Philippe Serhal Email & Phone Number

Longueuil, Qc, Ca

Greater Montreal Metropolitan Area

Netlify is a leading CDN and serverless front-end cloud platform used by millions of developers. It serves tens of thousands of requests per second across the globe.I am on the Frameworks & Primitives team, which is responsible for Netlify's platform primitives (builds, serverless functions, edge functions, log drains, and more) as well as the platform's seamless support of dozens of front-end frameworks (Next.js, Remix, Astro, Angular, Nuxt, Gatsby, SvelteKit, Vite, etc.).

Montreal, Quebec, Canada

I reported directly to the Director of Engineering, with a broad mandate to proactively identify problem areas across the org (5+ teams, 50+ headcount) and drive to solutions with stakeholders.I consulted on dozens of projects across the org: providing SME feedback, architectural guidance & alternative solutions; identifying risks, roadblocks & especially upcoming cross-team conflicts & opportunities. For example, I consulted on expansion to new markets, the replacement of our in-house transportation management system (TMS) with an off-the-shelf solution (incl. vendor selection), the design & implementation of a membership program, and so on.I was a member of the engineering leadership group accountable for org structure, resourcing, and planning.I planned, authored, disseminated & got buy-in across the org on a long-term vision for system architecture, a roadmap for cross-team tech debt, and quarterly technical OKRs.I proposed, founded & led a new Developer Enablement team with 4 engineers, with a mission to reduce cognitive load for product development teams (freeing up time & brainpower to focus on their problem domains), via libraries, services, docs, training, research, prototyping – whatever is needed.Motivated by ad hoc analysis I performed showing 80+% of change failures would have been avoided by types, I took over a stalled initiative to port ~1M LOC from JavaScript & Flow to TypeScript. I accelerated the estimated time of completion from 11 years to 6 months by introducing OKRs, progress visibility, automation, and workflows.

Montreal, Canada Area

(In addition to the responsibilities listed under previous positions)I was entrusted with the responsibility to lead a complex, sprawling, business-critical effort to replace our in-house suite of warehouse management apps (~300K LOC, 13 apps) with an off-the-shelf WMS solution, while contributing to a concurrent, interdependent project to similarly replace in-house Product Information Management (PIM) system, both retaining integrations with other systems & ensuring cross-compatibility. This launched successfully, unblocking a business-critical expansion to a new fulfillment center and 10+ other dependent projects, and improved margin per order by 70% & reduced order defects by 65%.I led the on-call process, ensuring metrics are reviewed, runbooks are updated, follow-ups are tracked & postmortems are scheduled. I revamped the process and tools, resulting in greater & clearer accountability, increased automation, and a decreased page rate.My role largely consisted of proactively identifying problem areas lacking clarity and taking the initiative to research & outline the problem, propose & contrast available solutions, and drive to a committed, documented decision with all stakeholders.I mentored engineers and onboarded new hires. I sponsored engineers for new responsibilities and promotions.

San Francisco Bay Area

(In addition to the responsibilities listed under previous positions)As Tech Lead, I led technical planning of several major projects: gathered requirements, coordinated with cross-functional stakeholders, wrote tech specs, wrote user stories, guided implementation, ran agile ceremonies, and contributed to code review & implementation.Our team designed and developed a suite of guided warehouse management & order fulfillment apps (to pick, consolidate, sort & ship barcoded orders; to receive, putaway, value-add & cycle count barcoded inventory); this launched successfully, on time, unblocking a business-critical move to “same-day” fulfillment. The system was used to fulfill 30M+ cumulative order items.Our team designed and implemented changes to the order picking physical process & algorithms, resulting in a ~90% decrease in cartons flagged for consolidation, saving ~1.7 mins/order and ~$500K/year. In another project, we came up with a change to the order picking algorithm that resulted in the total elimination of a step in the physical process and freed up ~20% of the warehouse space.I developed and continuously improved the standard (micro)service platform underlying our 20+ services, featuring an event-driven architecture (RabbitMQ), MERN stack (MongoDB, Express, React, NodeJS), TypeScript, GraphQL, and established, battle-tested, well-documented, self-serve libraries and patterns for automated testing, consumer-driven contracts, linting, CI, CD, observability & monitoring.I conducted ~100 technical interviews with software engineer candidates.

San Francisco, Ca

Good Eggs is a mission-driven company delivering same-day, absurdly fresh, 70% local groceries, meal kits, and alcohol. The entire door-to-door supply chain is run in house.I worked on the Operations Engineering team, developing internal software for day-to-day food fulfillment operations, including ordering and receiving food from suppliers, managing perishable in-house inventory, prepping bulk produce, picking & packing customer orders from inventory efficiently & accurately just in time, and delivering orders to customers' homes – while integrating with hardware like barcode scanners and label printers, and managing exceptions all along the way. I was a significant contributor to developing these systems from the ground up.Notably, I led the development of a new microservice for this complex perishable just-in-time e-comm marketplace, serving as the source of truth for available ("available-to-promise") product quantities by fulfillment day, leveraging product data, data from the inventory service, the purchase order service, and the marketplace, all in real time; it launched successfully, on time, unblocking a business-critical move to “next-day” fulfillment. It is still in use as of 2022, with 2M+ orders placed.Our ecosystem at the time consisted of ES2017/Flow/Node.js/MongoDB microservices on the backend, with systems mostly communicating via an event-driven architecture using RabbitMQ, and ES2017/Flow/React/Redux on the frontend, with a few legacy Angular 1.x apps – all hosted on a bespoke PaaS running on top of AWS.Participated in 24/7 on-call rotation. Worked extensively cross-functionally with operations leaders, process engineers, designers, and PMs to improve efficiency, accuracy, and traceability.

Montreal, Canada Area

Functional and Structural Bioinformatics Lab, IRICDeveloped an algorithm for quantification, visualization, and correction of spatial bias in DNA microarray raw data; published in peer-reviewed journal, presented at multiple conferences, and released as free software (R/C++).Worked on developing a modern approach to integrative analysis of multiple, dispersed, interrelated, heterogeneous, voluminous biological data sets. Developed proof of concept with distributed Node.js data servers and lightweight Bootstrap + d3.js integrative data visualization front-end, serving live clinical research data to a group of ∼40 leukemia researchers.

Montreal, Canada Area

Developed a complete DNA microarray image analysis software package in C++, implementing both classic and novel gridding, segmentation, quantification, and normalization algorithms.Developed a specialized normalization algorithm to address spatial bias issues in tiling array data.

Montreal, Canada Area

- Programming 1 (JavaScript) – Winter 2013- Applied Bioinformatics (proteomics unit) – Winter 2013- Applied Programming for Genomics (Perl) – Fall 2010- Programming 2 (Java) – Winter 2010- Programming 1 (Java) – Fall 2009

Ottawa, Canada Area

June–August 2007 and June–August 2008On a team responsible for government-wide accessibility & usability web standards, I developed web apps to streamline verification of standards compliance (ColdFusion, Perl, JavaScript).

Doctor Of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bioinformatics

Did not complete. Joined Good Eggs to work on practical problems with practical solutions.

Master Of Science (M.Sc.), Bioinformatics

Activities and Societies: VP of Communications, AÉBINUM (bioinformatics students association) Fast-tracked to PhD in 2011. Selected.

Bachelor Of Science (B.Sc.), Bioinformatics

Computer science applied to biomedical research, more or less. The degree consisted of about 40% of a Biochemistry degree, 40%.