Work Experience

• Senior Engineering Manager, Apollo GraphQL

  Dec, 2023 - Present

  I serve the folks responsible for our developer education platforms and content, including our Odyssey learning platform and documentation resources. I served the engineering teams responsible for the development of Apollo Client, Apollo Server, Apollo iOS, Apollo Kotlin, and their associated tooling. In addition to our open-source clients, I served the team that handles for the onboarding and billing flows in GraphOS, Apollo's SaaS product. I've had up to 14 people across three teams reporting to me in this role.
  <br>I also represent Apollo in the GraphQL Foundation, in which I serve as Board chair and treasurer, and the Agentic AI Foundation. I am active in contributing to the health of both communities. To that end I've helped plan and execute GraphQLConf and GraphQL Summit, the two major conferences in this space. I co-founded the GraphQL AI Working Group. I played a key part in bringing together the minds behind the Composite Schemas Working Group to work on an open GraphQL Federation specification. I've jump-started an open source sponsorship program at Apollo. I've authored four courses on mobile GraphQL development using Swift and Kotlin. My team and I have been featured in numerous keynotes and technical talks across the GraphQL, React, TypeScript, Android, and Kotlin communities.
  <br>I've been honored with Apollo's 2025 leadership award and won the CTO award in our 2024 Hackathon. I have been recognized as a 2024 and 2025 GraphQL Star by the GraphQL Foundation.

• Engineering Manager, Apollo GraphQL

  Aug, 2022 - Dec, 20231 year 5 months

  I served the engineers who create Apollo Client, Apollo iOS, and Apollo Kotlin. These are the flagship open-source client projects of Apollo GraphQL. I also represent Apollo as a member of the GraphQL Foundation Governing Board, helping to grow the GraphQL community through grants, events, content, and funding.
  <br>The engineers I serve are the best of the best, so my approach is to empower my team with information, priorities, and trust while giving them the processes they need in order to deliver their best work. The client libraries have grown in popularity and relevance due to judicious team growth, investment in community outreach, remarkable pace of innovation, and investment in the fundamentals of good open-source maintenance.
  <br>I led the effort to draft a new Engineering Career Ladder that has helped set a high bar for IC performance and proper leveling of new hires. I've also been doing a lot of glue work in transitioning our hiring process from a per-team, siloed approach to a cohort-based system. During that time I drafted new rubrics and interview templates, gave internal presentations on hiring, and helped close some high-quality candidates.

• Engineering Manager, Handshake

  Nov, 2021 - Aug, 202210 months

  • Manage and grow a team of software engineers (iOS and full-stack web) of varying seniority levels. A team with 4 engineers grew to 12 engineers during my tenure.

  • Work with a cross-functional squad and across teams to deliver impactful features to millions of student job-seekers, including performance enhancements to our messaging feature (5-10% response time improvements), converting our messaging feature from REST to GraphQL using Apollo client and ruby-graphql, updates to our Event views, and Group Session Follow-Up messages (stat sig increase in messaging usage)

  • Worked with other engineering managers to improve candidate sourcing practices

  • Lead the Internal Tech Talks committee and 2022 Intern Manager training

• Senior Software Engineer, Tech Lead, Intern Manager, Handshake

  Aug, 2019 - Nov, 20212 years 4 months

  • Deliver production code and architecture/implementation plans for user-facing features using PostgreSQL, ElasticSearch, Google Cloud, Ruby on Rails, GraphQL, TypeScript, and React for a product with over 30M users

  • Serve as the full-stack web engineering Tech Lead on the Student Relationships squad since November, 2020. My responsibilities include being the liaison between our squad's engineers and the greater engineering organization to ensure alignment on broad technical initiatives; project management; onboarding new engineers; working with product and design to manage scope and discover opportunities for trade-offs and enhancements; reviewing production code; contributing individually to production code where uncertainty and impact are high; prototyping

  • Successfully launched high-impact features to production: student referral programs, UK launch, the scheduling portion of our Virtual Fairs project, self-identification of gender & pronouns in the candidate-facing product, redesigns of student-facing recruiter/ambassador profiles, and Virtual Info Chats

  • As an intern manager in each of the past two summers, I onboarded, mentored, evaluated, and supported a full-stack web software engineering intern

