Head of Engineering @ Supernatural

Supernatural

Led the engineering, technical program management, QA and release management disciplines at Supernatural, a community-first VR fitness company.

VP of Engineering

Riot Games

Former Engineering Lead for Wild Rift Console, where I oversaw our engineering efforts to enable our dream to launch Wild Rift on console platforms. I also led an initiative called Developer Workflows where our aim was to streamline the entire software development lifecycle across all aspects of the Wild Rift developer experience

Previous to that role, I was the Engineering Lead for the League of Legends Foundry Team, where we developed new ways for players to immerse and express themselves in Riot's flagship game, League of Legends, PC.

My team launched Eternals in April 2020, which allows players to capture, celebrate and flex their moments of glory with their favorite League of Legends champions. In addition to Eternals, my team supported Emotes, Ward Skins, the League of Legends Collections experience and the League of Legends Loading Screen experience. In fact, you may have noticed our quiet beta launch of Emotes for LoL Esports. We are so pleased by the player and audience reception of Emotes in LoL tournaments! We also played minor assists in the launches of Team Fight Tactics for PC and Mobile. Beyond these exciting features, we developed and hosted critical game services and supported our software 24/7 to 10s of millions of players around the world.

Senior Engineering Manager

DRIVIN powered by KAR

In my brief stint as Vice President of Product & Technology at Drivin, I ran all product management, design and engineering for the business unit. This included defining vision and roadmap with my product team and empowering them to run product development; working with our director of design to properly align user experience, brand and marketing design efforts; acting as director of engineering for our engineers until I could hire a person to fill that role. I ran a staff of 25 across engineering, product and visual design. Drivin had 3 product lines, 2 of which were customer-facing and 1 of which supported our inside sales team. Drivin was primarily B2B, serving auto dealerships of all sizes as well as individual car buyers. We had the industry’s most widely adopted mobile app for pricing vehicles at auctions. Drivin hosted all of its technical products on AWS. Our stack was built up of Java primarily in the backend and React on the front-end. Our mobile app was written in Objective-C for iOS and Java for Android.

VP of Product And Technology

Curiosity.com

As head of technology at Curiosity, I led several product efforts, internal and customer-facing. Our group was small but highly productive (11 members at peak, operated at 7 much of the time).  The Curiosity stack was built on Java (Android), Swift (iOS), HTML/Javascript, Python, Clojure, NodeJs, ElasticSearch, RDS, S3 and other AWS services. Extensive use of Google Analytics, Kibana and Mixpanel for insight. Monetization achieved with DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) and other ad-tech, as well as custom branded content publishing capabilities.

Key accomplishments:
- 4.8 star rated apps in Android and iOS (from over 70k ratings and 25k written reviews)
- Both apps featured on multiple occasions on Google Play and App Store, respectively
- Award winning Alexa skill, featured on Amazon Prime’s home page
- Personally developed chatbots for Facebook and Skype, featured in Skype
- Automated ETL for ingesting video metadata from Youtube and other video providers, with supporting pipeline for taxonomizing and publishing videos on our website
- Custom content-management-system (CMS) for curating and publishing videos, writing and publishing articles, with support for ad placement and geo-targeting
- Robust personalization engine, allowing users to follow content in their favorite subjects
- Developed and operated technical foundation for all revenue at Curiosity, including integrations with ad serving platforms (DFP, Facebook, Twitter, InMobi, Teads, Nativo), ability to manage ad deployment via our CMS, and robust support for sponsored content

Head of Technology

Zeconomy, Inc.

Advised CEO on technical strategy. Coached and mentored existing team. Recruited candidates for permanent CTO role and ran CTO interviews for Zeconomy. Continue to provide technical input as requested.

Key accomplishments:
- Recruited and hired highly-accomplished CTO
- Developed security policies for company
- Helped migrate Zeconomy into secure private network on AWS

Interim CTO

Narrative Science

Head of engineering, product and IT for Narrative Science. Recruited, hired, coached and mentored engineers, UX, technical support, managerial and technical product management staff. Staff included 23 engineering reports and 2 technical product managers. Backend was primarily developed in Python and open-source. Frontend built on Flask, HTML/CSS, jQuery, Angular and related open-source. Extensive use of AWS, i.e. EC2, S3, RDS, CloudFormation, CloudWatch, CloudFront, Route53.

