Danny Smith

Consultant

Armakuni

Pole Star EAM

Chief Operations Officer

Oyster®

Consultant - Remote Workplace Design & People Ops

Delocate (acquired by Oyster)

Principal Consultant

RED Academy

VP Technology

Global Curriculum Director, Technology

Lead Instructor

Ada. National College for Digital Skills

Curriculum Designer & Lecturer

CharlieHR

Senior Software Engineer

Sparta Global

I wore *a lot* of hats as we grew from a 3-employee startup to 80+ folks

All Sorts

Royal Air Force Air Cadets

Adjutant, Central Training Team, HQ RAFAC

COO & Consultant | Creating high-performance remote organisations 👨‍💻🌍

I work with leaders to intentionally design remote organisations & ways of working, laying the foundations for rapid scaling, long-term organisational health, and a globally distributed workforce.

I spent 2021 at Oyster, scaling their fully-remote (globally distributed) company from 14 to 500 people (and a $1bn valuation). Which was absolutely wild.

I work mostly at the intersection of system design, human behaviour, remote work & operations. I'm convinced that knowledge work has no borders and the "remote work revolution" has the power to make the world a fairer and more equal place for everyone. Globally distributed companies are the future.  And the remote workplace should be diverse, safe & supportive for all.

I talk about "Organisational Health" a lot because healthy orgs feel calm when ploughing through unknown waters at 1000mph and can operate on the edge of chaos without being chaotic: much better for our people, and our business. Since systemic health problems have a disproportionately large effect on distributed remote teams (and quickly compound with scale), I'm on a mission to help folks be more intentional about how they design & transform remote-first orgs.

➡️ Read more on this → https://danny.is/writing/organisational-health

I love meeting new folks, so hit me up if you wanna chat 🙂☎️

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Wanna learn about remote best practices? 👇

· Oyster Reef → https://oysterhr.notion.site/Welcome-to-The-Reef-Oyster-s-Open-Source-Employee-Guide-fc482e3f107c4afd8c85ed217f1d0c1d
· Some tiny remote working tips → https://danny.is/remote

If you've read this far you *might* be interested to know...

· I've a sporadic sideline in personal coaching and team facilitation.
· I used to be a software engineer, but realised I have a much bigger impact when I help others do their thing better. And now that's my thing. (I still code, but just for fun.)
· Before that I was a blues musician. I still perform and jam lots: music has this weird ability to transcend language and cultural barriers.
· I'm a generalist. Obviously. Sorry not sorry.


In the past, my desire to "make work better for everyone" saw me doing:

· Education → curriculum design, learning design, teaching etc.
· Engineering process → DevOps, architecture etc
· Agile coaching & delivery process (SAFe still gives me nightmares).
· Design systems before they were hip.

Highlight

Building better products for people and the planet!

VP of Engineering

Fountain

Led Fountain’s globally-distributed engineering team, including B2B SaaS Product Development, Platform Operations, and Solutions Engineering.

- reduced downtime 50% by fostering culture of operational excellence (continuous improvement and monitoring, alerting, disaster readiness drills, and blameless RCAs)
- scaled organization (doubled headcount) including key leadership placements in Security, Cloud Operations, and Product Development
- increased deployment frequency 10x through CI/CD, test-forward culture, and tooling enhancements (TypeScript, Github Actions)
- introduced data-handling controls and practices across ETL pipeline and OLTP datastores
- standardized cross-functional feedback, escalation, change management, and communication processes
- systematized talent, planning/OKRs, and project management processes

Senior Director Of Engineering

Koan (acq. Quantive)

Led tech team through successful acquisition (acq. Quantive, 2021). Our team did it all: building features, internal tools, data-processing pipelines, and the infrastructure to deploy and run them.

- scaling development capabilities through hiring, mentorship and strategic technology adoption (TypeScript, GraphQL, Terraform, AWS)
- managing governance, risk and compliance (GRC) projects including SOC2 certification and GDPR compliance
- implementing data strategy to support and control data use across functions
- building inbound talent pipeline through evangelism and community involvement

Koan

Responsible for top-line SaaS metrics and increasing brand awareness of Koan’s cloud-based leadership platform
- increased year-over-year revenue growth by 10x
- defined and automated marketing, sales, and CS workflows
- integrated growth tooling and data sources with core platform

Director of Growth

Developed core services and operating practices as member of founding team
- introduced and tooled agile development practices including TDD, CI/CD, one-click releases
- collaborated with cross-functional stakeholders in defining, scheduling, and shipping full stack features
- managed release infrastructure (Github, CircleCI, AWS)

Developer

Versal

Led technical decision-making and people management for Versal’s distributed development organization
- standardized development and documentation processes across frontend, platform, and operations teams
- reduced production defect rates through feature-focused QA and release-management processes
- streamlined new-product development by consolidating and deprecating underused applications, technologies, and services
- oversaw auditing, response, and hardening of critical security infrastructure

Director of Engineering

Responsible for delivering course-creation interface and supporting applications within Versal’s course-building platform
- led architectural decisions and development of web-tier services
- developed team members’ individual capabilities through direct mentorship, pair programming, and mandatory code review
- used TDD/test-first culture to build developer confidence and reduce defect rates
- established development workflow, style, and internal best-practices for web-tier core technologies including node.js, express, memcached, mysql, amqp, nginx, and haproxy
- reduced incident response times by introducing automated alerting, APM, and supporting tooling

Frontend Lead

rjzaworski.com

- consulted on product strategy, roadmap development, and systems architecture for both early-stage and established ventures
- reduced lead times by introducing agile project management and continuous delivery
- improved availability through improvements to engineering processes (TDD, code coverage, peer review, QA), automated testing, and runtime monitoring
- lead platform and application development in JavaScript, Ruby, PHP, C, and C++

Principal Software Developer

Celebrating 20 years in tech as a leader, developer, and sometimes growth-marketer.

Likes:

* engineering excellence
* strong ownership and accountability
* distributed work
* reliable tools

Dislikes:

* micromanagement
* pointless meetings
* Zoom's configuration store

taplio

The Battle

Danny Smith

RJ Zaworski

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