Lead a team of architects and engineers to reinvent all areas of tax systems delivery model and drive the digital transformation and cloud migration of H&R Block’s tax platform. Key responsibilities include:• Manage a team of 16 technologist including architects, software and AI/ML engineers• Review team members work to ensure highest quality standards and develop a culture that encourages creativity and constant innovation• Provide technical guidance and thought leadership in all phases of the software development life cycle including research, requirements analysis, prototyping, design, coding, documentation, and testing• Develop relationships with key technology partners (Microsoft, Google, Adobe, etc.)• Create presentations to illustrate Roadmaps, Concepts and Prototypes to Senior Leaders and decision makers to develop, refine and execute architectural strategies• Maintain and establish working relationships with Product management and delivery leaders to develop and manage technology roadmaps and influence product direction• Partner with business and technology teams to analyze strategies, imperatives and requirements to identify technical deficiencies and create solutions to remove capability gaps• Lead the design and modeling of tactical and multi-year project architectures with a focus on cloud-native omni-channel solutions and low-code/no-code future-proofing techniques• Design and evangelize highly reliable, resilient and available platform architectural blueprints, patterns and practices to drive transformational changes to meet business goals• Partner with delivery leaders to drive the DevOps transformation through test-driven development and shift-left processes to ensure code quality, stability and security• Promote the use of cloud solutions to reduce costs and improve operations and velocity• Explore emerging technology trends to support current and future business innovation• Ensure compliance with government regulatory requirements

Director of Architecture and Integration reporting to the Chief Architect, VP Technology.Led teams of highly skilled architects and engineers responsible for driving new processes and technology architectures to modernize systems, implement new cutting-edge platforms and push the limits of innovation to enable and support Block’s business strategies. Key responsibilities include:• Manage a team of up to 35 including architects, managers, project manager, software engineers, UX designers and analysts.• Set goals, strategies and establish a framework to support architectural initiatives• Partner with Product and delivery leaders to develop and manage technology roadmaps, coding standards and best practices• Provide technical guidance, thought leadership and creative insights for all enterprise IT programs• Define and manage Block’s standard technology stack and compliance• Explore emerging technology trends to support business innovation• Partner with senior IT and Business leadership to establish the Block Delivery Model to standardize planning, design and delivery of architectural building permits, tollgates and reviews• Implement initial Scrum project to prove out the methodology and partnered with the CIO to transition delivery teams from Waterfall to Scrum• Lead R&D development and test teams distributed in the US, Russia and India to support 24-hour development and delivered several projects in record time• Lead Microsoft MTC and Product Team engagements to advance product capabilities and performance• Lead evaluations of technologies, platforms and services to support enterprise RFPs• Conduct acquisition technology reviews of companies including TaxAct and TaxNet

Managed a 30+ member team consisting of FTE, onshore and offshore develpers across multiple locations to extend and scale H&R Block's online tax system. Managed an annual budget between $5M and $25M.Built on the Microsoft technology stack, this site consists of more then 6000 dynamic pages and can horizontally scale the web, application and database layers to serve well over 100,000 concurrent customers as well as providing Clicks & Mortal connectivity to as many as 120,000 tax pros spread across 10,000 office locations.

Worked with partners to formalize the company, refine the products and establish operating rules. Co-developed the desktop, website, services, database, monitoring and support systems. Individually responsible for accounting, payroll, advertising, partner integration and search optimization for the company.Niche product included both a desktop application and social media website and quickly became the market leader with more than 600,000 customers across multiple countries with the website generating millions of page views per month. Company was sold in 2007.

Solutions architect responsible for tax preparation systems including the creation of H&R Block’s online tax preparation system and Click & Mortars strategy.

Directed annual development, build and release activities for retail office Tax Preparation Software and supporting applications and tools. Led team of 10-15 software developers with responsibility for hiring, work assignments, regular staff meetings, and performance reviews. Worked closely with business experts, quality assurance teams, support groups and other application development teams to define program requirements and resolve operational issues.Designed and proposed next generation windows based tax preparation system to the President of H&R Block and gained his endorsement to build and deliver this initiative over an 18 month cycle while still leading the effort to maintain the current system. This project is still considered to be the most successful rollout of new technology to H&R Block's 10,000 office locations.

Lead engineer on the project to bring H&R Block’s externally developed tax application (TPS) in-house. Management projected this to be a two year project but my team delivered this in one year with the addition of over 100 enhancements that the external company identified as “not possible”.

Led a team of 6 developers to build and maintain the Tax Partner federal tax application and eFile system. Tax Partner was a MS-DOS application written in Borland C/C++.

Developed and maintained all of the Tax Partner peripheral tax applications including Proforma, Organizer and the Tax Planner. The peripheral applications were initially written in Basic but were later converted to Borland C/C++.