Director of Engineering
BitTitan, Inc.
03/2021 - Present
Bellevue, Washington
An automated migration service for cloud-tenant and on-premises document, mailbox and user data.
Key Accomplishment:
Led the US Engineering and DevOps organization of BitTitan’s flagship and most profitable service, MigrationWiz ($44+M/annual revenue), improving the availability, reliability and scalability of its infrastructure, while improving the product and organization’s information security posture and cycle time to deliver.
Highlights:
Assumed responsibility for MigrationWiz's US Engineering team, promoted under-appreciated talent, and built a scalable Engineering organization.
Mentored multiple software engineering teams on a broad set of projects in various SDLC phases, including iterative feature enhancements, green field product development, UX refresh, and authentication/identity projects.
Defined a URL strategy that balanced the needs of a Marketing organization supporting multiple product brands, technical capabilities, and SEO considerations.
Defined the strategic DevOps roadmap to leverage Infrastructure as Code (IaC), adopt cloud native technologies (Azure AppService, Azure SQL), and iterate towards CI/CD pipelines (Azure Pipelines).
Reduced the overhead to build and deploy custom, customer on-premises deployments at contract values of up to $250K from three weeks of effort to under three days, enabling new lines of revenue for private deployments of our SaaS solution.
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Led MigrationWiz's Information Security initiatives in preparation for GDPR compliance and SOC2 and FedRAMP adoption.
Established non-functional requirements for a UX Refresh including performance, Accessibility (a11y), Localization (l10n), component build/deploy strategy, setting the stage for decomposing a mono-repo.
Assisted sales on key enterprise deals with complex infrastructure, information security, and compliance requirements.
VP Technology
Committee for Children
December 2018 - July 2020
Seattle, Washington
A non-profit Social-Emotional-Learning Educational Technology provider to K-12 schools.
Key Accomplishment:
Led a transformation of the organization's software product development and QA practices, including native cloud adoption, domain driven design, micro-services adoption, CI/CD and IaC, and Test Automation.
Highlights:
Initiated Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) to establish predictable and automated environment deployments. •Migrated unstable and under-performing apps & database to Cloud Native solutions on Azure.
Implemented Domain-Driven-Design (DDD) architecture with defined API contracts to transform a monolithic application into a component-based learning platform.
Built a Test Automation team capable of regression testing the learning platform in under 30 minutes.
Cycle times between deployments shrunk by over 450x (from ~3 months to multiple times a sprint).
Mean-Time-To-Repair shrunk from days to minutes using AI, monitoring and alerting improvements.
Introduced Story Mapping & Quarterly Planning practices for improved predictability of product development.
Sr. Director, Web Application Engineering
McGraw-Hill Education
March 2014 - November 2018
Seattle, Washington
A leading learning-science, educational content and software provider to millions of students worldwide.
Key Accomplishment:
Revolutionized a $2B company’s software deployment process reducing cycle times to release, cost to deploy, and risk to rollback for dozens of software teams. Coupled with delivering a content authoring, tagging, publishing and delivery platform, enabled the company to compete for up to $900M in new billings over two years.
Highlights:
Designed and implemented a new CI/CD deployment process and tech stack.
Mentored teams in adopting a Capability Maturity Matrix that tracked team maturity to adopt CI/CD.
Cycle times between deployments shrunk by over 600x (from ~4 months to multiple times a sprint).
Deployment costs dropped by two orders of magnitude from over $100k to about $1,000 per team.
Built an adaptive learning platform by solving several technical challenges, including ePub delivery with Web players and content publishing factories for authoring, staging and delivery.
Oversaw improvements in performance by several orders of magnitude in publishing, importing and delivering cntent.
VP Technology
Exponential Entertainment
January 2013 - March 2014
Seattle, Washington
A startup media entertainment company entertaining consumers through immersive gameplay.
Summarized Key Accomplishments:
Resurrected and successfully launched critical projects through process, technology, and people management that resulted in successfully acquiring several rounds of financing. Established performance testing best practices in support of a REST/WebSockets API capable of sustaining over 2000 request/sec. for a live “results” segment for a nationally televised talent competition.
VP Technology
Salad Labs
July 2011 - December 2012
Seattle, Washington
A startup “gamifying” celebrity buzz with machine learning to build a “fantasy” celebrity stock market.
Summarized Key Accomplishments:
Architected and built a scalable Web & RSS crawler, search indexer, ranking algorithm, and APIs to build the core IP to support raising seed funding. Improved performance from the original prototype by over 400% in crawling and processing speed with near-real-time price updates. Improved change management, documentation and deployment strategies. Implemented a responsive Web strategy to enable mobile/tablet access to our games. Modernized hosting/application/database hosting architecture.
Software Engineering Director
MemoryLane.com/Classmates.com/United Online
March 2002 - March 2011
Seattle, Washington
A leading provider of consumer Internet subscription services for social networking and nostalgic content.
Summarized Key Accomplishments:
Identified & resolved inefficiencies and gaps in various business processes that resulted in $6M in incremental revenue including an SEO strategy. Launched the Yearbook Project, a new line of business to scan, index, image process, crop, test, and package 200,000 yearbooks into both reprint (via Amazon Print-on-Demand) and digital (via classmates.com). Built a process-testing framework to improve checkout and registration flows. Helped transform Classmates from Waterfall to Scrum SDLC. Led platform stabilization efforts introducing engineering best practices like the A3 process, and root cause analysis.
Chief Technical Officer
Media Access Internet Solutions, Inc.
May 1997 - December 2001
Bellevue, Washington
A Web development and consulting firm providing e-commerce and database-enabled Web solutions.
Summarized Key Accomplishments:
Performed the initial biz-dev analysis for the acquisition of the seed-consulting firm for Media Access. Led the team that developed a standards-based web application hosting platform and APIs that were used to create feature-rich, scalable and usable Web sites that drove the company’s profitability for three years.
Network Director
Pacific Rim Network, Inc.
October 1994 - March 1999
Bellingham, Washington
A regional ISP offering high-speed Internet connectivity to businesses. Acquired by Verio/NTT in 1997.
Summarized Key Accomplishments:
Built an innovative Web hosting platform and developer network to build the largest regional ISP in Washington State. First-to-market with ISDN, DSL and ATM technologies.
Webmaster
Western Washington University
June 1992 - October 1994
Bellingham, Washington
An accredited four-year state university with degree programs in a variety of disciplines.
Summarized Key Accomplishments:
Developed Western's first database-driven Web applications to publish course registration & availability information in the earliest days of the Web to extend course registration information to students online.