Resume

I’ve been building software since 2005, mostly backend, mostly Ruby on Rails, with a long stretch of PHP and enough frontend and iOS to be dangerous. Since 2018 I’ve been managing engineers: hiring, process, architecture, and translating between the technical team and everyone else. I still write code.

Experience

GrailPay — Director of Engineering

August 2024 to present

Own technical design and architecture decisions, and the engineering process from intake through delivery, deployment, and operations.
Rebuilt the internal admin application in Rails, giving leadership and operations what they need for day-to-day support and automating enough of it to cut the support load on both ops and engineering.
Built a Rails app for engineering metrics: where time goes, and project and task completion rates by team and by person.
Revamped the external developer documentation platform.
Standardized documentation and project tracking from first concept through delivery.

Braintrust Tutors — Director of Engineering

May 2023 to August 2024

Led technical planning, requirements, and solution design across the product org.
Hired and onboarded developers, QA engineers, and product managers using the Who interview method.
Owned platform architecture documentation while still contributing to the codebase.
Represented engineering in InfoSec discussions with the New York City Board of Education.

LawnStarter — Engineering Manager

November 2021 to April 2023

Led the API team through an acquisition and the integration of the acquired company’s platform, including migrating hundreds of thousands of Stripe customer records.
Hired developers, QA engineers, and product managers (Who method again).
Built a quarterly engineering metrics approach that surfaced problem areas for the team and for individuals. That research fed into a paper by my VP of Engineering, Alberto Silveira: Engineering Productivity Goes Beyond “Just Code”.
Standardized how customer-facing Datadog metrics get documented.

RVshare — Engineering Manager

December 2019 to November 2021

Ran all engineering hiring for a stretch in 2021 and built the candidate tracking and evaluation process to do it.
Started sprint reporting on roadmap work versus defects versus engineering overhead (reviews, deployments, helping other developers).
Wrote the deployment process, and the documentation for it, that RVshare still uses.
Launched the company’s first real beta rollout, using Optimizely to ship a large feature to a selected group of users.

RVshare — Senior Software Developer

February 2019 to December 2019

Rails work on the API.
Led an initiative to standardize error handling, coding standards, peer review, and documentation, including an onboarding program for new engineers.

Dragonfly Research Group — Senior Software Developer

January 2018 to February 2019

Managed a small team of junior developers.
Built a boat-rental marketplace in PHP 7 (UX, frontend, and REST API design), an assessment platform for Eckerd College’s management training institute in Laravel using DDD, and a Facebook ad-campaign integration with an analytics dashboard on a Rails/React app.

Clear Idea Technology — Senior Software Developer

October 2005 to December 2017

Led teams of three to seven on PHP and Rails projects for twelve years.
Two years leading a team of four on a Rails backend, Angular frontend, and browser extension for an ad-tech startup.
Designed and built a Florida Keys tourism guide: PHP backend, REST services, and a native iOS app that delivered location-based deals.
Built the Rails backend and REST API for on-the-spot diamond pricing and quotes, and a PHP backend for a barcode-scanning app that identified cruelty-free products.

Other

Mentored youth teams at #SRQHacks in 2016 (special recognition) and 2017 (first place; the team was invited to speak at a Sarasota transportation symposium).

Tools

Ruby on Rails, PHP and Laravel, PostgreSQL and MySQL, JavaScript, React, Angular, REST API design, Objective-C and Swift.