University of Chicago

Director of Engineering at Luminate

Manages three engineering teams and is the principal engineering contact to manage usage of and relationships with AWS, Datadog, GitHub, Cloudflare, JFrog, and others. Two of my teams develop and support the core applications behind Luminate's Film & TV business unit. The other covers release engineering, platform capabilities, and core infrastructure.

Accomplishments:
· Built a culture of observability and continuous integration to accelerate the pace of delivery. Brought in Datadog, implemented it very well, and taught the team. Kept cost on track. Implemented DORA metrics.
· Retooled Jira so that work-tracking drove teams' focus on getting software into client's hands, not sprint metrics.
· Successfully managed the transition of a complex tech stack from vendor dependence to in-house engineering.
· Identified several instances where the roadmap was elongated by custom software that wasn't a business differentiator and swapped in best-in-class commodity software (Datadog, Fivetran, Slack, Google Sheets – not joking!)
· Principal manager of the cost and compliance for the company AWS organization, spanning three business units. Identified and executed opportunities to save over half a million annually through a variety of means, including:
	· saving plans and instance reservations
	· strategic re-platforming away from needlessly costly services (AWS Glue)
	· infrastructure right-sizing (EBS, EFS, EKS, RDS)
	· correcting application misconfigurations
	· more efficient use of test environments
	· raising team members' situational awareness of the largest cost drivers (e.g., weekly Snowflake cost report)
· Overhauled security for a critical web application in need; added a WAF, implemented origin shielding, and configured a series of WAF rules to block malicious traffic and bots.
· Led several highly complex upgrades of mission-critical components, such as EKS, Airflow, RDS. Migrated SCM from Bitbucket to GitHub to unlock productivity gains.

Luminate

Director of Engineering

Oversaw core backend development and engineering support for saksfifthavenue.com. Delivery included a blend of incremental enhancements, greenfield innovation, and KTLO work. Worked with product partners and stakeholders in logistics, marketing, merchandising, customer support, and digital item lifecycle to improve customer experience, empower internal users, drive the business, and operate a more secure and reliable site.

Accomplishments
· Served as Technical Program Manager for selecting and launching a new Saks loyalty platform – a complex project that involved work planning across the enterprise; website, POS terminals, contact centers, clienteling, merchandising, order management, sales audit, gift cards, data warehouse, and credit.
· Reimplemented saks.com session management with OAuth 2.0, creating an experience for customers to be “perpetually logged on” in the process – smoothing the checkout experience, and facilitating greater insights on customer browsing behaviors. Increased logged-in visits of mobile web by 500%, desktop by 200%, and app by 58%.
· Replatformed saks.com fraud provider from a manual-review-intensive process to a drastically simplified ML-powered decisioning tool, saving millions in false positives and improving average time to ship
· Managed delivery of an installment payment method, generating a conversion lift and expanding company engagement to new audiences of aspirational shoppers
· Designed new checkout integration to support timely, clear, and accurate delivery promise messaging that also enabled downstream cost-savings from carrier optimization
· Oversaw development of merchandising site changes to support new promotions types such a “purchase with purchase,” driving new business with beauty brands and $55K in incremental sales and “click-to-call,” enabling expanded assortments with selective brands
· Championed 6-month bug bash aimed at reducing site defects leading to a significant YoY site conversation rate increase

Saks

· Led Digital Contact Center technology during a massive replatform to Salesforce Commerce and Service Clouds
· Delivered on-time, on-budget, and successful migrations of 4 companies onto a new CRM for their customer support needs (telephony, chat, email, and web support). The migration included one-off loading of historical case data using custom python scripting and bulk data APIs, designing and documenting new IAM lifecycle and entitlements, tracking user adoption trends, and building CloudWatch dashboards and automated alerting to track overall system stability and keep integration partners accountable.
· Oversee active development and change management on a CRM used by over 1K agents and internal business users
· Designed new interfaces, workflows, and integrations to reduce swivel-chairing, eliminate friction points, improve data capture quality, and support a consistent and high-quality customer and agent experience
· Traveled to San Salvador contact center to personally interview and shadow agents, leads, and supervisors in their usage of the agent toolchain. Leverage user feedback to further refine the application roadmap

Sample of features designed:
· New interface to create a case in a single click given an order number when IVR was down
· Context-sensitive windowpane that would flag an agent if a case was attached to an order that had other pending cases associated
· Custom internal interface for viewing order details, implementing principles of information hiding. Highlighting top-level information using badges and permits dropping into more detailed views as needed.
· Custom interfaces to service The Bay’s new Loyalty program, supporting appeasements, retroactive point credits, account management, and internal escalation workflows.

Hudson's Bay Company

Senior Engineering Manager

Led teams to deliver custom software projects including:
· Saks Off Fifth product array redesign
· Lord and Taylor–Walmart Marketplace Integration
· Buy Online, Pickup in Store digital experiences for Saks Fifth Avenue, Lord and Taylor
· Saks Plus membership program for Saks Fifth Avenue
· Core development in Java and Scala. Substantive work in Python, Ruby as well as build pipeline and infrastructure management

Staff Engineer

· IT consultant technologist specializing in the transformation of struggling greenfield development projects. Wore any number of hats – QA, Dev, DevOps – in order to tweak troubled delivery workflows into more functional ones and keep the team traveling light.
· Worked in product development for an educational assessment company, a popular cloud hosting company, a large financial services firm, and several prominent luxury US department stores.
· Rapidly progressed 3 grades in 5 years due to a strong record of outsized impact at top clients.

ThoughtWorks

Lead Consultant

·  Managed accounts, inventories, and regulatory compliance for a small pharma business
·  Networked and forged new business relationships

Avocet Polymer Technologies, Inc.

Business Development

·  Single variable calculus (MATH 13100, 13200, 13300)
·  Led tutorial sessions and graded assignments

James T. Courtois