Building and delivering product while scaling the team

After Tally, the co-founder of Tally and I discovered a shared passion for product development, blending design and engineering. We joined to create a new company to build a new product in this space. I was responsible for building two distinct products: Strings and Summon. Strings was a copy writing tool that made it easy for writers to edit copy, the text, in web and mobile apps. I was responsible for all product services and infrastructure while I hired a contractor on the front end. This product lasted only 18 months, however, as there was too much friction in giving access to application source code to our tool for the writers.

Summon had a much larger vision as an integrated developer experience space for developers to improve their developer lifecycle. I believe that there are so many disjoint tools that compete for attention and increasing cognitive load. These tools include tools for project management, documentation, version control, pipelines, infrastructure, observability, etc. Finding the right thing at the right time is becoming counter-productive. Summon aimed to bring the right data to your fingertips without switching between all your browser tabs. By building a graph of your work, you could maximize signal-to-noise.During my time, my responsibilities and accomplishments include:• Recruiting process that shared ownership with the team and grew a fully remote, international team across North and South America• Culture of autonomous teams by letting them self select for their strengths and encourage growth to fill the gaps,• Library to improve our workflow in using DGraph DQL access,• Library for event streams, a pattern for asynchronous data processing,• Continuous deployment pipeline that reduced the time from commit to production to under 15 minutes for all services.• Process to respond to infrastructure and product incidents by actively promoting 12-factor app as our definition of Done resulting in only one production outage and a mean time to resolution of 30 minutes and mean time to acknowledge of 5 minutes.• Created Terraform pipelines to manage all infrastructure using GitOps and supporting a secured cloud environment for engineers and allowing team to add additional infrastructure and services,• Agent pattern for new services to be created that can read and write from APIs from new vendors, such as Slack, Confluence, Google Docs, etc. This resulted in a dramatic productivity boost for the team when creating new agent.• Data platform for visualizations, and tracking DORA metrics • Visualizations and additional views in our front-end platform

In the second phase of my time at Tally, having hired a more experienced engineering manager, I transitioned to a Staff Engineer focusing on internal tooling and developer platforms. I was given the opportunity to continue management, but chose to focus on engineering as I could have a greater impact. My final accomplishments include:• Introduce an Incident Support process, including a categorization strategy to prioritize incidents such as security, defects and outages, also to roll out PagerDuty and an on-call schedule across all engineering. The process included automation allowing teams to measure and apply their SLIs and SLOs.• Built a small web application to allow potential customers to test if they qualify and download the Tally app on their mobile device. It was an upstream sales funnel pilot project that increased customer acquisition by a small percentage• Built an internal tool for the customer support, credit teams and others to manage the platform and our customers• When our User Management system was no longer appropriate, I transitioned us to AWS Cognito to improve the security of managing user identity• Transitioned code versioning from BitBucket to self-hosted GitLab for all teams, and migrated build processes from Jenkins to GitLab's CI/CD to provide fine-grained deployment capabilities and visibility to versions of services in Kubernetes.This was a personal transition for me as I needed to step back from the leadership side. I wanted to spend more time on the engineering side and I recognize that I have more to learn in managing people and what a rapidly growing company needs for the teams.

Tally helps you save money by automatically paying down your credit card with a revolving line of credit. I was the first hire at Tally and was Head of Engineering. I was responsible for building our MVP which was effectively a bank. I built the stack in Scala with integrations for credit reporting data, credit card information, services for ledgers and payment generation and user management. I was also responsible for establishing a recruiting pipeline and hiring a brilliant team that was ultimately successful on delivering our core products.In this time, I accomplished the following:• Created a recruiting process which resulted in the hiring of over 30 engineers. The process was seen as highly engaging and entertaining by candidates and by the team. The process evolved as we collected additional data points but scaled to hiring an international team.• Built a stack focused on stability and quality for Financial Services. The Scala stack supported growth to 1000s of users and significant annual revenue.• I oversaw the development of the initial iOS app, and the subsequent Android app• I hired our Head of Data Engineering and Head of Product Engineering and established a Q/A team and a cloud services (infrastructure) team.I feel I grew a lot during this time. It was extremely stressful yet incredibly rewarding seeing how successful the company is now. The experience gave me new skills that I applied when building Summon, from which the co-founder from Tally and I ultimately teamed up to build Summon.

Bradley was the CTO and technical cofounder of Poshly Inc where he helped raise 2.5M, built and maintained a full stack, distributed giveaways and analytics platform that was recognized in the Fast Company’s Top 10 Most Innovative Companies of 2015 in Big Data and his flat designs were featured in Entrepreneur magazine. Poshly was initially built using Scala, Lift, Postgres and MongoDB and was later divided into a microservices architecture using Finagle, Zookeeper, Cassandra and Spark to support thousands of simultaneous users, 3rd party integrations such as that with People Magazine and a Consumer Insights research platform. Finally, Bradley hired and lead an engineering and product team of 10 people to grow and mature the company before departing for his next big challenge.

Bradley introduced modern patterns and technologies to a large existing back office solution. International Fund Services is a State Street company which provides a suite of fund management tools.

Bradley was hired by the CTO as an architect lead to design and build the new trading platform for alternative assets including Private Company shares, like pre-IPO Facebook and Twitter. With insights from the Foursquare team, he designed a distributive and secure stack that leveraged Java, Scala, Postgres, MongoDB, web services and legacy integrations delivering an amazing product that made SecondMarket famous. Bradley also led the back-end team who was responsible for implementing the vision.