Ken Stowell Email & Phone Number

Santa Monica, California, Us

At FlowFi we enable founders to operate at peak financial performance. FlowFi is a full-service marketplace where we match vetted financial experts to customers under our brand of quality and standards.- Implemented technology roadmap and charter in alignment with the company vision and values.- Introduced a revolutionary hiring process that reduced pipeline overhead while capturing skills and traits that matter most.- Created the FlowFi Growth Framework: an attribute based career ladder and rubric that enabled FlowFi to apply its values of excellence and inclusivity as pathways to advancement.- Unified Product, Services, and Engineering roadmaps by removing silos and dismantling traditional department structures. Created a single group of stakeholders to run the core functions of the business.- Managed department finance. Lead initiative to reduce our cloud spend by 60% through data-driven consolidation of resources and KTLO evaluations.- Reported goals, challenges, and progress in all board meetings.

Santa Monica, California, Us

- Implemented the FlowFi SDLC, codifying the discovery process to enable accurate predictability of project deliveries.- Built and deployed a single-responsibility architecture that let us build, scale, and maintain over 75 microservices in our cloud environment with a small team.- Worked closely with Product to develop our POM, creating a shared responsibility model between Engineering, Product and Process.- Managed the Engineering team, facilitating growth through high standards, coaching, and personal development.- Worked with leadership and HR to ensure representation of DEI practices in our hiring and management procedures.

Santa Monica, California, Us

- Built FlowFi’s MVP in six months as a sole developer and the first technology hire in pre-seed.- Established our cloud stack, AWS, implementing: Lambdas, API Gateway, SQS, PostgreSQL, AppSync, GraphQL, and Comprehend (NLP).- Established our client stack using React, Webpack, GraphQL and CircleCI.- Built our MVP data stack, implementing asynchronous ELT pipelines with integrations for Plaid and QBO.- Worked with leadership to plan and hire our first team after the MVP successfully indicated PMF.

Irvine, California, Us

At Acorns I had the amazing opportunity of leading the core product teams: Found Money (aka Earn) and our core Round Ups and Bank Linking teams (RUBL).The RUBL team was core to the product. It was responsible for the engineering required to support our end-users in linking their bank accounts (through Plaid) so that we could ingest their transactions to determine micro-investment candidates. With 2M MAU, you can imagine the scale. The engineers built a world class processing pipeline that could handle millions of transactions in every batch.The Earn team was responsible for the engineering required to facilitate our partner revenue streams. Acorn’s would partner with companies wherein large segments of our user base had engagements. In turn those partners would micro-invest in our user’s portfolios when consumer activity would take place. The engineers built an impressive ecosystem that could handle each partner's bespoke data requirements.Highlights:- Oversaw and facilitated technical strategy for the Earn and RUBL product lines through design and review- Managed the incident response and RCA process for the Earn and RUBL SLA's- Performance & Growth management for the Earn and RUBL teams- Created and led devX programs such as innovation weeks/hackathons- Managed the work intake/discovery process of our SDLC to increase the fidelity of work that made it into the sprints- Led and worked directly with the VPoE and CTO on our Direct Bank Linking project that set out to integrate with banks directly to remove our largest cost center in Engineering (Plaid)- Managed corresponding partner operation teams for our Found Money affiliates- Responsible for engineering content and throughput in hiring pipelines for these two teams

Portland, Or, Us

Live Axle was a full-service digital agency based in Portland, OR that built custom software for Miller Coors, Qualcomm, NBC and Cisco to name a few. As Director I oversaw implementation, quality, delivery and budget of all software initiatives.The most notable projects delivered during my tenure were for Miller Coors and NBC. Miller Coors needed a B2B sales platform that could consume real-time SKU information so channel reps could sell accurate amounts of product while in the field. NBC had us a build their "for your consideration" (FYC) platform that enabled media content to be screened by guided award body members to determine their nominations.Responsibilities & Highlights:- Established and governed technical strategy and roadmap with the CTO- Created architecture charter and process with tech leads to establish consistency within client projects- Founded the first hackathon and conference week for developers. Managed travel and expense protocol and budgets- Maintained and set budgets with Finance to ensure project profitability- Established and governed SDLC with Project Leads- Worked with Product Owners and Clients directly to produce units of work from SoWs and PRDs

I began my software career in 2006 as an intern and rapidly progressed to senior developer by 2010 at CD Baby. My last IC roles before moving into leadership were predictably more focused on architecture, data and systems design. Below are some highlights of my experience during this time:- Host Baby (2010, CD Baby): full-stack developer working on the "Host Baby" product team that gave CD Baby's DIY musicians a place to build their own WSYWIG websites.- UNFI (2013, Metal Toad): senior developer on a team that built an inventory PIM/DAM solution for UNFI's logistics teams to replace their archaic warehousing terminals.- McKeeSport (2013, Metal Toad): a wearable collaboration with Intel and Ziba design. I was part of the UI team that built a portal for interacting with the wearable where one could change settings and notification preferences, etc.- Daimler Telematics (2016-2017, Metal Toad): lead architect on a team that consumed Daimler's sensor telematics data (fleet vehicle sensor data such as fuel, lane and brake events) through a custom analytics pipeline to be visualized on a fleet management system dashboard.- Centris (2015, SoSA Corp): geo-social conflict modeling platform for the DoD that used a public model data set from the UN. Our platform consumed these models into graph data sets and ANN embeddings to build relationships visualized in a network graph on a dashboard. The goal was to aid actionable intelligence outcomes with "impact" data so that downstream results of a kinetic decision could be accounted for upfront.- Atlas (2016, Rubicon): An Ed-Tech startup subsidiary within a larger ed-ops enterprise, we built an MVP curriculum management system for school districts that conformed to federal standards.

Throughout the years I have taken on several software engagements for IC/consultant work in addition to my FTE roles. Here are some highlights: - Chirpler (2014, Greenlamp): was contracted as a full-stack IC to build an MVP for a dating platform including a recommendation engine for matching users by location and preferences, etc.- Code School Instructor (2014-2017, Thinkful): taught a prepared curriculum focused on full-stack development in a classroom and 1:1 mentorship settings off and on for ~3 years.- FBA Admin (2015, FBA): built a back-office order admin and order management system for that tailored to the specific frieght and logicistcs workflows that were required for operations.- Marketplace (2017, Canon): was an architectural consultant and lead for Canon's new photographer's booking/engagement marketplace. Primarily oversaw the recommendation engine/image matching pipeline.- Sungage (2022): architectural consultant to help Sungage Financial migrate their current order and financing workflows from Salesforce to a custom platform.