Tavour's mission is to deliver unique and hard-to-find artisanal craft beer direct to consumer doorsteps. In my role as CTO, enabling the R&D team to operate in a remote-only environment was priority number one:• Introduced tools and processes to implement Agile in a remote setting• Scaled engineering team from 8 to 24 remote staff. Introduced career paths, built three cross-functional agile teams, promoted managers and added quality and DevOps roles• Built continuous code deployment and release pipelines replacing manual processes • Hired test automation engineers and moved from a mostly manual testing process to an automated test suite. In parallel, I led the design & development of an AI/ML-powered utility that enables users while shopping in-store to scan a label on a bottle or a can to learn about the product and whether it matches their taste profile prior to making a purchase decision.

[Acquired by Renaissance Learning in May 2019]In my role leading engineering at Freckle, a fast-growing ed-tech startup with millions of students using its free practice products every day, I managed to successfully overcome two key challenges:1. Embracing a unique tech stack powered by a functional programming language known as Haskell with a very limited talent pool & extremely steep learning curve and turning it into a competitive advantage for the company by finding, hiring, and retaining Haskell experts across the country and enabling them to excel through robust agile processes & high degree of autonomy.2. Taming the large stream of data acquired every day and transforming it through a powerful ETL pipeline into an analytics data powerhouse tracking student progress and providing reports to schools and districts showing how their students and teachers are performing.

[Acquired by BlackRock in Aug 2015]In charge of all engineering and production, managed the team through an aggressive release rhythm, providing an industry-leading self-service digital retirement & investment management platform focused on serving America's middle-class families.Grew the team from 5 to over 40 engineers in less than two years. Built R&D HR, introducing career tracks and leveling, peer feedback-based bi-annual reviews, and internal mobility. Created an empowerment-based, highly vibrant engineering culture. Maintained an extremely low attrition rate despite the shift in company business post-acquisition.Provided leadership in the development and formalization of the company's Agile software development framework, defining product management policies, procedures, and reporting metrics. Responsible for engineering participation in bi-annual SOC2 attestation audits, as well as responding to numerous external client audits.

Took Raveable from an idea to a full-blown product in merely seven months. Managed to master new technologies starting with semantic analysis & natural language processing algorithms to Ruby on Rails, scalable website architecture, and low-cost deployment on Amazon AWS. Raveable.com went live toward the end of April 2009 and was quickly recognized as a clear innovation in the space by Travel & Pleasure, Inc. Magazine, and MSNBC.

Shared the insights and lesson-learned from bootstrapping Raveable into a profitable company with Seattle TechStars 2012 batch of startups. Mentored the founders of Apptentive, Glider (acquired in 2014), and Leanplum.

Led a team of four software developers that were responsible for implementing social networking features for windows mobile 6.0 & 7.0. Responsibilities included talent recruitment, management, cross-organization partnerships (MSR), assessing new technologies for the mobile space (Mesh), and hands-on work (.NET CF)

With application developers as my target customers for the first time, my role was to tame the overly complex data sync algorithms into a simple .NET library that extends ADO.NET interfaces. I was in charge of defining new API interfaces, drive reviews and buy-in from the SQL architects & management, supervise junior team members through development phases, drive early adapter engagements and feedback loops, building demos and sample projects, and partner with Visual Studio team to ship designer support tools in VS2008. Authored the Synchronizer blog and SyncGuru.com website which became the primary go-to resources for understanding the new Microsoft Sync Framework. The Synchronizer blog became one of top 100 blogs, in terms of traffic, amongst 5,000+ blogs authored by Microsoft employees.

Played a key role in the design and development of a new Distributed File Systems Replication Service (DFSR) to ship with Windows 2003 R2 with a main goal of building a reliable and scalable service to relief existing customers from the pain points with legacy version shipped in Windows 2000. In addition, my responsibilities included maintaining legacy File Replication Service (FRS) code base and servicing FRS customers:Designed and implemented myriad of components including: distributed configuration infrastructure through AD and XML files, monitoring capabilities through WMI provider, File marshalling library, security and delegation model, diagnostic tools and performance counters.In parallel, I managed to provide quick fixes for FRS customer issues. By the end of 2003, FRS was dropped from top ten most problematic components in windows saving around 1M in annual support cost.

Responsible for ensuring the quality of two windows server components, File Replication Service (FRS) and Remote Install Service (RIS): Built strong cross group relationship with product teams. Developed new test tools along with continuous enhancements of existing test tools. In May 2002, I’ve received “May Excellence Award” recognized my work in improving FRS stress tool.

Responsible for design and implementation of new components in Clink-2000 project which is an integrated development environment for importing data from CAD interfaces for designing and testing integrated printed circuit boards. In addition, I also extended and maintained common general class library used across multiple products.