Stewart Johnston Email & Phone Number

Seattle, Washington, United States

Portland, Oregon, United States

As the Tier II Team Lead at customer.io, I transitioned into a management role, and over my tenure grep the team from two people to six. While continuing to contribute directly to customer support and producing training materials, I embraced a mentorship role, providing individual and group guidance to my team members.To foster their career growth and effectiveness, I implemented a comprehensive approach. This included hosting regular one-on-one meetings, monitoring performance, and actively supporting their professional development. As part of deepening their knowledge, I designed and implemented a scheme where each team member joined a product squad during the inception, planning, development, and testing phases, culminating in feature release. The team member would produce documentation and training materials for the department, ensuring that Technical Support would have resident experts ready for any new feature launch. This innovative approach not only accelerated the company's release speed but also freed up product managers from long-term support responsibilities, enabling them to focus on new features.Additionally, I created runbooks for Technical Support during outages, empowering the team to communicate incidents and updates directly with customers. This proactive step relieved on-call SRE or engineers from customer communications, allowing them to swiftly address and resolve technical issues.These initiatives positively impacted the company's operations, improving customer satisfaction, accelerating feature releases, and optimizing resource allocation.

Portland, Oregon, United States

During my time at customer.io, we identified a need for a highly techical leader with deep knowledge of the company's infrastructure and software stack to elevate understanding within the Technical Support department, and I moved to the TS team to build a Tier II (and effectively Tier III) team.To enhance the efficiency of the Technical Support department, I designed and implemented troubleshooting and escalation playbooks. These playbooks streamlined the ticket-handling process between different tiers and the engineering team, resulting in improved response times and customer satisfaction.Recognizing the importance of knowledge sharing, I took the initiative to host and record video and other learning materials. By sharing in-depth insights into the company's infrastructure, I significantly enhanced the technical knowledge and troubleshooting skills across the department, contributing to improved overall performance.Throughout my tenure, I maintained an excellent Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) rating, a testament to my dedication to providing exceptional support and resolving customer issues effectively.

Portland, Oregon, United States

As a Site Reliability Engineer at customer.io, I played a vital role in ensuring the stability and security of the product. I performed on-call duties to monitor the health and security of the platform using Grafana and Prometheus, and responded quickly to incidents to minimize their impact.One of my key contributions was bringing the organization's infrastructure under code by bringing all the DNS records into Terraform. I also wrote Ansible playbooks for services as they were developed by the backend engineers, reconfigured the load balancers to accommodate new traffic with routing rules, and wrote code to stress-test our services and endpoints at multiple levels to determine their performance and bottlenecks. These efforts improved our efficiency, scalability, and resilience.Additionally, I played a critical role in performing technical evidence gathering for two SOC2 audits, ensuring that customer.io met the highest standards of data security and compliance.

London, England, United Kingdom

In 2018 Dentally acquired Goodteith, and as a developer I was responsible for the planning, development, and data migration of Goodteith customers. By carefully managing the migration process, we were able to minimize data loss and ensure a smooth transition for our clients.In addition to the migration tool, I also built a reproducible development environment for the rest of the team using Packer, Vagrant, and Chef. This allowed me to safely manage multiple migrations simultaneously.Overall, my contributions helped Dentally welcome Goodteith customers with the minimum of stress, and I'm proud that I was able to ensure those customers were welcomed and well looked after.

Scotland, United Kingdom

As the CTO at Goodteith, I led the development of dental practice management software. One of my key contributions was designing and building a robust data pipeline and parser that extracted data from our software and sent it to the NHS in XML format using SOAP. This involved converting data from YAML to XML and vice versa, and required a Windows service to manage the queue of send and receive data. By implementing this pipeline, we were able to improve data accuracy, reduce errors, and ensure compliance with NHS standards.

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

As the co-founder of Invent the World, I led a team that created and ran after-school classes and holiday camps for children ages 5-13. To provide a consistent environment for our pupils, I designed and built live USBs based on Arch Linux that enabled our students to access programming and gaming activities in a secure, controlled, and consistent manner. I also utilized SaltStack to manage our infrastructure and spin up on-demand servers for custom Minecraft maps, turning a day-long manual process into a single command.