(The RealReal : 9/16-9/17)
Execution
Provided research support around pre-IPO due diligence of SDLC metrics, teams’ productivity, and intellectual property
Shepherded months-long-overdue supply-side user acquisition feature into production (which had been built by third party vendor but then mothballed) by delegating to senior engineer for verification
Evaluated dev work towards long-term financial capitalization
Made introductions leading to offers for data science intern and candidate for Director of Estate Sales
Supported business’s most-important monthly accounting processes
Participated in Erlang and Elixir Factory 2017 and Google I/O 2017
Performed requirements analysis/discovery around 3rd party video chat solutions as a tactical way to increase supply-side engagement/retention
Proposed and shepherded build-out of Rules Engine POC (using Wongi) to simplify item pricing; abandoned because of time constraints
Hiring, Retaining
Led 21 Software and QA Engineers across seven web/mobile engineering teams (incl. in Russia, Canada, Central America) for:
- web : Rails/vanilla JS/Resque/MySQL/ElasticSearch on Heroku
- mobile: iOS and Android
Filled capacities of: Release Manager, (acting) Lead Engineer, Technical Recruiter, Scrum Master, Software Architect, Senior Engineering Representative (C-suite,) and Manager.
Partnered with HR to:
- identify ways to plan direct reports’ performance improvements while effectively managing reports through direct communication and engagement when issues arise; crafting Performance Improvement Plans as necessary
- start the engineering internship program in a bid to recruit highly-engaged, motivated potential future junior engineers; bringing on and coaching a female CS major from Columbia
- to ensure diligence around off-boarding consultancy in favor of a more performant agency
Increased capacity by:
- collaboratively establishing and tracking against 2017 objectives while engaging direct reports through periodic 1:1s as well as yearly performance reviews, including providing feedback as part of peripheral teams’ review processes
- making introduction to highly-performant near- (Canada) and offshore (Russia) teams to augment local web teams while organizing and managing engineers and deliverables
- fielding request to procure more resources on a Tuesday, re-established communication to previously-contacted near-shore agency immediately thereafter, and by Friday of that week, had a contract signed for two engineers to start two weeks later
- facilitated Agile SDLC through leading standups, backlog grooming, commitment-based sprint planning, and retrospectives
Increased engagement by:
- mentoring junior engineer in taking on time-sensitive accounting change having major impact to business and shepherded that effort to complete without bugs while meeting the deadline
- organizing company-culture events for promoting team spirit (holiday party, cocktail contests, bowling, bocce, Exploratorium)
- doing daily code reviews of teams’ PRs
- drafted leveling plan
Continued search after multiple Lead engineer candidates ghosted/fell off the radar after offer; including the time after a candidate accepted job offer only then to inform us the day before he was to start that he had accepted another offer
Quality
Took over QA when QAE suddenly left; picking up Ghost Inspector, Runscope, and TestPad
Led eval efforts around Rainforest QA/on-boarding seasoned QAE replacement
Results
- Led diverse co-located and remote web and mobile teams to deliver the user-facing experience for the premier luxury reseller.