Engineer and Agilist

As an engineer, I believe that boring tech is good tech, and that the new shiny is rarely as good as it seems. When you need it, the new shiny is the absolute best, but it is most often a distraction that creates novel failure modes. In other words, there are no silver bullets.

As an agilist, my work lives at the center of the Venn diagram with the humans, the technology, and the organizational structures and policies, and is always aimed at improving the flow of work through the org.

I believe in iteration, local autonomy aligned to strategic vision, cross-functional collaboration at all stages of product development, and using feedback loops to create a learning organization that continuously improves itself. Just-in-time, lightweight planning reduces organizational overhead and enables teams to hit the mark more often, and realize early when an idea won't work out.

Experience

Lead Software Engineer, YearOne

Portland, OR (fully remote); February 2021 – July 2024

As the first engineer at YearOne, I created the company's SaaS platform from scratch, and for almost 3 years single-handedly built the product during the company's quest for product-market fit. I handled all technical decisions and operations, including SOC-2 and accessibility compliance, incident response, and building useful documentation to enable rapid onboarding of the next engineers. I created the engineering process, and set up a culture of rapid iteration balanced with the need for product stability.

Principal Software Engineer & Organizational Architect, New Relic

Portland, OR; August 2016 – August 2020

As the organizational architect, my primary responsibility was to improve the flow of work through the New Relic product org. I worked with teams, managers, leaders, and executives across the org, on two continents, to help the org become a better, more performant version of itself as it scaled from ~40 engineering teams to ~80 engineering teams. Along the way I developed and executed a team health program that leveraged per-team assessments to conduct a yearly, distributed, org-wide retrospective that enabled teams to make local positive change for themselves and involved org leaders to make system-wide changes. I trained teams and coached them in their own agile processes, ran countless liftoffs to help new teams or transitioning teams to self-organize, managed a set of communities of practice, and delivered onboarding training on the org's agile thinking and processes to all incoming employees.

Principal Software Engineer & Architect, New Relic

Portland, OR; May 2015 – August 2016

As an architect I was responsible for two main areas: (1) coordinating a shared vision and execution for front-end development using a modern React or Angular stack, and (2) helping multiple engineering teams (from 5-15 at any given time) plan and build systems that are scalable, resilient and pleasurable to work in, while maintaining an engineering-wide set of standards and design patterns. Much of the work involved coordinating with engineers, project managers, team managers and executives to produce plans that were reasonable and feasible.

Lead Software Engineer, New Relic

Portland, OR; July 2014 – May 2015

As a lead engineer I built and coordinated a shared vision across multiple product teams for how to best do front-end development. I was also the technical lead on a major redesign of our product suite, which I completed almost single-handed in roughly 7 weeks, leveraging the design component system I had built out previously. I also continued to work with multiple engineering teams to help us overcome some of the company's ongoing growth-related challenges.

Senior Software Engineer, New Relic

Portland, OR; April 2012 – July 2014

Continued maintenance and expansion of the New Relic RPM (real-time performance monitoring) product site, in Ruby on Rails. During this time frame my largest accomplishment was building out a system to make redesigning the entire product much simpler, which brought redesign project times down from 7 months (for just me and 1 product) to approximately 7 weeks (for just me, coordinating across 5 products in the shared monolith). I also helped us grow our team by more than double in this time frame, while keeping new engineers "on message" for how we approach dev work, and what the existing systems were doing and why those behaviors were important.

Software Engineer, New Relic

Portland, OR; February 2010 – April 2012

Maintenance and expansion of the New Relic RPM (real-time performance monitoring) product site, in Ruby on Rails, with a strong emphasis on combining software engineering best practices with web design best practices.

Education

UC Santa Barbara — MS in plant evolutionary ecology, 2005. Prof. Susan Mazer, advisor. Sexual selection and genetic conflict in plants.

Reed College — BA in biology, 2000. Senior thesis: "Clonal foraging in plants: a review and simulation study."