The University of Alabama

VP Engineering at Fetch Rewards, Inc.

Fetch

VP of Tech Strategy

Vice President of Engineering

You should be able to save anywhere you like to shop, and you should save on the brands you're already buying. With Fetch, you just scan your receipts and we'll do the work for you.

Senior Director of Engineering

In my final role at Shipt, I was responsible for 3 different backend teams, each with their own Engineering Manager. The organization that I was responsible for had >20 people, including 2 Principal Engineers as direct reports.

Some key projects I played a small role in during this timeframe:
- "keeping the lights on" during unbelievable COVID order volume growth
- introducing the concept of bundling orders together for fulfillment by a single shopper
- a new service for estimating the effort orders will require in order to support a transition to a shopper pay model that was no longer commission-based
- delaying when we perform background checks on shoppers so they happen later in the onboarding funnel to reduce costs of shopper hiring
- laying groundwork for Shipt to be able to intelligently determine shopper supply with the goal of using enhanced visibility on this front to make better decisions as a business

Shipt

Director of Engineering

With this role, my team grew to >10 people in a very short time frame, and my additional responsibilities straddled the backend (with operational microservices) and the frontend (exclusively the mobile app used by shoppers to claim and fulfill orders). 

Some examples of services built and/or maintained by the team during this timeframe include a notification service, an automated shopper coaching service, a complete technical overhaul of our order offering system, and a complete re-platform of the Shopper App (from Ionic to React Native), while adding new features in the app to enhance transparency and the user experience in general.

Senior Engineering Manager

In this role I got my first taste of engineering management with a small team (2 direct reports). I was actively involved in hiring for roles both on this team as well as many other teams as Shipt was in a high-growth phase during this entire time frame. 

My team was involved in a Shipt-via-API project to better support retailer integrations, as well as building a new service to facilitate websocket connections from app and web clients, with the intention of being able to push data changes from the server down to the client.

Engineering Manager

I was responsible for a variety of different projects, from Shipt's first implementation of an automated promo pay worker to a Go microservice for quickly retrieving members' purchase history data, as well as building a mini-CMS and an initial proof-of-concept for a phased data pipeline for importing retailer product data.

In this role I was able to use a variety of tools for the first time: Ruby on Rails, Go, Postgres, DynamoDB, Redis, SQS and SNS. This is also the role that I was in when Shipt was acquired by Target.

Senior Software Engineer

• Work on a small team converting a mature desktop application, used for selling advertising, into a web application
• Collaborate with Delphi developers to establish API for exposing data which the web application consumes
• Establish patterns for writing reusable JavaScript modules, using RequireJS and Knockout Components
• Provide training for teammates via formal presentations and one-on-one teaching
• Research various component libraries to improve speed of development, including a written recommendation
• Tackle difficult development problems like building a wizard for complex data entry which is completely configurable and reusable for many different use cases within the application

WideOrbit

Software Developer

•	Member of a mid-size team developing a CMS designed specifically for health care organizations 
•	Communicate frequently with team members across a variety of roles within the product team
•	Regularly participate in process of user story grooming and estimation
•	Contribute to a wide range of projects, both improving existing functionality and adding entirely new features
•	High visibility special projects, including on-site client support
•	Experience with performance profilers, desktop virtualization, and SharePoint-specific utilities 
•	Work within a range of team structures: small team in open space, contractor-heavy, and most recently with  team members outside the United States

MEDSEEK

Software Engineer

•	Worked on a small team to develop an application used by bank tellers
•	Provided new features that interact with other JHA applications through established APIs
•	Consistently improved the performance and stability of the application
•	Researched ways to improve our tool set and processes (e.g. with NHibernate, TFS, and unit testing)

Jack Henry & Associates

I was a software developer on the Software Engineering team. The most notable project I worked on was developing a web application used internally for order processing. The application was used to some degree by every department to take orders from entry to completion. I also took part in data migrations of customer data from acquired companies. 

•	Worked on a small team to develop a new web-based order tracking system used in-house
•	Participated in software design meetings and requirements gathering
•	Improved usability of order tracking system by using JavaScript to add dynamic behavior
•	Provided technical support for the order tracking software, as well as other pre-existing tools

Momentum Telecom

Applications Systems Analyst

I was the sole developer on a series of projects for a client of the Alabama Productivity Center.  In this role, I had the opportunity to touch every facet of the software development life cycle.  My project was a desktop application used to keep track of orders as they flowed through an industrial process.  Enhancements to the code base ranged from adding reports to implementing a scheduling algorithm for predicting completion dates.

•	Worked as sole developer creating an order tracking software tool
•	Participated in software design meetings with the client
•	Designed and added enhancements to the order tracking software, including a scheduling component
•	Regularly provided technical support on-site with the client

Alabama Productivity Center

Software Engineer (part-time)

My introduction to professional software development was with a large medical IT company.  It was at this job that I was introduced to source control, various forms of testing, and code reviews.  I was also able to participate in design meetings to acquire functional requirements and then put these changes in place in the production code.

•	Worked on a medium-size team that developed EMR software
•	Participated in design meetings for acquiring functional requirements
•	Developed software in accordance with detailed design specifications
•	Was introduced to source control management tools and various quality assurance techniques

🚀 Drew Crawford