Michele Larson Email & Phone Number

Santa Monica, California, Us

Senior Director of Engineering for the Ad Platform team, responsible for GumGum’s ad exchange and applications. GumGum’s ad exchange is a highly distributed system handling a large volume of requests (18 million/minute) and is the leading revenue driver (> 99%) for the company. Our apps are used by nearly everyone in the company as critical tools to run our business and are focused on automation and team efficiency. • Manager of 6 globally distributed managers. • Driver of the integration of people and systems on the engineering side from each of GumGum’s company acquisitions. • Process improvements include establishing an incident management and response process, a playbook for handling discrepancies, an engineering wide developer survey, and an engineering wide tech lead rubric.

Santa Monica, California, Us

• Led the Advertising Applications Engineering teams, managing managers/teams focused on building the company’s web applications.• Stepped into a Product role when the business needed, and drove the requirements, execution and rollout for several key priority projects, across multiple teams.• Conceptualized and built out a process and support portal to streamline the prioritization and management of stakeholders' engineering requests. Created documentation and added automations to encourage the adoption of and visibility into requests.• Conceived of and created our engineering growth and recognition program, Sandbox, consisting of various programs for engineers to explore "possibilities to grow, innovate & play". Created engineering wide plans such as our RCA process, management rubric/leveling guide, and incident management response. • Designed restructuring plans after company acquisitions and changes. Produced my team’s hiring plans and rubrics.• Partnered with the VP of Accounting to reinvent our software capitalization process, creating guidelines and example documentation for engineers and audit guides for managers, evangelizing for its importance, and working with our tracking platform to ensure the data's accuracy. Owner of several initiatives for SOX compliance and assisted in financial audit processes for the engineering team.• Proactively built processes, training, and documentation for other teams in order to reduce my team’s workload, decreasing support tickets.• Managed and edited the GumGum Engineering Tech Blog at https://gumgum.com/techblog. Led, planned, and hosted the company’s annual Hackathon with increased participation year over year. First place & People's Choice Hackathon team in 2021 for using computer vision technology to identify the best color value and quadrant in a video for placing an ad, and 3rd place in 2023 for a Gen AI powered sales tool.

Santa Monica, California, Us

• Led the Advertising Applications Engineering team, managing 11 engineers focused on building JavaScript web applications and Java/Kotlin APIs with React, Redux, Node.js, and Spring Boot. Coached a diverse team of in-office, remote, and contract engineers in 4 countries to work collaboratively together. Helped team members expand their skillsets to work on tickets across both backend and frontend tasks.• Improved the team’s workflow by introducing documentation, establishing processes, and defining best practices. Created, executed, and evolved our team’s hiring plans, on-boarding and training, and leveling up guide. • Oversaw 8+ main products, including conducting code reviews, working on feature and bug tickets, and providing troubleshooting support for our applications and ad creatives.• Collaborated with Product to identify, prioritize, design and scope features based on user and business requirements. Led GumGum’s first agile team to successful completion of a major project. Devised solutions to automate internal team processes that saved up to 98% of the time spent on tasks previously.• Spearheaded the creation and open sourcing of GumGum’s React component library. Organized GumGum’s Women in Tech and JS.la Santa Monica lunches, and served on internal Culture Club and Hackathon committees. First place GumGum Hackathon 2017 team for a VR room built with A-Frame.

Santa Monica, California, Us

• Project lead for GumGum Visual Intelligence, a social media image tracking Angular web app, and AdBuilder, a React creative tool that allows anyone to create GumGum ads.• Built and maintained an API with Node.js, Sequelize and MySQL, created services to interact with an external API, designed and built user interfaces, and created vanilla JavaScript widgets.• First place GumGum Hackathon 2016 team for a Publisher FAQ Center built with React.

San Ramon, California, Us

• Designed and built user interfaces for CARD.com in PHP/Drupal and the mobile app in Angular/Ionic.• Developed the email marketing program, including designing and coding responsive email templates optimized across a variety of email platforms, and implementing code modules with the Mandrill API.• Created strategy for the CARD.com lifetime communication flow for a variety of types of users, and established overall creative and tone for email messaging, including copywriting and content.

Bachelor Of Science - Bs, Computer Science

Bachelor Of Arts - Ba, Advertising (Media Planning), Business