Engineering leader with 20+ years of experience, including 15 years in global team leadership (25-250 individuals). Proven expertise in building high-performing engineering and product organizations, and fostering talent through effective hiring and coaching. I am passionate about technology, regularly code and blog, and provide technical guidance to my teams. Seeking a long-term opportunity that provides professional growth and drives organizational success.
| ACTO: Canada, USA, India, Brazil |
2020 – 2023 |
| Vice President Product and Engineering |
• Worked with the executive team to design streamlined metric and goal setting programs for the company. Improved strategic processes and customer interaction by strengthening/codifying repeatable Roadmap processes. Produced configurable JIRA-based issue and product reports that were accurate, available, current, and supported customer-facing teams.
• Substantially improved product quality and operations by creating product-centric teams, implementing rigorous development practices, and improving communication. Reduced customer-reported bugs by 50% in six months.
• Strengthened ACTO’s engineering team by recruiting 25 skilled professionals globally, improving architectural stability and processes while reducing cost per engineer by 40%.
• Revamped Product Management by setting clear standards, coaching PMs on role fundamentals, mentoring leaders on proactive management, and aligning work with OKRs. I achieved biweekly releases, quarterly roadmaps, and 100% JIRA standardization with documentation and metrics in six months.
| Science Exchange: USA, Serbia |
2018 – 2020 |
| Vice President Engineering |
• Revitalized engineering team morale and delivery consistency through coaching, mentoring, and strategic senior hires, fostering a culture of ownership, Agile best practices. Doubled team size within six months, achieving over 85% successful completion of sprint stories. CEO described engineering as performing “the best she’s ever seen”.
• Consulted with AWS representatives to prototype ML-based solutions for contract identification and scoping and customer assistance.
• Streamlined projects by prioritizing company requirements, clarifying critical fixes with Product, establishing issue identification processes, and implementing key solutions. Produced meaningful results on a struggling long-term project within three weeks.
• Optimized project delivery by coaching Product Managers on MVPs and phased deliveries, resulting in quicker, repeatable deliveries, reduced operational engagement, shortened project timelines by months, increased successful sprint deliveries, and enhanced customer value per delivery.
| AppDirect: USA, Canada, India, Argentina |
2015 – 2017 |
| Head of Engineering |
• Led Dev/QA/Release. AppDirect develops middleware for lifecycle management of SAAS products, such as Office 365, Google Docs, Box, etc. Customers included Comcast, Rogers, and Vodafone.
• Managed rapid scaling of engineering post-Series D funding($100 million), orchestrating hiring and on-boarding plans, defining new organizational structure, coaching leaders, and expanding from 60 to 250 engineers across USA, Canada, India, and Argentina offices, achieving 25% cost savings by transitioning from consultants to full-time staff overseas.
• Championed a transition to a services architecture by securing executive buy-in, conducting technical investigations, prototyping, and scaling to a Kubernetes-based system with 50 services across 15 clusters, enhancing scalability, reliability, and reducing engineering cognitive load.
• Implemented an approach to manage technical debt by documenting critical issues, securing executive buy-in, establishing a 20% tech debt budget, and enacting dedicated sprints. Ensured continuous reduction of debt while addressing usability, security, scalability, and product impacts.
• Set up metric gathering (OKRs) on build/release/QA processes to illuminate progress and drive decision making. Redefined the QA/Dev team relationship to ensure that all team members fully understood and contributed to AppDirect’s quality standards
| Salesforce.com: USA, France |
2009 – 2014 |
| Director Content and Mobile |
• Led a long-term initiative to re-architect the Content product, transitioning to a consistent, scalable queue-based architecture, enhancing development efficiency and feature implementation speed.
Created a completely new product, Chatter Desktop (think: Slack desktop), evangelized it to execs, and built a team to develop it. This became very successful, as Salesforce’s highest DAU app.
• Technical lead for strategic acquisition efforts in the Content space, evaluating companies across multiple countries, recommending and successfully integrating DimDim, Stypi, and EntropySoft post $20+ million investment to bolster engineering expertise and market presence.
• Orchestrated the server-side mobile strategy by creating a denormalized REST API and implementing Mobile Back End As A Service (MbaaS) functionality, including vendor-independent notification, caching, and geo-fencing features at enterprise scale and security levels.
| Adobe Systems: USA, Germany, India |
2006 – 2009 |
| Lead, Architect Mobile Services |
• Architect for team of 15 engineers. Investigated and resolved memory, performance, and security issues. Designed and implemented front and back-end modules.
• Talked with customers to gather requirements and feedback. Authored PRD requirements, and specifications. Produced five successful customer releases in two years.
• C++, Java, and ActionScript development for mobile authoring (part of Adobe Creative Suite) and associated components. Designed and implemented SOAP/REST APIs.
Additional experience not shown
| Education |
Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, CA: BS in Computer Science, with honors
Stanford University: Postgraduate studies in Computer Graphics and Digital Signal Processing
| Patents |
| Blog: Software Engineering Leadership and Management |
Technical Projects
Personal Apps released to the iOS AppStore 2015-2016: ClipCollage, Attack Wing Probabilities, X-Wing Probabilities, Tap and Roll, Tap and Flip
github: flyinacres