St. Cloud State University

Software Engineering Manager at Invoca (We're hiring!)

Lake Oswego, Oregon, United States

Invoca

Software Engineering Manager

After Moovel announced they are shutting down, I chose to take a sabbatical to spend time with family and friends, reflect, establish healthy daily habits (meditating, co-learning, co-working, running, journaling, waking early, stretching), learn new technologies, work on apps, and discover activities that I enjoy.  I've emerged with increased and renewed self-awareness, health, and relationships, and a renewed sense of purpose and desire for management.

(home)

Sabbatical

As Software Engineering Manager:
-  Led a cross-functional development team with six direct reports. We were responsible for iOS and Android apps and backend services for a Google Maps competitor app with mapping, trip planning, and scheduled and real-time transit arrivals.  We successfully met multiple aggressive 8-month commitments made to customers prior to the team and myself being hired.
-  Led another cross-functional team with seven direct reports. We were responsible for managing the services and data of the complex transit ticket catalogs for our 15 clients.  We automated manual processes, increasing efficiency, predictability, and reliability.

-  My management responsibilities for both teams involved:
-  One-on-ones with my team
-  Keeping the team focused, assigning tasks, mitigating risk and delays, creating plans-of-action
-  Working closely with Product Managers and the team to plan sprints, and to ensure the commitments and technical debt were well-defined, estimated, and managed through the SDLC and delivered on-time.
-  Hiring
-  24/7 on-call incident coordinator duty -- resolving production outages, defects, and incidents
-  Managing agile rituals and artifacts (backlog grooming, sprint planning, retrospectives, standups)
-  Conflict resolution
-  Creating professional development plans with direct reports
-  Presenting at all-hands demos

As Senior Software Engineer:
-  Created designs and specifications for new features
-  Worked on back-end services (Node.js, Python, Jenkins, docker, MySQL, Postgres, ElasticSearch, Redis, automated testing (unit, functional, integration))
-  Worked on a web app for viewing and updating catalog data involving many tables and relationships, using journaling and workflows (React, Redux, html, CSS, JavaScript)

moovel Group

Software Engineering Manager, Senior Software Engineer

I worked with 20 other engineers, developing a high-traffic website with over 2 million visits per month with 1 million users and 100k paying customers.  Development projects included converting the site to a front-end / RESTful API architecture and implementing an API for external customers to post jobs.  Our development environment was extremely collaborative, with extensive pair programming and mob programming.  Selected technologies: Python (Flask, SQLAlchemy, RabbitMQ), PostgreSQL, Redis, HAProxy, nginx, gunicorn, Bamboo, Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, Linux.

idealist.org

Team Lead, Senior Software Engineer

I worked on the multi-tenanted cloud platform, which was responsible for a RESTful API for web and mobile clients; services to continuously pull content from 100k+ RSS feeds into multiple databases; and other services such as sending email and getting social media share analytics.  We emphasized performance, scalability, automated testing, and reliability.  We had 100k+ RSS feeds, 10k users, 80 enterprise customers, 30 services, and used 100+ PyPI python packages and standard libraries.  Selected technologies: AWS, boto S3, Cassandra, fabric, Linux, nginx, NoSQL, ORM, pillow, pipelines, PostgreSQL, puppet, pystache, RabbitMQ, Redis, RSS, SES, Solr / Lucene, SQL, SQLAlchemy, zmq

Trapit, Inc

Senior Software Engineer

As employee #10 in a 30-person startup, I was the software architect and team lead for the web application, API's, and database, leading a team of 7 other engineers (3 locally and 4 outsourced in Vietnam).  At the time I started there was one other engineer on the team, the software was still in development, and I was actively involved with deploying the project into production for multiple tenants.  I championed test automation, code reviews, requirements, architectural designs, configurable features, technical documentation, performance, hiring excellent engineers, automatic test data generation, and logging.  Selected technologies: Django, Python, PostgreSQL, Selenium, factory_boy, Linux, Nginx, Memcached, Sentry, JSON, test-driven development (TDD)

Atlatl Software

Software Architect, Lead Software Engineer

I added functionality to the webapp, including user registration and profiles, and created processes to calculate and update data.  Selected technologies: Python, Django, Amazon AWS/EC2/S3/SES, Celery, CSS, Fabric, factory_boy, HTML, Linux, Memcached, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, Sentry, South, SQL

Tixie, Inc.

Software Engineer

I led the QA effort for a high-profile iOS, Android, Mobile Web, and web app. Features included Facebook sharing, geocoding, reverse geocoding, geotagging, 2D/3D virtual-reality mapping; upload, display, and playback of video, audio, photo, and text.

Uncorked Studios

QA Lead (Contract)

I managed the QA of a social-networking web app and mobile apps with VoIP, chat, email, and address book features. I managed the test team; recruited and hired; wrote test plan and testcase specifications; and wrote a web app monitoring tool and automated tests. I worked with a remote team across 13 sites in the U.S., England, Ukraine, Russia, and India. Oversaw test automation utilizing Selenium, Python, nose, Ruby, Capybara, and Cucumber.

Huawei

QA Manager (Contract)

I started a print and online monthly newspaper of positive stories. We attracted 200+ volunteers to contribute writing, photography, and to help distribute 9000 printed copies each month. I coordinated and worked on all aspects of the paper, including managing volunteers, finding content, selling advertising, editing, layout, printing, distribution, and website creation and maintanance.

The Portland Upside newspaper

Founder / Publisher / Editor

Initiated a journalism project where I interviewed 27 people; assisted a friend with a startup; helped my wife self-publish two books.  I spent time with my family, soul-searched, and got a lot of rest and relaxation.  I came out of the sabbatical rested, with a renewed strong interest in self-awareness, relationships, work, and technology.

Soul Searcher

- Independently conceived, architected, and implemented a Python framework for doing distributed, parallel code execution in an environment with an arbitrary number of clients and servers of various platforms. This resulted in a 200% increase in productivity by a team of 10 test engineers writing automated tests, saving the project $300,000.
-  Designed and implemented a multi-threaded, multi-process utility to stress-test a file system by randomly reading from millions of files.
-  Designed, implemented, and supported a "one-button-test" application for 40 engineers to run sanity tests prior to committing, automating all aspects of setup and running of tests, improving main branch reliability.

QA Automation Developer

- Responsible for maintaining over 30 builds and testing of database engines on various platforms, and
providing build and version control customer support for engineers. Designed and implemented processes and scripts for all build tasks.
-  Designed and implemented an online organizational chart web app, making it easy for anyone in the company of 3000+ employees to query or traverse the chart by name, site, team, or business unit.

Informix

Added functionality to existing products, including designing and developing a text editor, a graphics-tablet editor, and redesigning the TCP/IP socket communications component.

Rob Bednark

Rob Bednark