Traackr

Lead Applications Engineer

San Francisco, CA

Lead Applications Engineer at Traackr, building the company's SaaS Influencer Marketing Product for the Enterprise. Leading a Team of Engineers who are responsible for the development and maintenance of customer facing apps. Stack: CakePHP, MySQL, Redis and JQuery, VueJS, NodeJS, MongoDB. Committed to ongoing strategic planning around the implementation of business initiatives by engaging in close collaboration with other engineers among the various teams, as well as with VPs of Engineering, and the Heads of Product and Data. Responsible for delivery on bi-weekly sprints, feature design, technical architecture, and development, as well as ongoing support and maintenance.

• 2015-2018 Engineering Lead, Growing and organizing the team of engineers responsible for building Traackr's customer facing applications. Optimized the team based on function and skillset, creating areas of ownership and facilitating best practices for better technical implementation and team collaboration.
• Designed and Developed, in partnership with Head of Product and VP of Engineering, a repeatable process for large cross-team project delivery that encompasses: clear roles and areas of ownership, activities, deliverables, and interdependencies. The Engineering Teams have delivered 4 large scale projects using this method this year alone.
• Implementing quarterly and semi-annual goal setting for members of my team. Responsible for performance reviews and feedback.
• Helped double the team size through strategic hires, increasing the team UX Engineering capacity. UX Engineering group has coverted half the front-end code base from jQuery to VueJS without disrupting the customer experience.
• Created a process that allows for the frequent prioritization and execution of large technical debt projects where the capacity for completing them is very slim. As a result the team continues to meet its commitments around technical debt work that would otherwise not be able to be completed using the regular SCRUM process
• Completed SCRUM Master Certification Training in Feburary 2015. Collaborated in implementing a SCRUM process within Traackr Engineering.
• 2013-2015 Apps Team Individual Contributor, transitioned from the backend/platform team to a the team developing customer-facing applications, including the company's main SaaS product.
• Designed and implemented framework for the management of communities and collections of people-data-sets. Allowing the application to scale from allowing users to manage 100s of entities to several thousand, with an emphasis on API integration, caching strategy using Redis, with milisecond response times.
• Architect and primary contributor of "Notify", Traackr's internal app-to-user notification service. The system collects and aggregates application data, into responsive and visually rich HTML emails, delivering a daily email digests to over 1500 users. Notify was a response to a business need to push relevant information to end users to increase stickiness of our app. Notify was designed to be application independent, abstracting the notion of app-user notifications, so any number of applications can integrate to easily notification features, without the need to fully bake this functionality in every respective app.
• 2010-2013 Backend/Platform Team Individual Contributor, hired as the 2nd Engineer at Traackr, and member of the company's founding team in 2010.
• Designed and developed the Influencer Relationship and Network Analysis feature set. Architected and implemented within two months. Mechanism involves the analysis of 500,000 entries of social data daily to discover key relationships of each person in our database. Architected and implemented both the display of relationship data, as well as the interactive force-directeg graph on the customer app, using D3js. This Network Analaysis engine is still being used today.
• Designed a system of daily content and metrics updates across our entire database of relevant people. Scaled the acquisition of data, from 50k profiles over every two weeks, to 100k user daily.
• Created Traackr’s practice for geo-located based searches. Created strategy for the normalization of > 150,000 freeform location entries, into ISO codes for every UN and ISO recognized continent, region, country, province, and county in the world. Designed geo-based model to allow for multi-lingual support for international locations.
• Lead and implemented key vendor partnership for the acquisition of realtime social data. Implemented an Akka-based client, to handle the processing of realtime Twitter data via GNIP, at a rate up to 100 messages/sec.
• First employee to move from Boston to SF and was a key figure in the seeding and growing our new headquarters in San Francisco in both logistics and cultural development;
• Supervised university intern, and guided him in the transition of his NodeJS prototype into a production ready application. Taught him the disciplines of test-driven development, and helped guide the transformation to a more optimized implementation.
• Internal team evangelist on various platforms and toolsets. Lead a presentation and effort to introduce GIT rather than SVN to improve our development, and collaboration.

Seeds For Hope

Co-Founder / Board Secretary

Co-Founder and Board Member, responsible for USA fundraising initiatives and outreach, with almost yearly trips to Kenya to document and help implement certain programs and initiatives.

• Designed and developed the organization’s website, www.seedsforhope.org. Implemented a Search Engine Optimization strategy for increased web search results.
• Developed SFH’s social networking presence on the web.
• Cooridinated The Music for Life Project in 2009, which connected a musician from NYC, with a girls school in Kibera which resulted in the establishment of a Glee / Performance club that still functions today
• Volunteers on the ground in East Africa at least once a year. Responsible for the media portion of an upcoming campaign around raising awareness on the plight of students in Kenya.
• Initiated partnership with a grass roots secondary school in one of the slums of Kenya, to further our goals as an organization to provide education to those otherwise unable to afford it.