University of Michigan

Senior Engineering Manager at Twitter

Boulder, Colorado, United States

I manage a 7 team organization comprised of about 50 engineers. These teams include the Home Timeline Client Team, the iOS and Android Foundation Teams, and the Client Performance Team. The iOS and Android Foundation teams are charged with enabling feature teams to execute faster by building shared frameworks to accelerate product development. The Client Foundation teams are also client engineering's primary interface to our critical partner functions including owning our central engineering hiring pipeline, QA, mobile app release, and our business development teams.

Twitter

Senior Engineering Manager

Engineering Manager of the Home Timeline and Direct Messages Native Client Teams. Grew the Home Timeline Team from 7 to 14 engineers across Boulder, San Francisco, and fully remote. Built the Direct Messages Native Client Team from scratch across our Boulder and San Francisco offices. In addition to shipping a large volume of impactful features, I drove changes with broad impact beyond my immediate teams. Accomplishments include moving the Twitter for iOS release cadence from every 2 weeks to weekly and migrating our code review system from Gerrit to Phabricator.

Engineering Manager

Tech lead for the Home Timeline iOS team.

Staff Software Engineer

Senior iOS Engineer

Chaotic Moon was a studio focused on building mobile apps for broadcast and entertainment companies. I was responsible for the management of engineering teams across multiple projects, all delivering ambitious feature sets under tight deadlines. As the iOS Platform Lead, I lead all of the iOS engineering, including staffing and team structure, best practices, the development of internal shared libraries, and so on.

Significant apps shipped while in this role included the following:

-  FXNOW for iOS and Android
-  Disney Movies Anywhere (now called Movies Anywhere) for iOS
-  Marvel Unlimited for iOS and Android
-  Fox Now 2.0 for iOS
-  Dell Mobile Workspace for iOS and Android

In addition to managing project teams, as a senior architect I am also a key member of the Engineering Leadership Team.

-  Significantly increased the talent level of the iOS team through the hiring of both FTEs and contractors, both in the Austin office and remotely (about 40% of the engineering team is remote at any given time).
-  Overhauled the iOS interview process to improve rigor and consistency, involve more team members, and more easily integrate remote interviewers into the process. Also created a review and feedback mechanism so the organization can increase hiring effectiveness based on previous interviews.
-  Shifted the proportion of our iOS team such that we were able to reduce the proportion of contractors to less than 30% of our overall staff. This allowed us to execute more effectively by reducing staffing churn, increasing institutional knowledge of projects, and building project teams with a greater feeling of investment and ownership over a project’s success.
-  Established a set of quantifiable goals within engineering management. These were designed to give the leadership team a marker around which to improve our execution by allowing us to focus on a manageable number of near term issues. Established a regular review process to evaluate progress.

Chaotic Moon Studios

Senior Software Architect / iOS Platform Lead

As a senior iOS engineer at Chaotic Moon, I was a significant contributor to the following apps:

-  Marvel Unlimited for iOS and Android, Marvel’s subscription-based comic reading app.
-  Qwiki, an interactive storytelling app. Qwiki was a New York-based startup and the Chaotic Moon team was responsible for the vast majority of the development of the app. They were subsequently purchased by Yahoo for around $50 million.
-  Storyd, another interactive storytelling app that never shipped because the project was canceled mid-flight.

Senior Software Engineer

High Order Bit is an independent software company focused on building products for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. I'm responsible for all aspects of managing and growing the company, including product inception and development, marketing, and customer support.

Among the more than 8 iOS apps we've published to the App Store, we built Twitbit, the first iPhone Twitter app with native push notifications. Twitbit has been favorably reviewed in Macworld, Daring Fireball, TechCrunch, among others. We also built GPS Tracks, one of the first applications to leverage background location tracking in iOS 4, and achieved a top 10 sales rank in the Navigation category on the App Store. You can see our full product portfolio on our website.

High Order Bit also builds high quality mobile applications for clients. Our customers range from small startups to Fortune 500 companies. We help with every aspect of development, including requirements gathering and product definition, user experience, interface design, software development, analytics, and successful admission to the App Store.

High Order Bit

Owner

Manager of CTC’s global software development team. Accomplishments include:

-  Initiated fundamental re-architecture of our core algorithmic trading engine and our theoretical valuation system to enable the firm to more effectively meet the competitive demands of electronic trading.
-  Increased the alignment of the Software Development organization with the needs of the busi- ness by establishing a consistent mechanism for collecting, vetting, and prioritizing software projects firmwide.
-  Fostered a development culture emphasizing bottom-up approaches to problem solving through individual ownership, developer empowerment, and calculated risk taking.
-  Established an education program for developers, giving every developer access to professional training and conferences outside Chicago.
-  Continued to focus on recruiting top lateral and college talent, increasing the size of the team by 30% and filling several key leadership positions.

Chicago Trading Company

Executive Director

Development manager and technical lead of the Exchange Connectivity Team, as well as a member of the firm’s leadership through participation in its Technical Executive Committee. Accomplishments include:

-  As a member of the Technical Executive Committee, worked with the firm’s executive leadership to develop, communicate, and execute a firmwide strategy and vision for the software development team.
-  Drove the hiring of several key software developers by recruiting both within the financial industry and from universities.
-  Continued CTC’s expansion into electronic markets to include the International Securities Exchange (ISE), the American Stock Exchange (AMEX), and the Philadelphia Stock Exchange (PHLX).
-  Migrated all of our connectivity servers from Windows to Linux, resulting in 40% higher throughput and 30% reduction in latency for market data, 25% higher throughput and 15% reduction in latency for submitting orders and quotes, increased software supportability, and improved overall system stability.

Director

Development manager and technical lead of the Exchange Connectivity Team. Accomplishments include:

-  Built a five-member development team from scratch through a combination of college recruiting and lateral hiring.
-  Quickly expanded the firm’s access to electronic markets to include the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), and the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT).
-  Transitioned our order management system from C# to C++, leading to a 300% increase in throughput and greater architectural flexibility.
-  Drove the adoption of mature software development methodologies, including modern version control practices; use of automated build systems; integration of unit testing into developers’ day-to-day work; and automation of common but error-prone tasks like software deployment, configuration management, and production support.

Associate Director

Responsible for the design, development, testing, and production support of major components of the firm’s first electronic trading software. Accomplishments include:

-  Individually designed and developed an options market data server for the Boston Options Exchange (BOX), the firm’s first electronic market.
-  Technical lead and developer of an order management system for the Eurex exchange, the firm’s second electronic market.
-  Individually designed and developed a general-purpose order management system and market data distribution system capable of providing client systems with market data for stocks, futures, and options from any electronic exchange through a simple and universal API. This system lasted for the entirety of my tenure at CTC, and supported the firm’s growth from 1 to 8 electronic markets.

John Debay