Key accomplishments:
- Provided product vision and managed all development of Quill, Narrative Science’s flagship platform
- Transitioned software from a collection of scripts and jobs to a full self-service, configuration driven platform architecture and robust web-based user experience
- Served over 50 clients in multiple industries, including sports, real estate, marketing and finance
- Launched company’s first public APIs, launched several SAAS product offerings thereafter
- Defined and wrote company’s first $1 million+ accepted client project proposal
- Developed differentiated cloud deployment models for addressing varying levels of security and privacy concerns for customers, including fortune 500 customers with strict compliance and contractual obligations around sharing of data
- In partnership with In-Q-Tel, proposed and implemented one of the first private AWS deployments for the Intelligence Community for classified and non-classified usage
- Implemented agile best practices and product management for engineering, later adopted by other teams in the company
- Introduced Jira for all automated and human-driven issue tracking
- Fully automated build, integration testing and release deployment with Jenkins
- Implemented 24x7 coverage of software through on-call rotation and major improvements to application-level and system-level monitoring & alerting
- Introduced major improvements to security and implemented company-wide SOC-2 compliance on 4 trust service principles

Computation Institute

Managed development of 9 projects & software stacks simultaneously. Grew team from 1 member to 11 members (FTE and students) in one year. Software primarily developed in Python or Java and a mix of open-source, such as: Apache, NGINX, Pyramid, Tomcat, Jersey, Maven, Hibernate, JUnit, Cucumber, Cassandra, Solr/Lucene, MySQL, Chef, Fabric, etc. UX primarily developed in DHTML, jQuery and custom libraries.

Key accomplishments:
- Built and launched new file transfer experience, now basis for Computation Institute’s flagship website, http://globus.org
- Co-wrote 2 research papers on cloud-based solutions for natural language processing of clinical narratives
- Co-wrote NIH proposal, in collaboration with Northshore University Healthsystem, for providing medical translation services to Northshore’s 140,000 patients
- Coordinated efforts for DoD funded project to establish multi-site clinical tests and research platform to study the efficacy of diffusion MRI
- Coordinated efforts for NIH funded project for monitoring and analyzing availability of health & life quality resources in poor urban areas
- Led prototype development for NIH funded project for providing researchers with a platform for experimenting with different medical natural language processing engines and ontologies
- Developed company’s first employee leveling and 360 degree performance reviews
- Introduced agile / SCRUM and related best practices, including: regular sprint planning and reviews with customers and key stakeholders; product backlogs and regular prioritization meetings; peer code review system; automated testing
- Architected web-rendering engine and co-designed website building framework
- Co-designed RESTful service for modeling users and relationships to resources

Director of Software Engineering

Amazon.com

Managed a team of 4 developers on several web application projects. Amazon’s platform was built on a mix of open-source (Apache, Tomcat, Ant, Junit, EasyMock, Selenium, Eclipse, SVN, etc.) and Amazon developed technologies.

Key accomplishments:
- Pitched proposal to refactor Amazon’s website platform to reduce the time it took to stand up a new site on the platform from months to minutes; subsequently built team and delivered on this capability
- Proposal was selected as the foundation behind the Webstore initiative to allow SMBs to launch their own e-commerce sites on the Amazon fulfillment backend
- Over 9 month duration of the Webstore launch initiative, my team was the only team to complete development on time (we delivered ahead of schedule)
- Pioneered one of the first REST-driven systems at Amazon, worked extensively with the chief principal engineer of the e-commerce platform and several other principal engineers in the company
- In my first few months at Amazon, personally developed enhancements to several widgets and business logic components written in Java
- Helped launch several sites, including Smallparts (http://www.smallparts.com), Javari (http://www.javari.jp), Bebe Canada (http://www.bebe.ca), Target (http://www.target.com) and other merchant websites built and hosted by Amazon

Software Development Manager

Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center

Designed and developed Java-based web portal solutions for several European Union funded projects. Responsibilities included architecting and writing software products created here and in past projects, as well as leading a team of developers to help evolve these products to meet project deliverables. Work was funded by OMII-Europe, where I led portal activities and was a member of its technical committee, and BEINGRID, where I assisted businesses in applying GridSphere and Vine (see below) to their commercial applications. As with previous positions, reported on budget, activities, wrote articles, traveled extensively, presented at international conferences and promoted products developed at my institute.

Key accomplishments:
- Architected, developed and launched a follow up project to my previous project, GridSphere, an open-source Java Grid application framework called the Vine Toolkit
- Continued to coordinate activities for the GridSphere Project (see previous position)
- Onboarded 8 commercial organizations, small and enterprise, onto GridSphere and the Vine Toolkit to power grid applications
- Wrote several papers and attended conferences around the world promoting the work of the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center

Senior Software Development Engineer

I am so fortunate to be where I'm at in my career, which has been defined by adventure, great missions and working alongside some of the best humans on the planet, to whom I owe everything.

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