Erik Klingman Email & Phone Number

Chicago, Illinois, United States

Brighton, East Sussex, Gb

After a restructuring in the fall of 2022, I was promoted to Senior Director and given responsibility for our entire Consumer Intelligence group. In this role my job is to set the strategic direction and drive tactical process improvements for 4 SaaS products, 7 teams, and over 50 engineers, PMs, and designers globally, contributing to over $200M annual revenue.In my day-to-day role, I collaborate with leaders and teams across Product, Design, User Research, Customer Experience, and Go To Market to define our product vision, establish quarterly roadmaps, tackle tech debt, and ensuring our teams are consistently delivering great products in a sustainable manner.Some other highlights include implementing a rapid response system for handling support tickets, which has led to an increase in GRR of 10% year over year and a reduction in the average ticket resolution time of over 2 weeks. I've also led oversight and integration of over a dozen third-party engineering integrations to improve product functionality, stability, and security.

Brighton, East Sussex, Gb

In October of 2018, Crimson Hexagon merged with Brandwatch, instantly becoming the leader in the social listening space and a $100M+ revenue SaaS company. I was responsible for leading a cross-functional team of over a dozen engineers, designers, and product managers to develop a "light listening" version of the flagship Brandwatch Consumer Research application, to be embedded within partner applications that wanted to have social listening functionality without building the whole infrastructure required to run such an intensive product. Our first partnership was with Hootsuite, and thus "Hootsuite Insights" was born.Due to complexities with the merger, the deal between Hootsuite and Brandwatch was signed in September 2018, but we weren't able to being work until March 2019. We then planned, designed, built, tested, and deployed an entire light listening application from scratch in 6 months to meet the September 2019 deadline set in the original contract. We used React, TypeScript, Node.js, and Java APIs for the application itself, and developed a cloud-based deployment and monitoring pipeline using Kubernetes, Docker, GCP, Jenkins, Grafana, and Elastic.After the successful launch of Hootsuite Insights, Brandwatch was acquired by Cision in early 2021 for $450M. To signal to the market that the acquisition would be a successful one, leadership asked us to expand our Hootsuite Insights "embedded app" to 5 additional partner applications, including the Falcon.io social media management suite, as well as 4 legacy Cision applications. We developed an innovative templating and deployment system that enabled us to deploy to those 6 total applications in under 5 months, eventually generating over $5M in revenue and reaching over 10,000 clients and 60,000 users.

Boston, Ma, Us

After a couple years as a Senior Manager I was promoted to Director. During this period I was responsible for building our Dashboard and Reporting teams and products from the ground up as leader of the Dissemination squad at Crimson. We followed the Spotify model at the time, where I led an autonomous team of frontend engineers, backend engineers, QA engineers, a PM and a product designer.We built out the next generation Dashboard and Reporting modules in Crimson's flagship ForSight product, leveraging a modern frontend stack of React, Webpack, Flux, and Sass, driven by a Java and Postgres backend. We wrote the APIs, designed the data visualizations and UIs, and leveraged a whole slew of reusable components to craft two separate but intertwined sets of functionality within the larger product.

Boston, Ma, Us

In November of 2014, I was promoted to manage the UI team at Crimson Hexagon. At the time that included 4 full-time engineers, one intern, and two contractors, and we were vital to the engineering efforts at CH. My responsibilities included, but were not limited to: keeping the team on track, helping to ship new functionality, bug fixes, and other product improvements, and helping the UI Engineers achieve their goals and grow professionally. This work dovetailed nicely with my duties as Scrum Master for the entire Engineering team, as those requirements were similar to the ones I had for the Engineering team as a whole, only on a more focused scale. I also focused on growing the team to meet increased demand in enhancing the product and expanding the company, creating a cohesive, autonomous unit within the larger Engineering team, and shepherding any and all front-end technology stack enhancements through the minefield of competing demands and needs inherent in any small technology company.

Boston, Ma, Us

As a UI Engineer at Crimson Hexagon, I was responsible for all things front-end. This involved, first and foremost, working with modern HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to make sure all of our data visualizations and advanced client-side functionality worked well and worked quickly. I also did a bit of back-end work on Java controllers, where necessary to handle front-end issues.Core technologies used include: HTML 5, CSS3, Freemarker, JavaScript, jQuery, Flot, D3, Node, Grunt, Eclipse, Subversion, &c. And, to a lesser extent, Java, Hibernate, Spring, and related back-end technologies.I was also heavily involved in the product planning process, which included creating wireframes and mockups for new features, working across the company with Product, Engineering, Sales, and Services to refine product plans based on company goals and customer needs, screening potential new engineering employees, and demoing current projects internally.As of June, 2014, I took on the responsibilities of Scrum Master for the Engineering team, ensuring we practice Agile methodologies and had just enough process backing up our development to allow us to deliver quality product quickly and often, without bogging down the team in day-to-day drudgery. This position also involved interfacing with other members of the organization, acting as the buffer between their needs and engineering team members' time.

As a freelance technologist, I worked with a wide variety of companies to solve whatever needs they had and could not handle in-house.This included developing cutting-edge web applications, building fully modern corporate websites, handling remote IT administration duties, creating web-based apps for large corporate clients, and consulting on best practices and technologies to use.I worked very closely with organizations of all sizes, from sole proprietors to larger corporations, to discover project goals and needs, and to formulate effective solutions. I did all of this with an eye toward quality, reliability, open and honest communication, and value for the work performed.

La Jolla, Ca, Us

After almost 3 years of working as an undergraduate assistant to the Computer Systems Manager at UCSD Recreation, my boss left to pursue a different career, and I applied for and successfully retained the manager position. As the Computer Systems Manager, I performed all the same duties I did as an assistant, only this time with much more accountability. I helped to design, develop, and debug three complex, LAMP-based web applications from scratch, as well as maintained and updated legacy code bases for two other applications. I was deeply involved in setting the direction of technology for the department, and advised its employees about available solutions to their technology needs. I also continued work on modernizing their server infrastructure by moving a dozen servers running a variety of Linux and Microsoft Server operating systems from commodity desktop machines (mostly Dell towers) to proper racked 1U and 2U servers in a small server room with necessary cooling, power, backups, and access controls. Finally, I managed a succession of student employees who took the position I had vacated, and helped them to provide excellent support to the department staff, as well as grow their skills and appreciation for technology.

La Jolla, Ca, Us

As the assistant to the Computer Systems Manager at UCSD Recreation, I had three main responsibilities: - Desktop support needs for dozens of employees and hundreds of machines at half a dozen locations across campus. - Web application development and maintenance of in-house apps to facilitate successful and efficient running of the various areas within the Recreation department, including a completely custom web application for student employee management, and another for Sports Clubs athletes and trainers to manage their medical history information. - Server administration for a variety of local servers, supporting filesystem access, Exchange email accounts, and the previously-mentioned web applications and databases.I was chosen for this role because of my honest, easygoing nature, my strong skills as a technical generalist, and the ease with which I interact and communicate with people across the organization and with varying levels of technical proficiency. These skills have continued to help me thrive throughout my career.

Cupertino, California, Us

This was definitely a dream internship, and was the main reason I ended up getting a Minor in Computer Science and continuing down the path towards software development as a career.At the time I had very little formal programming experience, so I helped what was then a small, mostly remote iSync team in whatever way I could. This included carrying out QA testing and application debugging on production file sync software, assisting developers in any way necessary to ship a solid, bug-free product, and, on occasion, acting as a liaison between the development team and upper management for bug reports and feature requests.The only production code I wrote was some debugging log statements, but I can still say that I have code in the final version of OS X 10.3 "Panther".