Experiences
Freelance
Technical Solutions Architect / Fractional CTO
Sep 2022 – Present
Remote - USA
Architecture
Strategy
Recruitment
Digital Transformation
Product
Elixir
PHP
PostgreSQL
AWS
GCP
Summary: Delivered strategic consulting and spearheaded digital transformation initiatives for diverse EU and US clients, including NGOs and commercial entities. Included some hands-on technical work.
Notable Projects:
- Wunderwork.io: When the CEO from my previous position founded his own HR tech firm, I co-developed a go-to-market strategy, candidate-talent matching strategy and built out the MVP. We created a very thoughtful onboarding funnel that led to the acquisition of 100+ candidates a few weeks after launch, with a 70% completion rate.
- The Outreach Team (TOT): TOT is a 300-person non-profit organization that provides strategic consulting services to Left-leaning organizations. Reporting to the CEO, I lead a digital transformation of operations for their signature collection campaigns - operations that impact thousands of temp workers and millions of collected signatures. I outlined a tech roadmap, designed and executed learning field tests, and sourced vendors. I led vendors to deliver on-time and on-budget. Early results include 3x efficiency gains for a major cost center.
- Schmidt Futures: As Eric Schmidt's philanthropic initiative looked to grow from a few hundred grants a year to several thousand, the organization needed tooling for grant management, tracking, and accountability. I evaluated, recommended, and helped persuade the board on a buy or build decision. After building support on the board, Schmidt Futures built up its internal team to pursue the initial product vision I developed - an innovative and flexible system to aggregate KPIs for grant initiatives with very diverse goals.
Hays - Paladine
Corporate Start-up
Head of Engineering
April 2022 – Sep 2022
Berlin
Architecture
Strategy
Summary: Hired to lead local, remote, and offshore development teams as a part of a corporate start-up. The role encompassed all technology components, including strategy, resourcing, DevOps, security, and development. Ultimately, the company decided against completing the product. The entire leadership staff departed.
GG Care
Co-founder / CTO
Nov 2020 – Jun 2021
Remote
Elixir
Phoenix
PostgreSQL
Docker
AWS
Alexa
Summary: GG Care was an IOT company providing remote monitoring and reminder services for seniors with dementia. I wore many hats, leading tech and product development. I architected and wrote the MVP and prioritized delivering value in small iterations while ensuring clean, well-maintained code. Outside of product/tech, I allocated significant time to marketing, copywriting, and grant writing. We attracted significant interest and won awards for our product, but we struggled with customer traction. I left to focus on family issues.
SuitePad
Head of Engineering
Nov 2016 – Nov 2020
Berlin
Ruby on Rails
Elixir
Node.js
Ember.js
Java
Kotlin
AMQP
PostgreSQL
ELK
Redis
Memcached
Docker
Puppet
Ansible
Terraform
K8s
AWS
Summary: SuitePad is a hospitality IOT company facilitating guest experiences through custom hardware - TVs, Tablets, and sensors. During a period of rapid growth, I was responsible for ensuring the effective use of technology in the pursuit of business outcomes - tech strategy, scalable architecture, code quality, process improvement, resource allocation, team building, and new product development.
- Cultivated a culture of excellence and continuous improvement, expanding the team from 4 to 14 FT/Freelance engineers on 3 teams from 10 countries.
