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 - Feb 2024
Craft (Series B) helps organizations reduce risks in their supply chain.
Led the 40+ person global engineering and IT organization.
Delivery and Impact
- Delivered flagship B2B SaaS and Consumer apps and API with weekly releases. Gained SOC2 compliance.
- Launched v1 freemium product which converted paying customers.
- Oversaw development of the data platform to enable data scientists and analysts to build AI / ML models from 50+ data sources.
- Gained buy-in for a reusable technical solution I proposed that unblocked a $2M deal while reducing development and support costs by $x00,000s annually.
- Defined and executed the engineering strategy and roadmap aligned with business goals.
Technical Efficiency
- Drove or oversaw projects that slashed development costs by $200,000+ and saved weeks of engineering time annually.
- Established performance metrics and KPIs. Examples: reduced data support costs by 75%, and CI/CD time by 50%.
- Hands-on coding to make small features and targeted improvements to address bug hotspots using React, JS/TS, node.
Team Building
- Built a diverse global team, scaling from 20 to 40+ engineers, with nearly zero regrettable attrition.
- Overhauled hiring practices in partnership with Recruiting to improve velocity & candidate experience, achieving a ~90% offer acceptance rate.
- Turned around an engineering org with high attrition and low morale; boosted one team’s NPS health score by +30.
Director of Engineering - Craft.co, Seattle, WA
Oct 2020 - Feb 2022
As the first U.S. engineering hire, laid the groundwork for scaling engineering and product usage by 10x, overseeing SaaS enterprise, Growth / Consumer, and Platform / DevOps / Security / IT teams.
For the global engineering org
- Built a diverse North American engineering org, growing from 1 to 15 engineers and 3 teams.
- Partnered with Customer Success to establish the incident response process and SLA.
- Rolled out global on-call support to all engineers with training, and playbooks.
- Set up a Help Desk ticket system for IT, customer bugs, and security. Tracked SLAs and used the data to make targeted improvements to reduce support cost while improving responsiveness.
- Overhauled level descriptions, setting clear expectations. Created tools to facilitate career conversations.
- Revamped onboarding guide as well as added setup automation so new engineers can push code on day 1.
As full-stack engineering chapter lead
- Set the technical roadmap for the application platform. Oversaw projects to increase engineering excellence and productivity.
- Facilitated chapter meetings, promoting knowledge sharing through tech talks and proposal reviews.
- Hands-on coding for small features and developer productivity improvements.
Software Development Manager - PayScale, Seattle, WA
Jan 2018 - Feb 2020
PayScale is an HR tech startup with B2C and B2B products that helps people get paid fairly.
Led software development of SaaS business apps in Seattle, with two distributed full-stack teams across 3 core products.
Delivered a v1 cloud-based pay cycle administration app. Completed core functionality and addressed key performance, security, and stability issues while increasing test coverage and reducing the support cost.
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.
Technologies include TypeScript/JavaScript, React, C#, .Net Core, Azure and AWS, a bit of node.js, and lots of unit and integration tests.
Software Development Manager - PayScale, Seattle, WA
Jan 2016 - Jan 2018
Led the team responsible for serving ~3 million unique data-driven pages to tens of millions of visitors.
In addition, I scaled the site to support the traffic using AWS CloudFront, S3, WAF, HAProxy.
Organized quarterly hack days for 3 years, leading to production features. My own hack day project led to $180,000+ in new opportunities and sparked a transformation of the sales org.
Earlier roles
- Principal Software Engineer / Web Architect — PayScale, 2014 - 2016
- Senior Software Engineer — PayScale, 2011 - 2014
- Senior Software Engineer — Myspace, 2010 - 2011
- Software Design Engineer — Microsoft, 2004 - 2010
Education
University of California, Santa Cruz
BS & MS, Computer Science
Skills
- Leading distributed teams
- Working with diverse stakeholders
- Leadership development, mentoring, mediation
- 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
- Agile Scrum and Kanban, scrum master
- Effective communication and writing
Volunteering
School PTA
President, 2020-2021
Board member, 2018-2020