smokeclouds is a boutique engineering agency created to build innovative, exciting sites and applications for our clients. We’ve worked for a variety of companies and start-ups, delivering projects from prototype to contributing to major live platforms. Our work has been both as an individual contributor (usually in a Principal/Architect role) or as a manager and leader supporting both engineering teams and business stakeholders.Recent Experiences:- Joined a healthcare project team initially to augment development, however quickly identified a lack of technical leadership and team crisis. I offered (and was accepted) to step up into a leadership role. In 4 weeks, I reset the 20-person eng team, handling team dynamics, concerns and fears quickly and efficiently. Simultaneously, I worked with all relevant stakeholders to quickly identify problematic items and high value bugs/features. Then I quickly prioritized, managed and ultimately delivered the items on time as promised, helping to repair a critical relationship with one of their primary clients.- A leading e-commerce design to consumer site had a lopsided database, with most tables in the mid 8 figure rows, but 2 tables were in the billions, causing challenges in appropriately sizing & resourcing the data store. In 8 weeks, I built a series of queries to convert the vertical semi-relational data into a de-normalized form on the parent record, reducing storage by 40% (50GB), creating an overall significantly smaller footprint.- A large online DTC e-com with an $100M ARR identified an existential risk to their business, and had started to address the threat. I was brought on to perform an outside-in analysis of the situation. Within 4 weeks, I presented a detailed report & deck to the ELT, explaining and identifying the exact shape of the problem. I then worked with the VPE to build out action plans for resourcing, budget and dev cycles to deliver a replacement architecture eradicating the business risk.

Abound is a two sided marketplace, enabling independent product creators to quickly connect with boutique sellers. As principal engineer and architect, I led the charge rebuilding the platform for scale, leading the core platform team, repositioning our data effort while helping build the wider team and culture in conjunction with the VPE.Some key highlights are:• In three weeks, I established several development processes and coding standards, ensuring consistent output and easier to manage code review. Alongside this, I introduced a process of team leveling with tech knowledge, hosting and arranging a number of lunch-and-learn and peer training sessions.• Early in my tenure, I Initialized and managed a team to develop evolved cloud engineering based SRE practices: with the deployment of monitoring, alerting and general observability principles. In 3 months, we had an established core practice as well as educated the wider team to their value.• Drove a significant revamp of the hiring process, to include a more genuine set of technical challenge questions and ensured we were able to gain a wider (360) view of each candidate, improving overall flow by 30%.• Through several rounds of optimization, was able to improve the performance of the system by 250%, therefore reducing infrastructure costs and improving scale capacity, especially relevant during Black Friday/ Cyber Monday events.• Deployed FiveTran and snowflake as the vanguard of a data strategy which helped move critical queries from expensive views in the live database into a more sustainable workspace• Alongside the overall architecture and standards, I also managed the platform team to deliver core functional updates which helped improve the overall application performance and capabilities.

Retail Zipline is a leading communications SaaS product, enabling retail and grocery brands to deliver transformational store experiences through engaged employees, consistent execution and fast feedback. It provides an important service for many brand names with exceptional customer satisfaction.Some key highlights are:- Led development and deployment of Kinesis, Parquet and DynamoDB, migrating millions of events from the production DB, establishing a practice of data management, which culminated in an audit dashboard, delivered in 3 weeks.- Managed the technical aspect of multiple new customer implementations, delivering satisfied customers and happy partners, reducing the time for new customer onboarding by 25%.- Provided peer support via mentoring, pairing and PR review across multiple projects and deliverables, while continuing to support leveling up the team with Rails & Ruby knowledge, hosting a number of lunch-and-learn and peer training sessions.

Greetpoint was a bootstrapped project started to explore new and innovative ways to rethink the greeting card market. We raised a small proof of concept round to build initial prototype, concurrently launching a subscription model within 6 weeks, and first partnership within 12 weeks, recruiting six other collaborators to build this project, and while we weren't successful in raising seed funding, learnt a significant amount during the process which will be applicable at later stages.

As a technical leader at XO Group, my responsibilities focused on leading the teams rebuilding the editorial product and services provided internally. Starting with a team of 8, I quickly absorbed a second team of 10 focused on building the site redesign delivered by building a unified UI library. Notably, I led the build and setup of the internal guild structure, fostering skill share over more than 100 product & engineering colleagues across single responsibility teams.

With the CEO, I created a hybrid role managing and directing the tech teams for both projects. Client focus is in fashion, fragrance and luxury, with often distant relationship with technology, requiring significant translation and adaptation to find creative solutions to problems. My time was spent split between the two properties, where I led the build of several new client sites, as well as managing the evolution of the e-commerce platform.

At Code and Theory I worked as a technical lead on some of the more challenging projects, acting as a key stakeholder from initial define through to managing a team for final implementation and QA. I had success in IOS and web projects, delivering work on time and in budget, solving needs effectively and using best practices to innovate ideas, for established brands such as Comcast to celebrities like Jimmie Johnson.