Rand Seay

More About Me

I'm a software engineer with a passion for solving complex problems and building innovative applications. Like many, my path into building software was a slightly atypical one. I am self taught, and find immense satisfaction in the process of learning new things. As a result, I have a wide range of hobbies and interests.

First and foremost I am a husband and father, and take every opportunity I can to connect with my family. I love backpacking, hiking, and camping. I'm an avid reader, and enjoy science fiction and fantasy. I'm a hobby woodworker, I cook as much as possible, and I love playing sports such as basketball and ultimate frisbee.

My Professional Journey

My formal education is from the University of North Dakota, where I received my Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design & New Art Media. After a successful start as a graphic designer at a local ad agency, I wanted badly to create a portfolio site for myself, so I dove headlong into learning web development.

Passionate about my new craft, I took a position with the North Dakota University System Core Technology Services as a Web Applications Developer in 2013. Additionally, I became a father and co-founded a development and design firm the same year. Besides full stack development and IT Consulting, we helped clients through designing logos, building websites, and establishing their brands.

As of January 2016, while we were expecting our third child, I began working remotely as a front-end engineer at Kaggle, where I was an early contributor towards the vision of helping to make data science accessible to everyone. In this role I worked on and cared for front-end architecture, delivered features, and spearheaded responsive design tooling and techniques.

After Kaggle was acquired by Google Cloud in March 2017, I remained on board in my role within the community engineering team. I worked on features such as discussions, administrator tooling, documentation, and authentication flows.

As the world was shutting down in April 2020, I transferred within Google Cloud to the BigQuery UI team, where I contributed to the SQL-like workbench that data analysts use to interact with their data warehouse. At this point in time my wife and I moved our family to the greater Seattle area.

After nearly five years with Google, I left to rejoin the startup world and have since found a home as the lead front end engineer at Dispel. Dispel enables professionals to manage zero-trust remote access to their industrial networks. We protect critical infrastructure through the use of end-to-end encryption, moving target defense, and resilient infrastructure.