Samuel Smith — smlksmth

02 In Brief

Event-operations leader with eight years running world-class festivals and venues, paired with hands-on software engineering practice. I sit at the seam between operations and technology in the evolving live-events landscape — building the systems and running the rooms.

03 Software Engineering

ERIN

Jun 2024 — Present

Software Engineer · Pittsburgh, PA

Designed and shipped a new ATS integration service spanning Greenhouse, Workday, and iCIMS — replacing a legacy third-party provider and cutting $80,000/year of vendor cost.
Own the referral-processing pipeline (AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, API Gateway) running candidate workflows for 40+ enterprise clients at ~15K events/day.
Built full-stack features in React and Node integrating with client HR ecosystems over REST and SOAP — including the client self-onboarding flow and hiring-manager status webhooks.
Tuned production reliability on AWS (EC2 + serverless) — cut referral-pipeline p95 latency from 1.8s to 320ms and absorbed 4× traffic growth without scaling spend.

BNY Mellon

Apr 2023 — Jun 2024

Software Engineer · Pittsburgh, PA

Shipped financial-services applications on the platforms custodying roughly 20% of the world's investible assets — Java, Spring Boot, microservices over Oracle.
Built secure APIs and Oracle transaction flows moving ~400K transactions/day worth ~$20B in notional across BNY settlement platforms with no data-integrity incidents.
Rolled out automated deploys and a code-review discipline that moved release cadence from biweekly to weekly and cut deploy time from ~3 hours to ~20 minutes.
Stood up Kubernetes services with Kafka and MQ for high-volume financial-data ingest — peak throughput of ~10K msgs/sec.

04 Event Operations

Freelance — Festivals & Live Events

2022 — Present

Box Office · Ticketing · Access Control

2026X Games — Box Office Manager · Aspen, CO
2025Soundstorm — Internal Ticketing Manager · Riyadh, KSA
2025X Games — Box Office Manager · Salt Lake City, UT
2025SmokeSlam — Box Office Manager · Memphis, TN
'24/'25Railbird Music Festival — Access Control & Box Office · Lexington, KY
'22–'24Four Chord Music Festival — Ticketing & Access Control Manager · Pittsburgh, PA
'22/'23Imagine Music Festival — Assistant Box Office Manager · Atlanta, GA
2022Mempho Music Festival — Box Office & Access Control · Memphis, TN
2022Louder than Life — Box Office & Access Control · Louisville, KY
2022Soundstorm — Satellite Ticketing Manager · Riyadh, KSA

Lennd

Nov 2021 — Dec 2022

Client Success Manager · Pittsburgh, PA

Owned a portfolio of 15 event clients running Lennd's operations platform — onboarding, credentialing workflows, and on-event support through the full event lifecycle.
Brought operator perspective into product reviews — credentialing, gate, and workflow features benefited from someone who'd actually run them at scale.

Patron Technology

Jan 2019 — Nov 2021

Sr. Event Operations Manager · Pittsburgh, PA

Ran on-site event technology for flagship clients — Burning Man, New York Comic Con, Ultra Music Festival, NFL, NBA — kiosks, POS, and access-control infrastructure across ~30 productions/year.
Co-led the product rollout of self-service kiosks, next-gen access-control hardware, and a custom-built box-office POS — operator voice inside the product team, then deploying the same systems in the field.
Trained client operations teams across formats — on-site, structured workshops, and a knowledge base I built and maintained.
Authored the technical playbooks field teams and clients still use for on-event deployments.

ShowClix

Mar 2015 — Jan 2019

Event Operations Manager · Pittsburgh, PA

Ran ~25 live events a year on the ShowClix ticketing stack — on-site deployments, escalation point, and event-day operations from gate-open through teardown.
Owned event budgets and supervised contractor crews of up to 25, both remote and on-site.
First responder for the long tail of weird tickets — patched issues on the fly, then fed the lessons back to Product and Support.

05 Practice

Credential management · Ticketing & box office · Onsite planning & execution · Access control · Technical system documentation · Feature development · Software configuration · Implementation · Training & enablement · Event management

Samuel Smith.