My leadership journey continues! What an honor it is to rejoin Launch Consulting in this role. More to come once I get my bearings!

Store 8 is a startup incubator and skunkworks team, financed by the world's largest private employer and Fortune 1 company, Walmart. We iterate quickly, and explore emerging tech with a "fail fast" mindset. Much of the work we do is guided by the Scientific Method, but rather than throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, we use data-driven hypothesis' and real customer feedback to focus our R&D efforts.I'm leading an App team in the "food venture tech" space, and while I can't tell you much about what we're up to, I can tell you what I appreciate about the role:* 38% of the food produced in this country goes to waste, while one in eight households in America go hungry. At Store 8, we're looking to change that. It is a career highlight for me to work on a project that has the potential to redirect many tons of food waste from landfills.* Save time, save money - 90% of Americans live within 10 miles of a Walmart store. Working at this scale (where concurrent users number in the millions or tens of millions) is exhilarating. Helping customers save time and money while inflation runs rampant is a treat.* Incredible leadership and peers - my immediate leadership team is comprised of industry veterans, who have offered unwavering support. Over the last six months, we've built a diverse, world-class development team. * Incredible developers - I am blessed to have a phenomenal Tech Lead (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sbarli/), along with a number of supporting engineers that remind me of my Digital Acceleration days at WalmartLabs.

I provide E2E leadership coaching, technical project management (TPM) support, hiring/team-building/staff-aug, architectural guidance and solutions for Native Mobile applications, and engineering management for some of Launch's most well-known clients. Assisted in Architectural Decision Records (ADRs) for massive brands that you know and love, helping them choose a mobile stack for the years ahead.

Managed one team of 13 directs, 24 functional reports split evenly between iOS/Android, plus an additional Senior Engineering manager. Maintained a near 90% completion rate on sprint work, making Search one of the top domains at eBay. Collaborated with Sr Director of Accessibility to automate testing of common A11Y violations. Collaborated with Core Components engineering leads. Collaborated with Product Managers to develop requirements for both new feature requests, as well as test suites for legacy features. Provided hands-on coaching of Agile fundamentals. Drove quarterly planning and estimation, hitting every major deliverable date for 4 consecutive quarters. Hired six engineers, promoted two.

Managed two teams concurrently, as well as a third team and Senior Eng Manager, across Native Mobile, API, and Web projects in Walmart's Digital Acceleration group. Heavily involved in hiring and recruiting, hiring 20+ engineers in 2019 alone, as well as performance management and career growth. Promoted five engineers, including a Principal. Learned how to do a "squiggly."Engineering Lead for Rise (Web/Backend), the Registry for Good, part of Walmart’s $1.5B in philanthropic efforts. Responsibilities included talent sourcing and acquisition, interviews, and (TBH) hiring an amazing team to do the real work. Led the project to a successful MVP launch, with full operational intelligence and on-call rotation as well as proactive monitoring and alerting. Supported more than 1000 Salvation Army chapters throughout the holiday season.Engineering Lead for Store Maps (iOS/Android/Backend), a widely-used feature in the Walmart eCommerce App with over 1.5M daily uniques, and 10% YOY growth. Led engineering efforts for cross-functional ground-breaking Blue Dot feature (indoor positioning) leveraging Visual Light Communication (VLC) and Bluetooth. Worked with Walmart chief legal counsel on privacy verbiage. Released Pathfinding feature, which provides step-by-step directions in Walmart stores. Improved operational intelligence and system stability, and incorporated on-call rotation. Stayed up late with talented engineers running disaster readiness tests of every sort so that when Black Friday came, we rocked it, with zero downtime.Managed Senior Engineering Manager - helped develop 1:1 skills, performance reviews, OKRs, and career goals for his team of 10-12. Looked on in awe at his technical fluency. Shared authentic, challenging conversations, and added "show up" to my Manager Bat Belt