  • Serve as a leader and trainer in our on-call teams, responsible for ensuring prompt resolution of production incidents at all hours

  • Design and document Ruby and TS architecture for translations and date/time formatting to support int'l expansion on a fixed timeline

  • Give talks on software topics for engineering, design, and product peers

  • Conceptualized and implemented an initiative to audit, organize, modularize, modernize, and trim third-party dependencies scattered throughout a mature codebase. Early interventions were measured via A/B tests and the results indicate 70-200ms improvements in TTI across all users

  • Promoted to Level 6 in June, 2021

• Senior Engineer & Manager, Visibly (fka Opternative)

  Jan, 2019 - Aug, 20198 months

  • Manage software engineer evaluations, compensation packages, and professional development for a small team

  • Responsible for technical implementation of projects: empower direct reports to take on user stories with autonomy that play to their strengths and foster new skills where possible, make key technical contributions where appropriate, and meet key timelines in close coordination with stakeholders

  • Overhaul software engineering recruitment and interview process

  • Work closely with product owners, designers, and project managers to identify key decision-making criteria, including long-term app architecture implications, precise estimates, and domain knowledge-related nuances

  • Lead biweekly sprint retrospective for all engineering and product personnel focusing on continuous improvement of process and product

• Senior Software Engineer, Visibly (fka Opternative)

  Jan, 2018 - Jan, 20191 year 1 month

  • Key contributor and innovator to the development of "Single Device Over Refraction," the first-ever application of pure HTML5 technology to create a 100% voice user interface on the web available to the public

  • Create, evangelize, and mantain modern front-end architecture for various production features and applications

  • Rapidly prototype cutting-edge user interfaces early in a product's lifecycle to ensure designers and other stakeholders can agree on a consistent vision that takes full advantage of the web browser's capabilities

  • Advise other engineers on database schema and data modeling best practices

  • Contribute to candidate interviews, colleague evaluations, and personnel decision-making

  • Overhaul team metrics gathering by collecting and gathering qualitative and quantitative information pertaining to the software engineering process

  • Mentor and teach teammates through one-on-one sessions and group lunch-and-learns on a variety of software development best practices, with an emphasis on front-end development techniques

  • Contribute patches to under-maintained open-source projects to drive company initiatives forward without having to reinvent the wheel (and improving company visibility to the developer community)

  • Drive revenue by mining production data and third-party analytics services to identify opportunities and implement solutions to improve outcomes for users

  • Facilitate international expansion by coordinating technical management of static assets and translation dictionaries for English, Spanish, and German

• Software Engineer, Visibly (fka Opternative)

  Aug, 2015 - Jan, 20182 years 6 months

  • Pushed and empowered teammates to incorporate principles in the Agile Manifesto in different aspects of the software development lifecycle

  • Proactively improved low-level code quality and consistency by implementing git hooks, linters, and documentation for Ruby, JavaScript, and CSS/Sass/SCSS

  • As the first remote-only employee, established a model for effective off-site collaboration within the engineering team and throughout the rest of the company

  • Designed, developed, and deployed the first iteration of the company's Engineering Blog (currently offline, version 2 coming soon)

  • Audited entire marketing site for accessiblity issues, reported findings to the team, created user stories for actionable items, and executed those items to ensure compliance and broad usability

  • Quarterbacked transition from Angular 1.2 + Sprockets to React + Babel + Webpack and other modern UI development best practices

  • Planned and taught a biweekly "learn to code" course for non-engineering colleagues

  • Generate technical specifications, detailed implementation plans, user stories, and estimates for large units of work

  • Created the company's first live style guide to facilitate higher-quality design-developer interactions, code reuse, and UI consistency

• Junior Front-End Web Developer, Discovery Communications

  Jul, 2014 - Jul, 20151 year 1 month

  • Developed prototype and production code for a distributed, infographic-heavy data visualization feature

  • Conceived, built, and deployed a "Styleguide as a Service" for bootstrapping new applications and rapid prototyping with a small team of designers and developers

  • Develop and maintain features and unit tests in a variety of education webapps using Backbone, Marionette, and ColdFusion

  • Improved software development speeds by identifying areas of high technical debt and refactoring those to comply with team norms and best practices

Education

Volunteer Work