In the Platform Engineering strategic business unit, we run all of Appian Cloud for customers and internal users alike. We build and manage highly-scalable infrastructure and ensure our software engineers can build and deploy their software to our customers using DevOps practices.Our team is global, spanning many locations across the US, Australia, and India, with a total team of 100+ engineers.

Head of Engineering for our Cloud Native Strategic Business Unit.I am in charge of delivering on two key missions: providing a resilient and scalable Appian Cloud to our customers, which drives a significant portion of Appian's revenue; and driving our investment in Cloud Native technologies.In addition, I'm driving the effort to further modernize and push our platform towards a Cloud Native future

I lead our Cloud Native initiative at Appian, which aims to make Appian a Kubernetes-native platform. This will allow us to provide consistent capabilities across public, private, and hybrid clouds, both hosted and on-premises. We are focusing on elastic scalability and zero-downtime deployments while also enabling our engineering department to make high-impact changes frequently and predictably with minimal toil.

I lead the Platform Tribe for Appian's Engineering department, a group of about 40 engineers spread across 6 development squads. In my role as Director and Tribe Lead, I ensure success across our four critical dimensions: Technology, Process, People, and Strategy.I am currently heading up our Continuous Delivery efforts within Appian, implementing and managing our Kubernetes clusters for rapidly deploy applications at scale.The mission of my tribe is to build features of our product that aid in keeping Appian a world-class platform. Some of the missions of my squads include:* Providing a reliable and fault-tolerant Kubernetes cluster for our company to deploy products on* Manage our infrastructure across cloud providers* Infrastructural capabilities for our Engineering department through our Release Engineering squad, which includes redesigning our deployment pipeline to suit the needs of both our cloud offering and on-premise customers* Building out a fault-tolerant layer for providing high availability to Appian's lower-level process engines* Building monitoring and visibility into the product for insight into critical problems with the platform* Creating and supporting Appian's SAIL language, a functional reactive programming language for building webapps and mobile apps using Appian's platform* Building our data storage solution which allows for rapid queries and aggregations of data across many data sets* Administration and security-related featuresIn addition to ensuring that we're executing on these missions, I coach the next level of leaders within the tribe as they fill roles as managers, Agile practitioners and coaches, or as technical leaders and architects. I manage several managers who manage our engineering staff, as well as managing some of the higher-level engineers within my tribe.

Joined as a Principal Software Engineer for the Administration and Integration team. Quickly moved into a leadership role on the team after one month and guided the team through a rapid transformation to a high-performing agile squad.Delivered quality features for the administration of Appian which helped to meet security regulations and allowed Appian to be approved for various security certifications, leading to new customer opportunities. Also helped lead the effort to provide a custom web API design experience for designers in the Appian no-code platform.Started and led the effort to build out a more scalable and fault-tolerant deployment of our in-memory data store using Netty, Kafka, and Zookeeper.Managed up to 12 direct reports through direct, hands-on, goal-oriented coaching to help them become new leaders within Appian (becoming Agile Coaches, Managers, or lead software engineers).These facets led to my promotion to Director of Software Development.

In my role as a deputy practice head, I was trusted as a thought leader and personnel manager within the company, and have been instrumental at building the DC office from one person (myself) into a 30+ employee office. I helped improve our development, recruiting, and interviewing processes, and championed monthly technical seminars in our DC office.In my role as a senior software engineer, I created rich multi-page and single-page web applications (mostly using Backbone and Require). I built back end services with Java, Spring, and REST APIs to provide services to the front end. One project required proving out the performance of document data stores in comparison with traditional relation databases (specifically MongoDB), assessing their feasibility using a custom-built test harness. I acted as team lead for several projects, championing agile development methods.

