AppDirect, San Francisco; Montreal; Buenos Aires; Pune

Head of Engineering, 2015–2017

Managed Dev/QA/Release for fast-growing enterprise SAAS startup. AppDirect develops and integrates middleware that allows customers to find, buy, and manage SAAS software, such as Office 365, Google Docs, Box, etc.

  • Hired 100+ engineers in the United States, Canada, India, Germany, and Argentina. Managed recruiting team and worked with them to define job reqs and the interview process. Collaborated with engineering leaders to fine-tune technical challenges, screening, and the interview process to get consistent, actionable feedback on all candidates, maintaining high quality across all locations. Worked with engineers to create better onboarding/training materials and processes. Personally interviewed senior technical and management candidates.
  • Managed team of 300+ Dev and QA engineers through transition from startup to enterprise SAAS company. Organized team into a structure of 30 hierarchical teams under 20+ engineering leaders. Mentored new engineering leaders in areas such as leadership, management, decision making, and processes. 
  • Final reviewer for code check-ins, database change management, and out-of-cycle hot fixes. Evangelized best practices, addressing tech debt and microservice architecture. Improved QA and release processes. Guided tech advisory groups in various areas (architectural, Agile, QA, etc.). Sponsored and participated in Hack Days.
  • Aligned with execs to determine the best methods to implement decisions. 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. 
  • Regularly traveled to remote offices to share information and receive feedback directly from my engineers. Tracked morale and worked with the team to boost engineering confidence and ownership.

Salesforce.com, San Francisco; Santa Monica; Paris

Director Files and Mobile, 2009-2014

Files team built enterprise-scale document management infrastructure and apps and handled hundreds of millions of docs. Mobile team produced infrastructure for mobile connection, syncing, geocoding, and push notifications. 

  • Built teams from scratch to address new opportunities, and inherited and scaled existing teams. Successfully integrated acquired teams and their technologies (Redis, Node.js, MongoDB) into Salesforce. Mentored engineers and managers. Provided coaching on Agile processes and fostered strong cross-team collaboration.
  • Worked with teams to develop effective testing, documentation, monitoring/metrics, production issue handling, and release processes within a Scrum framework. Successfully addressed adoption of new technologies, rewrites of key components, and integration between internal and external systems, all in Agile methodology.
  • Worked closely with execs, PM, QE, user experience, performance, legal, compliance, tech ops, and security teams on new products, acquisitions, major application and SAAS releases, and customer issues. 
  • Technical expert for numerous due diligence investigations of acquisitions and vendor selections (build vs. buy decisions). Represented Salesforce in India (Dimdim),Paris (EntropySoft), and the US (Stypi) in technical investigations: grilled management, interviewed staff, analyzed products/architecture, and reported findings to company executives.  Managed and integrated acquired teams into Salesforce architecture and culture.
  • Worked with patent team on the analysis of issued patents, their relevancy, and possible extensions. Granted multiple patents for mobile, rich client, security, and server-side technologies. 
  • Sat on and chaired architectural committees for the review of mobile, applications, and company technologies.   

Adobe Systems Inc., San Francisco; Hamburg; Noida

Lead, Architect, 2006-2009

FlashCast was a combination of a server-side Java-based content delivery service, flash-based mobile runtime, and development tools for content creation.

  • Engineering lead for full-stack mobile app development tool. Gathered requirements, wrote specifications/PRD, worked with management on resource and project planning. Brought teams in Germany and India into the project.  Traveled to engineering sites for training, integration, and management of project. Coordinated work with business groups, including UI design, client, server, documentation, support, marketing, and management. Produced five successful customer releases in two years.
  • Architect for team of 15 engineers. Solved performance and security issues. Mentored junior engineers.
  • Gathered requirements and feedback from internal and external customers. Played lead role in PRD process, authoring requirements, and specifications. Prioritized team assignments and performed Scrum Master role.
  • C++, Java, and ActionScript development for mobile authoring (part of Adobe Creative Suite) and associated components. Designed and implemented SOAP API (Java/Weblogic/Axis WSDL stack).

NetDeposit, San Mateo

Lead, Staff Engineer, 2004–2006

NetDeposit provided transaction servers to the financial industry. Led team in Agile development and maintenance of key servers and advised on standards and strategy for engineering division.

  • Created hiring process and staffed up team. Enacted a long-term training/mentorship program to introduce new hires to NetDeposit standards and quickly improve productivity. Produced yearly reviews for team. 
  • Led team in the planning of new features and development against requirements: technical expert for QA, domain analysts, and customers. Investigated new technologies and performed gap analysis on requirements. Served as best practices/Agile expert for the engineering organization.   Lead Java engineer for several server products.

Groxis, Inc., Sausalito

Lead, 2002-2004

Groxis was an early-stage startup with a rich information visualization solution. The company won DEMO 2003, raised more than $11.5M in VC, and had more than 1 million users.

  • Responsible for user interaction design and implementation (Java, JavaScript) and general functionality. Met regularly with company officers/backers to discuss design and strategy for the product. Created and presented proposals for new designs.   

Avolent, Inc., San Francisco

Manager, Architect, 2000–2002

Avolent provided electronic billing and settlement solutions. Led a team of senior engineers in the development of system management applications.   

  • Ran a high-performance Agile/XP team. Defined, scheduled, and assigned tasks. Led team meetings, worked with management, evangelized the team’s work. Exceeded management expectations by beating deadlines, delivering on all requirements, and satisfying difficult customers. 
  • Architect for Avolent’s system management infrastructure. Java-based MVC system featured a Java Bean hierarchy that represented the underlying data model—an XML-specified graphics subsystem supporting Swing GUI, CLI, and XML/HTML—and a framework for flow control and general functionality. Gathered requirements from customers, produced specifications, and designed APIs.

Treseq, Inc., Santa Clara

Co-Founder, Lead Engineer, 1997–1999

Treseq was a twelve-person startup focused on developing one of the industry’s first fully programmable network processors. Nortel Networks purchased Treseq, Inc. for $15M in August 1998.

Education

Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, California

B.S. Computer Science, with honors

Stanford University

Postgraduate study in Computer Graphics and Digital Signal Processing

Patents

Asynchronous Testing of Applications

8,271,837
Issued Sep 18, 2012

Maintaining Occasionally Connected Applications

8,407,184
Issued Aug 26, 2013

Resolving Data Conflicts

8,489,974
Issued Jul 16, 2013

Determining the Rate at which an Entity is Polled

8,589,540
Issued Nov 19, 2013

Performing Synchronization of Data

8,595,382
Issued Nov 26, 2013

Metrics-based Accessing of Social Threads

8,738,603
Issued May 27, 2014

Rule-based Prioritization of Social Data

8,818,985
Issued Aug 26, 2014

Methods and Apparatus for Digital Steganography

9,015,494
Issued Aug 26, 2014

Cloud Based Social Networking Environment

9,307,006
Issued Apr 11, 2013

System for Secured Inter-application Communication in Mobile Devices

9,442,778
Issued Sep 25, 2013

Technical Projects

Personal Apps released to the iOS AppStore 2015-2016: ClipCollage, Attack Wing Probabilities, X-Wing Probabilities, Tap and Roll, Tap and Flip