Movr is more than just a fitness app; it is a “movement health” platform designed to assess individual biomechanics and prescribe personalized corrective exercises.
In 2024, I joined the team as the Principal Engineer, reporting directly to the CTO. Unlike previous roles where my focus was often purely on shipping features, my mandate at Movr was broader: to mature the engineering practices, solidify the architecture, and ensure the platform was robust enough to handle rapid scaling and enterprise partnerships.
Operating as a Principal Engineer meant constantly zooming in and out. One hour I might be deep in the weeds of a complex database query, and the next I would be in a strategic meeting discussing the roadmap for the next quarter.
Working directly under the CTO allowed me to have a significant impact on high-level decisions. We weren’t just writing code; we were designing the factory that produces the code. My goal was to create an environment where features could be delivered quickly without sacrificing stability or increasing technical debt.
A major part of my work involved optimizing our cloud infrastructure. We leaned heavily into a Serverless architecture using AWS Lambda.
We used DynamoDB as our primary data store. NoSQL offers incredible performance, but it requires disciplined access patterns. I worked on optimizing our data models to ensure that as our user base grew, our query latency remained low. This involved restructuring how we stored user sessions and workout history to prevent “hot partitions” and ensure efficient retrieval.
Technology is only as good as the team and processes behind it. A significant portion of my energy went into strengthening the “internal product”—the developer experience.
I championed a shift toward full test coverage. We moved away from the idea that testing is a “nice to have” and integrated it into the core definition of done. By implementing rigorous unit and integration tests, we gave the team the confidence to refactor complex logic without fear of breaking existing functionality.
To maintain high velocity, we automated everything we could. I helped refine our CI/CD pipelines (using GitHub Actions) to ensure that code was automatically linted, tested, and deployed. This reduced the “deployment anxiety” that often plagues teams and allowed us to release updates to users multiple times a week.
I believe that a senior engineer’s job is to make themselves redundant by sharing knowledge. I spent time creating detailed technical documentation and standard operating procedures (SOPs). This wasn’t just about “how to run the code,” but “why we built it this way,” ensuring that future engineers could understand the architectural decisions we made.
My time at Movr was a masterclass in balancing immediate product needs with long-term technical health. We successfully delivered critical features to end-users—improving their movement health—while simultaneously rebuilding the engine in flight.
Leaving the codebase cleaner, faster, and more robust than I found it is always my goal, and at Movr, I believe we achieved exactly that.
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