Resume

Summary

I have over 20 years of experience in SaaS, across B2C marketplaces, media, finance and government. I have led teams in product engineering, DevOps, data, site reliability engineering (SRE) and IT, managing a team of twenty-five. People know me for:

• Empathetic leadership. I help teams reach their potential and give people room to build their skills. That has led to real operational results, cost savings and simpler processes.
• Strategic vision. I led a major refactoring of our data architecture that changed how the business ran, and I communicated it clearly and openly across the organization.
• Financial sense. I understand the wider financial goals and deliver results that beat expectations. I stay calm, and I explain the technical side to non-technical colleagues so they can learn it.
• Working across departments. I help departments work together, so the whole company runs better.

Snagajob

Snagajob is the largest online marketplace for hourly work, serving more than 47 million hourly workers and over 450,000 employer locations.

Director of Engineering · Jan 2021 – Oct 2023

• Cut vendor spend by 49% in six months (realized), which improved the company’s financial position. That included cutting AWS by 68% (sorry, Amazon).
• Cut operational headcount needs by 15% over nine months through automation.
• Made platform engineering something anyone can understand, and raised team efficiency by 50%, with a new way to value engineering and IT work. How it works.
• Excellent employee retention: <2% voluntary turnover over my tenure, across all positions.

Architect · Jul 2019 – Jan 2021

• Raised operational efficiency across the whole company by as much as 83%, through a multi-year consolidation of six products into one. It simplified the sales funnel, sped up finance’s month-end close, shortened support cases, cut development time, and gave us accurate, real-time analytics. It helped the whole company and was delivered early. I am best known for this. One Platform.
• Worked with product leadership to bring a new product to market in a record six weeks. Record speed.

Senior Engineering Manager · Nov 2018 – Jul 2019

• Doubled first-year revenue, and reached 4× in year two, by serving a larger market through a new architecture.
• Raised developer productivity by leading the API chapter on operational excellence, evolving our methods and best practices.

Engineering Manager · Oct 2016 – Nov 2018

• Cut email marketing spend by 90% with tools we built in-house that handled millions of emails a day.

Senior Software Engineer · Aug 2011 – Oct 2016

• Demonstrated infrastructure scale of half a billion applications served, with a pioneering microservice built on MongoDB (NoSQL) and RabbitMQ (asynchronous messaging).
• Wrote the most embarrassing line of code of my life.

Salem Web Network

The internet division of Salem Media Group, America’s leading radio broadcaster, internet content provider, and magazine and book publisher focused on family-themed content.

Senior Software Engineer · Mar 2010 – Aug 2011

• Gave us new technical capabilities with a video encoding service we built in-house, converting thousands of videos a day. (Where were you, AWS Elastic Transcoder?)

Scott & Stringfellow

Financial advisors headquartered in Richmond, VA.

Software Engineer · Sep 2007 – Mar 2010

• Raised developer productivity with a custom validation framework that made the department’s move from desktop to web development simpler.

Media General

A communications company with newspapers, television stations and interactive media.

Software Engineer · 2006 – Aug 2007

• Built internal libraries and components that sped up software development and content management for dozens of online properties.

Associate Software Engineer · Feb 2003 – 2006

• Ran web analytics, audience ad targeting and email systems in operation.

Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries

A government agency focused on wildlife conservation responsibilities and opportunities.

Associate Software Engineer · 1998 – 2003

Education

BS, Computer Science, James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA.

Key skills

Engineering management, leadership, cost management, platform engineering, data streaming, software development, software architecture, leadership development, team management, marketplaces, coaching, roadmaps, agile, continuous delivery, testing, SRE, metrics and KPIs, microservices, web applications, cloud, web APIs, Kafka (message bus), MongoDB (NoSQL), AWS (cloud computing), Snowflake, Elasticsearch, C#/.NET (Core and Framework), Datadog (observability and performance monitoring), Loggly (logging), Git (source control), RabbitMQ, REST, MS-SQL.

And many others to a lesser extent, or too embarrassing to list here, like Silverlight.

Availability

Onsite, hybrid or remote, with up to 25% travel.