During my time as an engineering manager at Jobcase (with various titles), I primarily managed two teams. I spent about half of my time performing manager / team lead duties, and the other half doing software engineering duties -- mostly debugging things, investigating issues, and making sure we were operationally stable to keep the engineers focused. The first team I managed was a backend team that maintained the legacy monolithic Java application that had been effectively the entire company in its early days. It was primarily responsible for user data, but was also responsible for a lot of other data and processes because of its history. It served APIs for both Jobcase.com, and most other sites the company operated. Other things it managed included a lead/offer engine, bot detection, authentication/authorization, ETL, event reporting, compliance, 3rd party integrations, etc... This team was small when I managed it, being just 3 people including myself most of the time. Managing this team, and working on this application, had a lot of challenges that I imagine to be typical of monoliths like this. System stability was crucial. If it crashed, most of the company ceased to function. The other team I managed was a more typical product team. It was responsible for various sections of the Jobcase.com website such as the profile page, SSO, notifications, connections, messaging, and profile search. It was effectively the Jobcase.com "front-end" of the other team I managed, though the team itself was full stack.Notable accomplishments during my time as an engineering manager include: - Being a key contributor to the move to microservices. - Being a key contributor towards an event driven architecture. - Operational response excellence -- my teams were often used as examples here. - Engineer career satisfaction. I truly believe I helped everyone on my team learn to be better engineers, and advance their career as they wanted to.

Primarily worked on a variety of backend Java systems such as the user data store and outbound communication system.This role and team focused heavily on up-front design, and design by contract, to ensure quality software. This was in lieu of maintaining a regression test suite, and instead spending the time usually spent there on JavaDoc contracts, code review, and ad-hoc testing as needed. I was wary of this when first starting since I had only used automated tests as a quality strategy before, but it truly did produce some of the highest quality code I have ever worked on. I now choose to use this method to develop when given the option. What I really took away from the experience is that there are a lot of ways of building software, and the important thing is deciding on a strategy the whole team agrees with.Notable accomplishments include: - Upgrading the cross application Java stack from Hibernate 4 to 5 in a JTA environment. - Designing and building (as part of a team of 2) an in-house email templating system using Velocity so that communication templates did not have to be rebuilt in each of the communication vendor's templating systems. - Being promoted to a managerial role after about 2 years.