John Ruiz Email & Phone Number

From the start of my career in the leadership development program at Lockheed Martin to VP of Engineering at YouEye, to Security Ops at GitHub, I've seen and done quite a lot in the last 20 years. I've been an individual contributor, a leader of teams, and a leader of organizations - and I still enjoy cranking code.As a leader, I observe that technical teams tend to be successful on their own when three conditions are true: 1) individual contributors understand the larger business objectives and can draw a direct line from them to their own work, 2) there is a culture that encourages the raising of impediments and problems, and 3) the team's contribution is made visible within a reasonable timeframe. From this observation, I draw the conclusion that leaders best serve their teams by continually communicating business objectives, by listening to the team's warnings about potential problems, and by shortening the timeline of feedback loops.I've spanned the gamut of process methodologies, from heavyweight CMMI Level 5 at Lockheed to lightweight SCRUM in the face of ever changing priorities at start-ups. I see the need for each, and view process as something that should be custom designed on a case-by-case basis, with sensitivity to business needs and team dynamics. I have turned around a number of teams with unsatisfactory processes simply by removing the idea of SCRUM practices as an absolute proscription and essentially giving the process back to the team, making iterative improvements through thoughtful retrospectives.Technically, I've architected globally distributed applications for the US Intelligence Community, wrestled with the performance implications of datasets whose volume overwhelms traditional processing systems, ensured the application of security mechanisms that protect our nation's sensitive information, faced the stark challenge of discovering business intelligence within heaps of data, and more.I enjoy getting teams to work together as much as getting code to work.