three, recruited and mentored engineers, and set roadmap with stakeholders.
- Managed a team of three engineers: hired, ran performance reviews, and set roadmap with stakeholders.
- Led the cloud-native rewrite of a flagship Windows product into a performant, accessible web platform (Node.js, React) for pharmaceutical-research customers, on AWS infrastructure built with Terraform, Helm, and Kubernetes.
- Took the platform through a rigorous third-party security audit and the company's first SOC 2.
- Drove a >50% reduction in coding errors in one year through technical training, QA process, and routine code review.
- Led adoption of agile practices, reducing project delays and improving morale.
Senior Software Engineer II - Synack
| Apr 2016 - Mar 2021Lead engineer rebuilding key product verticals of a crowdsourced security-testing platform.
- Rebuilt the interfaces for top product verticals, increasing user engagement >60% in under a year.
- Established internal coding standards and style guides adopted across the engineering team.
Co-Founder & CTO - Ultimatum, Inc.
| Sep 2015 - Jul 2019- Co-founded and built a crowd-fundraising platform that triggered automated donations to 501(c)(3) nonprofits from real-world events.
Senior Software Engineer, Team Lead - Lookout
| Apr 2013 - Apr 2016Lead frontend engineer building workflows and tools for the team discovering and analyzing Android malware.
- Built custom research tooling that doubled the security-research team's productivity in under a year.
- Authored the open-source OraculumJS and FactoryJS frameworks.
Software Engineer - PBworks
| Oct 2011 - Mar 2013- Generalist building features and interfaces for cloud document management; performance and cross-browser test work.
Earlier: Backbone.js consultant at Plug.dj (2012-2013); Software Engineer at Arrowhead Electronic Healthcare (2010-2011); Sr. Software Developer at Infrahealth (2009-2010); founding member of ATX Hackerspace (2009-2011).
Skills
Management: Engineering management, hiring, performance reviews, roadmap planning, stakeholder management, mentoring and coaching, biweekly 1:1s, remote and asynchronous team management, agile, code review, SOC 2 compliance.
Technical: JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, React, Node.js, PostgreSQL, AWS, GCP, Terraform, Kubernetes, LLM agent tooling (Anthropic API, Claude Agent SDK), Supabase (Postgres, pgvector; personal projects), Linear, and Slack.
Writing: Essays on software, craft, and AI at egeste.net/blog.