Well-rounded software engineering director. I build collaborative, effective engineering teams and help develop leaders, all in service of making great products people love.
I foster a supportive environment, where being open and vulnerable leads to deeper connections, growth from taking risks, and a stronger team overall.
Head of Engineering - Craft.co, Seattle, WA
Feb 2022 - current
Leading the entire 40+ person global engineering and IT organization.
Delivery and Impact
- Defined and executed the engineering vision and strategy.
- Delivered flagship B2B and Consumer applications and API with weekly releases and entire new feature areas with a distributed team in the US, South America, and Europe.
- Established engineering performance metrics and KPIs.
Team Building
- Partnered with Recruiting and led engineering in overhauling recruiting practices to streamline and land great candidates. 90%+ offer acceptance rate.
- Grew engineering org from 20 to 40+ engineers on the journey from Series A to Series B and beyond.
- Championed increasing diversity through recruiting and organizational practices.
- Zero regrettable attrition in 18 month tenure.
Technical Efficiency
- Set the technical strategy focusing on delivering business value and engineering excellence.
- Drove or sponsored projects that reduced costs by six figures and saved several weeks of engineering time.
- Partnered with Product, Design, and Customer Success to become empathetic with our customers and ensure we’re building the best application possible.
Director of Engineering - Craft.co, Seattle, WA
Jul 2021 - Feb 2022
Building fundamental features and processes and putting in the infrastructure foundation to scale engineering and product usage 10x. First US engineering hire. Responsible for 3 teams: SaaS enterprise product, Growth/Consumer, and Platform / DevOps / Security / IT.
For the global engineering org
- Recruited and hired a diverse North American engineering org across multiple dimensions. 100% offers accepted.
- Wrote the incident response plan, in partnership with Customer Success
- Rolled out global on-call support to all engineers, including research, training, and extensive support documentation
- Set up a Help Desk ticketing system for IT, Security, and bug reports.
- Overhauled the engineering level descriptions to be more granular to set clearer expectations and facilitate career conversations
- Overhauled onboarding guide used by all new engineering hires.
- Led a regular global engineering leads meeting to provide support and peer mentorship to each other
As full-stack engineering chapter lead
- Regularly facilitated chapter meetings, providing an opportunity for engineers to lead tech talks, reviewing proposals, and discuss technical and process topics.
- Membership grew from 5 to 12 engineers globally representing 5 countries.
- I set the technical roadmap and priorities, incorporating feedback from each member.
Also acted as the engineering manager from Oct 2020 to Jul 2021.
Software Development Manager - PayScale, Seattle, WA
Jan 2018 - Feb 2020
Led software development of SaaS business applications in Seattle. Led two distributed full-stack teams across 3 products and directly managed 7 engineers.
Focus was on leading development of a cloud-based pay cycle administration product. It was halfway through a complete rewrite when I was asked to take it over. Led the team to complete core functionality and address key performance, security, and stability issues while increasing test coverage and reducing the support cost.
Worked cross-team to create roadmaps balancing product and engineering needs. Delivered changes with the biggest impact while minimizing development cost.
Mentored managers across the company, including outside of engineering, and consistently received feedback that it made a positive impact in their leadership.
Designed and built a custom version of a flagship product, including migrating thousands of accounts to a new platform. I drove the project end-to-end, working directly with stakeholders at one of PayScale’s largest customers.
I served my team by encouraging leadership, collaboration, and personal initiative. Nurturing their development through regular 1:1s, career planning, and new experiences.
Software Development Manager - PayScale, Seattle, WA
Jan 2016 - Jan 2018
Led a team of 4 engineers responsible for serving ~3 million unique pages to tens of millions of visitors on payscale.com.
Increased front-end and server-side performance (nearly 2x faster).
Organized quarterly hack days, over a 3 year period, for the entire engineering org; many projects led to features in production.
Led the team in
- Adding unique content that scales to millions of pages using, for example, PayScale survey data, user-generated content, machine learning, and public data sources.
- Splitting a monolithic application into independent components
- A/B testing features and SEO improvements.
- Building games for cleaning and classifying data.
Web Architect - PayScale, Seattle, WA
Aug 2014 - Jan 2016
Principal-level role in charge of the front-end platform for all products.
Led adoption of React, Webpack, ES6, Sass. Set standards and the front-end roadmap. Promoted best practices.
Scaled the public site serving millions of pages each month using AWS CloudFront, S3, WAF, HAProxy.
Managed 1 engineer and 1 intern, mentored other engineers.
Senior Software Engineer - PayScale, Seattle, WA
May 2011 - Aug 2014
As a full-stack developer on SaaS business products I built major new features and overhauled existing services.
Identified a new source of revenue and created a brand new type of job. Presented my side project, web chat, to multiple levels of management across Product Development, Marketing, and Sales teams, convincing them to create a new division within Sales. I personally piloted chat directly with potential customers, contributing to $180,000+ in new opportunities over a two-week period.
Senior Software Engineer - Myspace, Seattle, WA
Oct 2010 - May 2011
Developed OpenSocial REST web services and APIs, including core functionality such as adding comments and accepting friend requests.
Software Design Engineer - Microsoft, Redmond, WA
Aug 2004 - Sept 2010
Developed primarily user-facing features on Bing Book Search v1.0, Academic Search v2.0, and Windows Vista/7/8. On Internet Explorer 9, I added fundamental HTML5 and SVG features such as SVG Gradient and contributed to GPU-accelerated rendering.
Education
University of California, Santa Cruz
BS & MS, Computer Science
Skills
- Leading distributed product development teams
- Leadership development, mentoring
- Agile Scrum and Kanban, scrum master
- Technical: C#, .Net Core, C++, React, TypeScript / JavaScript, Node.js, Html, Css, Amazon Web Services / AWS, Microsoft Azure, CI/CD, Service-oriented architecture / Microservices, DevOps, Project Management
- Working with diverse stakeholders
- Effective communication and writing