Managed two teams concurrently, split horizontally, with technology fortes including Node, Java, and Swift, all within Nike’s B&M (Retail) division. Supported an average of 12-18 direct reports across the two teams, with an annual budget of $4.5 million. Led the expansion of Nike’s flagship membership App, Nike+ Link, to an additional 12 countries in a four-month span, coming in under budget and two months ahead of schedule. Staffed engineers in additional geos to support 24x7 on-call rotation (with incredible efforts from my entire team, just to be clear! We had folks flying all over the world to make this possible!) Created runbooks and KB docs and transferred on-call duties to L2 support team. Successfully promoted multiple engineers to senior positions, including promotions onto other teams. Created and led a tiger team to remove Nike’s dependency on a 3rd party authentication provider, saving Nike over $200K in annual license fees. Selected by Nike CTO Skip Potter as one of five employees to lead an internal talent-sourcing and acquisition project. Asked to serve as an official representative of Nike, Inc for themuse.com

Responsible for the technical direction, development, distribution, and support of four enterprise iOS Apps within Nike’s B&M (Retail) division. The predominant product is an omni-channel Mobile Point of Sale App, which performs 65% of all in-store transactions, has real-time inventory adjustments, and averages over $17M in sales per day. Spearheaded the usage of Node.js and GraphQL in Nike Retail, created an orchestration layer to reduce network requests for mobile devices. Developed a shared Cocoapod for code reuse between Consumer/Retail Apps. Awarded a Nike Maxim for Seamless Commerce.Additional responsibilities included conducting interviews, developing architectural patterns and best practices, code reviews, providing estimates, career guidance/mentoring/coaching, and working directly with stakeholders in Product, Business, and UX.Tooling: Xcode, Storyboards, UI Automation, Jenkins, Bots, continuous delivery and deployment, Objective-C, Swift, RESTful Web Services, JSON, Cocoapods, GCD, UIKit, CoreData, CoreLocation, CoreAudio, TDD, BDD, and mocking and stubbing frameworks.

Rewrote Nike’s flagship Mobile Point of Sale iOS App to use modern RESTful architecture and JSON, instead of XML/SOAP. Introduced BDD, mocking, crash reporting, and data-driven analytics. Steered the division towards the usage of Git. Replaced VFL with storyboards. Tasked with hiring 12 iOS engineers, split evenly between onshore and offshore. Interviewed, made hiring recommendations, and then managed the PRs for both teams.Awarded a Nike Global Maxim for introducing Apple Pay upon launch. Traveled to western Europe to assist in the geo-expansion of the App.

Responsible for the architecture, development, distribution, and support of Mobile8, Eponic’s mobile enterprise data acquisition software. Practiced Agile Methodologies as well as elements of extreme programming, including TDD, CI, design patterns, story mapping and planning, and development sprints. Mobile8 for iOS is an “Occasionally Connected App” (OCA) and incorporates a SQLite database, APNs, photo capture and manipulation, RedLaser integration, zip/unzip functionality, data synchronization with a cloud, and was designed using standard UIKit elements. Tooling: Xcode, Interface Builder, Instruments, iOS/Objective-C, iPhone/iPod Touch, XML, and (for legacy Windows devices) Visual Studio, VB.net, NUnit, SQL Server, SQL, HTML, CSS, JS, Flash, and Photoshop.Eponic have a large, distributed customer base, with customers in private security, hospitality, public safety, and business improvement/urban development. Because of the unpredictable schedules in these sectors, 24x7 uptime is expected of all systems, and scheduled maintenance is challenging. During my time at Eponic, I was the primary on-call for production support. I not only became a better developer during this time period, I became better at everything I did. A phone call to "production support" would forward to my cell, and on the spot I had to diagnose the issue, provide something reassuring to the customer (an ETA?!), and determine if the issue was impacting one device, one city, or the entire country. One learns to appreciate the value of unit tests very quickly, how to set expectations, and how to adjust technical nomenclature on the phone when they are supporting over 1,000 devices in production.

Worked as a Java engineer on a J2EE application which supported Banfield's internal Customer Service/Call Center team. Tech stack was Oracle 9i, which was hosted locally, Java, JavaBeans, and JSP, with some JavaScript thrown in for fun on all the front-end stuff. There was also some usage of Adobe Flash, and a number of internal tools which I supported.* While working at Banfield I discovered a security exploit on the local network that allowed me to browse the entire contents of the hard drive of every computer on the network. The IT team had shared the roots with C$. I raised the concern once but it wasn't heard, so I raised it again after tracking the browser history of an employee on the network (and showing my peers) which resulted in fixing the exploit. I learned at that moment that you keep pushing when you know you're right.* I worked under the infamous Dave Turner, who taught me "I work for You, Inc." I still apply Dave's teaching to my teams today, nearly 20 years later.