Experience
Senior Director of Engineering
Instructure (via acquisition of LearnPlatform) · January 2023 - Present · Salt Lake City, UT (Remote)
Expanded leadership responsibilities after the acquisition of LearnPlatform to oversee a 40+ person, six-team engineering organization across multiple product lines.
I successfully integrated people, platforms, and processes across the company, fostering cohesion and driving innovation across previously siloed teams.
- Unified previously siloed teams to enable a critical reporting capability, providing essential product usage insights that had been unattainable for over a decade.
- Drove the strategic development of a centralized API gateway and partner integration suite, expanding the product ecosystem and enabling critical connectivity with customer platforms.
- Championed a company-wide, common UI framework to unify the user experience and provide a centralized solution for meeting institutional accessibility requirements.
- Created an engineering culture centered on trust, accountability, and inclusivity, resulting in top-quartile engagement scores. Maintained 90%+ retention in global teams.
Vice President of Engineering
LearnPlatform (acquired by Instructure) · March 2022 - January 2023 · Raleigh, NC
Led engineering for an education technology SaaS platform that enables evidence based decisions in school districts using over 2 billion new data points per week to drive better student outcomes quickly and cost-effectively.
I directed all aspects of delivery including development, data engineering, quality assurance, infrastructure, technical customer support, and systems reliability and uptime.
- Delivered first iOS product launch for LearnPlatform, expanding K-12 market reach.
- Modernized engineering practices and processes in preparation for acquisition, positioning the organization as a mature, scalable asset.
- Guided cross-functional teams through the due diligence process, streamlining the process and ensuring the successful and timely closure of the acquisition.
Vice President of Engineering
NewsCorp · May 2019 - March 2022 · New York, NY (Remote)
Led engineering for Reel, an internal SaaS mobile delivery product. I oversaw the
platform teams responsible for building the core frameworks and services that empowered over 10 product development teams.
- Built and scaled a global engineering organization across 4 time zones, enabling a 24/7 development and support model.
- Instituted modern engineering roadmaps and DevOps practices, including IaC and test automation tooling, providing clear strategic direction and accelerating product delivery.
- Championed Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices which significantly improved platform maturity and reliability.
- Established a formal RFC and architectural board to drive collaborative, metrics-based decisions and foster a culture of resilient engineering.
Principal Advisor
New York Times · July 2014 - April 2019 · New York, NY (Remote)
Steered the technical vision and strategic direction for a high-volume API platform that was the central nervous system
for all customer-facing products, serving over 40 billion requests weekly. I built trust across teams to drive the adoption of product-driven development practices.
- Partnered with multiple product teams to adopt GraphQL and a consolidated data schema for 15M+ articles, modernizing API access and accelerating product development.
- Architected a robust cloud operations model with multi-region workloads, achieving near-zero downtime during extreme traffic spikes (10-100x) for a high-volume platform.
- Redefined the delivery pipeline to enable multiple daily feature releases, significantly increasing engineering agility and time-to-market.
Chief Technology Officer
The Daily Beast · November 2011 - July 2014 · New York, NY (Remote)
Provided the technology vision and led all engineering, DevOps, and QA operations for an award-winning news site.
I was responsible for delivering the platform that fueled significant business growth and audience expansion.
- Modernized the entire technology stack with a strategic cloud migration, implementing incident processes and automation to improve reliability and scalability.
- Built and led a new R&D practice, which fostered a culture of innovation and collaboration with editorial and product teams to prototype new solutions.
- Spearheaded the adoption of Agile methodologies to break down silos, cutting time-to-market by 40% and contributing to a 150% growth in users.
- Led a major technology overhaul that reduced infrastructure costs by 10% and improved UI performance by 25%.
Director of Engineering
CondeNast · March 2007 - November 2011 · New York, NY
Chief Architect who led the development and full-scale migration of a new SaaS content management system that enabled more dynamic content creation for 20 major brands.
I led a 20+ global engineering team in the development, rollout, and ongoing operations of the platform.
- Spearheaded the replacement of a legacy CMS with a new platform, unifying core components for reusability across brands and expanding content creation capabilities.
- Orchestrated a major modernization effort that migrated the entire stack from on-premises to the cloud and introduced distributed source control systems like Git.
Principal Engineer
Digital Focus · November 2004 - November 2006 · Reston, VA
A Principal Engineer and member of the consulting leadership team that was responsible for technical execution and management of custom-built software solutions for clients across the healthcare, legal, and finance industries.
- Led project delivery for engagements valued at $750K-$3M yearly, managing all aspects of technical execution, architecture, and client requirements.
- Pioneered the adoption of Agile methodologies to drive a collaborative and iterative development process, ensuring projects were delivered on-time and with a high degree of client satisfaction and quality.