Joseph Schenck

Resume Projects

I'm a Director of Software Engineering at Nasdaq, running the team behind our design system and frontend platform, which 40+ products and roughly 300 engineers build on. Eight years here, with three promotions and then a lateral move that took me from individual contributor to Director.

My approach is pragmatic. Platforms should make the right thing easy. Performance and accessibility belong in shared infrastructure rather than in consuming apps. Shipped software beats clever abstractions. I work in React, TypeScript, and Web Components day-to-day, and I build the MCP server and agents my team ships with.

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Experience

• Director, Software Engineering at Nasdaq

  June 2022 - Present
  • Built the team from zero. Won executive headcount approval, ran the full hiring loop, and set up the performance review and career progression process for frontend engineering at Nasdaq. Lead a cross-functional team of 9, and coached two senior engineers into leadership roles.
  • Lead a platform adopted across the company without a mandate. A Lit core and a React library at full parity, 76 components each, shipped as versioned NPM packages under semantic-version contracts so each product upgrades on its own cadence. Adoption doubled each of the last three years, and consuming teams report greenfield projects dropping from ~18 months to ~6.
  • Wrote and maintain an MCP server and custom agents for everyone working on the design system. They ship as a versioned NPM package and are tool-agnostic, so Claude Code, Copilot, and Codex read the same definitions.
  • Built the agentic review pipeline. A worker agent makes the change, specialist agents audit accessibility, brand guidelines, and API-contract consistency, and a Playwright loop checks the result in a real browser before a person reviews it.
  • Shipped the AI primitives product teams build on: the AI Tag with Explainability Popover and a Chat surface.
  • Own render performance and bundle size for the shared packages, and brought every production component to WCAG AA, which keeps accessibility in the platform instead of in each app.

• Software Developer Senior Specialist at Nasdaq

  June 2021 - June 2022
  • Owned technical strategy for the design system platform as the senior IC leader, before it became its own engineering team.
  • Built a framework-agnostic web component SDK (Lit, D3.js, SASS, TypeScript) that let any consuming stack use the platform without rewrites, reducing framework lock-in across the company.
  • Drove React component library adoption by embedding with product teams as they converted legacy applications to modern stacks, running multiple migrations in parallel.

• Software Developer Specialist at Nasdaq

  December 2019 - June 2021
  • Led development of Nasdaq's enterprise-wide component library (ReactJS, Redux, StyledComponents, D3.js), taking it past its first 2-3 pilot products.
  • Established the inter-team collaboration and inner-source contribution model that the design system platform was later built on.
  • Built and operated automated package deployment and consumption pipelines: a versioned SDK distribution model with semantic-version contracts to consumers.
  • Set up unit, integration, and end-to-end testing (Jest, React Testing Library, Playwright) across the library, reaching 90%+ coverage and cutting production frontend defects.

• Senior Software Developer at Nasdaq

  February 2018 - December 2019
  • Joined Nasdaq on the NFF Risk Platform, partnering with product and engineering leads to turn customer requirements into system designs and frontend implementation.
  • Built the platform's UI component library and design system from scratch (ReactJS, Redux, Sass, D3.js), on an application that took live data over SSE and WebSockets.
  • The UI library was spun out company-wide to become the Nasdaq Experience Framework, the design system platform 40+ products build on today, built to handle streaming data the same way.

• Software Engineer II at Pacific Medical Data Solutions

  August 2017 - February 2018

  Led front-end design and development of healthcare data applications, built prototype applications in Angular, MySQL, and C#, and collaborated on scope documents and requirements across internal teams.

• Front-End Developer at Faction Media

  August 2016 - July 2017

  Built responsive user interfaces from design files using React, Sass, and Node.js, with a focus on modular JavaScript architecture and UI/UX best practices.

• Freelance Web Developer

  May 2014 - August 2016

  Delivered responsive websites and custom WordPress themes for clients, managing end-to-end delivery from scope through deployment.

Education

• Louisiana State University

  May 2016

  Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering

  Minor: Business Administration

Projects

• Nasdaq Experience Framework Component Library

  

  The Nasdaq Experience Framework (NEF) is the reference implementation of the NEF Design System.

  It ships as two libraries at full parity, 76 components each: a Lit core in TypeScript and Sass for use from any framework, and a React library. Both are documented in public Storybooks, with upgrade guides from v2 through v5.

• SpeakBits

  2024 - 2025
  

  SpeakBits was a social news aggregation, content rating, and forum social network. Built as an alternative to Reddit after seeing user discontent with the platform, designed around moderation transparency and user empowerment.

  On top of the standard set of features, it provided a sortition moderation system, forced group moderation transparency, automatic image and video compression, and automatic article summarization.

  Built with Next.js, TypeScript, Express.js, PostgreSQL, Redis, and BullMQ.