Last updated
About
I’m a senior technical leader with demonstrated product savvy and proven experience in growing teams, growing people, identifying high-value problems, and conceiving and delivering impactful, innovative solutions. I have a knack for blending strategy, technology, people, and process to achieve remarkable results.
Swarmia #
Remote
January 2023 - Present
Field CTO
Leveraging my developer productivity experience to help guide Swarmia customers in their engineering effectiveness journey. Working closely with Product, Sales, Marketing, and the CEO/Founder to guide strategy and tactics. Author, with Otto Hilska, of Build: Elements of an Effective Software Organization.
Stripe #
Remote
December 2020 – December 2022
Engineering Manager
Established and grew the JavaScript Infrastructure team from zero to 10. Delivered multiple developer productivity and experience improvements, including step-change improvements in development cycle time, and a multi-million-line conversion of Flow.js code to TypeScript. Hired a new manager to focus on JS Infra while I started a new Engineering Success team in the Developer Productivity org, focused on understanding and improving the cross-cutting experience of doing software engineering at Stripe. Developed the “paper cuts” program, implemented the SPACE framework, and drove an overall user-centered approach to internal tooling. Worked closely with senior leadership to identify and understand productivity challenges using data-driven approaches.
Indeed #
Austin, TX (on-site and remote)
February 2016 – November 2020
Senior Technical Product Manager
Senior Engineering Manager
Engineering Manager
Secured VP support to form the Front-End Core organization to develop and own a comprehensive suite of modern front-end capabilities, and proceeded to drive business impact and platform-wide technical improvement and innovation during a period of significant company growth. My organization eventually comprised five teams on two continents with more than 30 cross-functional team members, and several engineering managers who reported to me. Together, we:
- Conceived and launched a Global Navigation platform, enabling consistent navigation and rapid experimentation across more than 95% of external page views. PMs across the business used this capability to run game-changing experiments, including reducing SMB customer support calls by 20%, increasing subscriptions to the resume search product by 6.7%, and increasing new account creation by 10% (to name a few).
- Established Node.js as a first-class development runtime, championed an internal npm registry, and promoted patterns and practices for Node.js development. In 2020, approximately 25% of new web apps at Indeed used Node.js, and Node.js powered a range of business-critical functionality. Its presence has only increased since.
- Created tooling to support a massive migration toward modern front-end practices, including standardized approaches to compilation, logging, performance SLOs, unit and functional testing, CI/CD, TypeScript, static analysis, and the first Indeed design system. Some portion of this tooling is used by more than 80% of Indeed software engineers at least once a quarter.
- Designed, delivered, and popularized an internal micro-frontend platform that eliminated massive bottlenecks in releasing UI code, which enabled rapid, autonomous development of composable user interfaces. Time to release new features to flagship products was reduced from nearly three weeks to sometimes less than a day.
- Led the way in shaping customer-centric product practices for internal platform teams, including repeatable playbooks, detailed marketing and communications strategies, and tooling for tracking customer engagement.
- Received two Innovation Awards, which honor ~5 projects per year that are novel, transformative to the business, and broadly applicable. One project was then nominated and accepted to the Recruit Engine Forum, the Indeed parent company's innovation program.
- Gained organizational alignment on the need to hire front-end specialists within and beyond the Front-End Core organization. Developed new interview questions and rubrics, recruited numerous engineers, and represented the impact of this specialization at quarterly performance management panels. Secured the promotion of three of these front-end engineers to the Principal level.
Coaching & Mentoring #
- “She deftly balanced technical leadership, product management, and mentorship/coaching.” – VP Engineering
- “You do the work expected of engineering managers, principal engineers, program managers, technical content managers, and product managers — and you do it well.” – Product director
- ”She continues to extract the maximum benefit out of the people in her organization. I appreciate the high bar she sets. Being on her team means you know you are adding value to Indeed.” – Engineering manager
Bazaarvoice #
Austin, TX (remote and on-site)
February 2013 – January 2016
Senior Staff Software Engineer
Staff Software Engineer
Senior Software Engineer
- Led a team responsible for promoting and ensuring best practices for consumer-facing client-side application development, and coordinated key front-end development activities and tools across product teams.
- Led and grew a team of engineers of varying experience levels on a mission-critical product with 100 million page views per month. Led planning, monitoring, and mitigation activities for the surge of traffic associated with “Black Friday” and the holiday shopping season. Drove accessibility remediation efforts.
Bocoup #
Boston, MA (remote)
April 2012 – December 2012
Engineering Training Consultant
Developed new curriculum for teaching JavaScript beginners, overhauled the jQuery Fundamentals learning site to provide an interactive learning experience, and created presentations and training material around the subject of writing testable JavaScript. Helped develop a conference focused on JavaScript training content, and developed a JavaScript coaching product aimed at clients who need ongoing JavaScript support.
Toura Mobile #
New York, NY (remote)
November 2010 – April 2012
Guided the design and implementation of a client-side framework for developing content-rich, offline-capable mobile applications inside a PhoneGap wrapper.
Before That #
I began my professional career on the night news desk at a small newspaper in western New York. I learned perl to automate mindless tasks, and left in 2001. I was a bartender for the next 18 months before getting on a bicycle and riding, alone, from Maine to North Carolina, camping along the way.
In North Carolina, I waitressed until I landed a job at an advertising agency, where I was heavily involved in their fledgling web efforts. In 2006, I joined a local web agency, where I made a lot of banner ads and suggested we might use JavaScript instead of Flash. In 2008, I moved to a startup that laid off most of its staff five months later. I spent the next couple of years speaking at conferences, co-hosting the yayQuery podcast, earning my pilot's license, and building a lucrative front-end consulting business with the 2008 MacBook Pro the startup gave me as my severance.
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