- Collaborated across the organization to improve processes, tooling, and training, ultimately reducing issue escalation by 90%
- Continuously improved infrastructure automation, monitoring, and reproducibility, increasing reliability and reducing costs by 75%
- Scaled distributed system infrastructure for 10x growth - from 4M requests/day to 40M, from 12k managed devices to >50k
- Led prototyping of a Set-top-box and other hospitality IoT products - identifying and mitigating scaling challenges and other technical risks before product launch
- Recruited and coached three team leads who went on to become engineering managers
MayDay Pac
Director of Engineering and Digital
Jul 2014 – Apr 2016
Brooklyn, NY / REMOTE
Ruby on Rails
Python
Django
Jekyll
PostgreSQL
Redis
Memcached
GCP
Chef
Summary: Led tech, product, UX, and design strategy, recruited contractors/staff/volunteers, including all lead developer responsibilities to facilitate user conversions, telephony services, donations, and analytics aggregation
- Massively reduced technical debt and simplified technical architecture: Transitioned fragmented tech services and multiple data stores into a single integrated services API
- Recruited contractors and volunteers, leading a team of 3 contractors and 12 volunteers
- Implemented analytics tooling to empower A/B testing and identified predictive metrics to increase conversation rates
- Continually improved internal deployment/review/QA processes through the course of a major branding relaunch
- Hands-on development of many API features in RoR backend and FE development with CSS/JS
Mobile Commons
Senior Software Engineer
Dec 2012 – May 2014
Brooklyn, NY
RoR
Python
Jekyll
MySQL
Redis
Memcached
GCP
Chef
Summary: Implement and maintain front-end features, JSON/XML API services on existing Ruby on Rails App
- Hands-on development of many API features in RoR backend and FE development with CSS/JS
- Structurally refactored internal PostGIS geospatial lookup API - automating shapefile import from multiple sources for easy updates
- Built a demonstration SMS<>chat app with a RoR API and Ember.js frontend to empower 3rd party integrators
- Collaborated on UI/requirements/analytics to plan and prioritize` features
Rising Tide Interactive
Tech Lead
Oct 2011 – Dec 2012
Washington, DC
RoR
Python
Jekyll
PostgreSQL
Redis
Memcached
GCP
Chef
Summary: Led internal tech/IT strategy and client web projects, including ad integrations, microsites, email programs, and conversion optimization
- Our efforts contributed to five Senate wins, including Sen. Tim Kaine, Sen. Bob Casey, and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand
- Led and built an internal ad reporting and analytics platform with Facebook, Google, and internal API integrations - reducing reporting burdens and empowering ad buying team to execute faster
Big Window Labs
Fullstack Engineer - Freelance
May 2011 – Oct 2011
Washington, DC
RoR
JS
PostgreSQL
Redis
ElasticSearch
Memcached
Heroku
AWS Mechanical Turk
Summary: MVP Development for a campaign email logging system called Traceful - a service to create a demographically representative set of personas for the purposes of collecting and identifying trends in campaign email communications.
- Aggregated and analyzed municipal data sources to build a sample of fictitious email personas
- Build an integration to Amazon's Mechanical Turk to leverage remote workers to submit subscription forms to thousands of campaigns
- Used ElasticSearch to develop simplistic vocabulary and tone analysis dashboards to compare campaigns from Democratic vs Republican senders
Democratic National Committee
Frontend Developer
Sept 2010 – May 2011
Washington, DC
JS
CSS
HTML
Ruby
Python
PostgreSQL
Summary: Provided general front-end and responsive development and analytics support, drove SEO strategy. Initially hired on 6-week contract that was extended to 8 months.
- One of three devs to launch Barack Obama's first 2012 campaign site, assisted with API design
- Built DNC's first electoral mobile sites, implementing polling place lookups with geolocation capabilities
- Tested and optimized donation pages, increasing contributions by 73% and amount contributed by 7%, amongst other results
Orbital Voice
Founder
Jan 2006 – Aug 2010
Boston, MA
JS
CSS
HTML
Ruby on Rails
Python
PHP
PostgreSQL
MySQL
Summary: As the project manager, information architect and developer, drove the creative process from pitching new business, defining business objectives, and developing messaging through execution, dev, and deployment.
- Grew my digital shop from zero to $350K in revenues, leading teams from 3 to 10 persons
- Managed and developed executions including online ads, blogs, web apps, newsletters, and collateral
- Notable projects: video sharing site, B2B art framing app, music video app, real estate app
Mullen
Account Executive
Oct 2002 – Dec 2005
Boston, MA
Summary: Managed vendors and internal teams to deliver integrated print, broadcast, and collateral executions on time and within budget. Developed, presented, and “sold" creative/strategic recommendations.
- Crafted estimates and shepherded client and vendor contracts worth over $30MM
- Pitched and Secured $1.2MM for client-sponsored television documentary production and distribution
- Led media team on $17.5MM print and cable ad buy, carefully supervising the media matrix
Assistant Account Executive
- Led PSA distribution from vendor selection to delivering $2.8 MM in donated media time
- Coordinated our $300K nationwide casting search to develop an integrated testimonial campaign
Babson College
Bachelor of Science in Business Administration
May 2002
Boston, MA