My main role was as a software engineering contractor to customers in a development, technical lead, or product management capacity.Internally, I was the technical lead and Agile product manager for an internal product, KEYW's Risk Mitigation Tool, or RMT. My work directly helped to land a significant customer for the platform.* Planned and executed the re-development of RMT from its legacy codebase (old ASP/VBScript) to a fully-functional Java-based web application using modern Java technologies such as Spring MVC, Hibernate* Employed Agile development methodologies with a team of developers and a summer intern, using a continuous integration system for deploying and testing the software* Used Test-Driven Development (TDD) and Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) for a full regression suite of both unit and integration tests, all automatically run using continuous integration (Hudson/Jenkins)* Completely re-designed the application to protect intellectual property rights of KEYW by implementing a licensing framework* Provided full technical support, and ran multi-day training sessions to customers of the softwareSkills and tools used: Java, Spring/Hibernate, JUnit & Mockito, JBehave (similar to Cucumber, used for BDD and validating Agile acceptance criteria), Hudson/Jenkins (continuous integration), JavaScript/JQuery (front-end design)

Provided software engineering services to this customer while working at KEYW.Brought on to finish out the final months of a maintenance contract, providing technical support of the HUBZone application. Provided expertise for transition of the application to the SBA’s internal IT group.

Provided software engineering services to this customer while working at KEYW.Deployed new enhancements to the ground software suite (MAESTRO):* Developed a new framework for encoding / decoding data streams in the legacy commander software to better leverage future enhancements to the commanding software* Built a small unit-testing framework in C for doing more interaction-based (i.e. mock-based) testing of the library code* Enhanced the JMS-based framework that allows re-assembly of mission-critical data on the ground into archivable files, also providing plug-in capability for external processing of the downlinked mission dataSkills used: Java, JMS, Spring, Hibernate, C

Provided software engineering services to this customer while working at Sycamore and KEYW.Developed software for L-3 Telemetry-West in San Diego, CA, working remotely from my office in Maryland:* Developed a web-based telemetry application in Java for use with the InControl satellite command & control system, which allows remote users to run reports and view archived telemetry data from spacecraft missions* Built a translator for the XTCE XML format, which is a generic telemetry and command format supported by OMG, CCSDS, and NASASkils used: Java, Echo Web Framework, JFreeChart, XML with XSLT

I worked directly for Sycamore as a contractor, sent to several different organizations throughout my career here. I have listed those as separate entries in my career log to give further insight into my impact in those organizations.Sycamore was bought out by KEYW Corporation in November 2010.

Managed a summer intern project to develop a telemetry and command viewer (TCV) application for L-3 Telemetry-West. The team consisted of 2 interns and an experienced developer, in addition to myself.* Employed an Agile software development process, producing working software in 2-week iterations through the user of user stories and iteration demos to the customer* Mentored the interns on software development processes and practices, as well as providing technical expertise to help improve their skillsSuccessfully delivered on schedule and budget.Skills used: Agile software process management, Java, XML, SVN/Trac

Provided software engineering services to this customer while working at Sycamore.Worked as the technical lead and lead developer for the US Small Business Administration's internal legacy HUBZone system tracking website:* Designed and developed a Java-based back-end for the data layer of the HUBZone certification application using the Spring Application Framework* Redesigned some of the web-based forms to use standards-based HTML and CSS, allowing for better usability* Led a team of developers in an effort to integrate the Java back-end with the ColdFusion architectureSkills used: ColdFusion, Java, Spring, Subversion/Trac

Provided software engineering services to this customer while working at Sycamore.Developed software for the satellite ground control software suite known as MAESTRO:* Developed several graphical applications for administering the software suite.* Created an external API in Java, C, and C++ for third parties to extend the capabilities of the product within a secure environment.* Built an encryption interface for use with the software suite to support satellite communications encryption* Redesigned the build and release system to provide much quicker builds and more reliable releases, decreasing build times by an order of magnitude* Administered the source code repository and brought about changes to allow the migration to a modern issue tracking system and eventually a modern source code repository systemSkills used: C, C++ and Java, CVS & Subversion, Trac issue tracking system, Makefiles.