Western New England University School of Law

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Head Of Engineering at Knotel

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Texture

Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer

I was leading the Tech team at Extra, a fintech startup which is helping people navigate their financial journey and build credit with a debit card. 

Valued as a tech unicorn with strong backers (a16z, Firstmark, Lerer Hippeau, and Green Bay Ventures), Extra rapidly went from a small Series A to a Series B company with the need to mature its engineering team, tech stack and architecture, processes, etc. I rapidly scaled the team increasing engineering velocity significantly and then focusing on maturing the org and its processes while working to navigate the business and find a sustainable model.

My day-to-day was leading all technology and operations. Everything from software engineering to IT to technical project management to data engineering rolled into me. My directs were Directors each with their own ~12-17 person teams and a handful of principal-level ICs. I was helping to guide business and technology strategy and presenting to investors and the board. I have navigated through hyper growth (with the team peaking around 60) followed by 2 RIFs landing my team around 45 before I parted ways with the company.

Overall like all of the startups I have been a part of, this was a fantastic learning experience and I walked away with a much deeper understanding of business strategy and management at the exec level.

Extra Card

VP of Engineering

I report directly to our CTO and essentially lead everything on engineering outside of our core refi mortgage business.

This includes Purchase (helping people to navigate the home ownership journey, find their dream home,  get a mortgage for it, and possibly sell their existing home), Real Estate (powering our in-house brokerage Better Real Estate), Property Search (including MLS and other public record sources), and what we call the Better+ businesses (Title, Appraisal, Homeowner's Insurance, Inspection, and other horizon two and three businesses). I have very wide scope across many different lines of business and work across various Product leaders.

I have scaled and grown my teams to around 70 engineers today, especially going through hypergrowth in 2021 where I hired the majority of my team in under 6 months. In addition to incredibly rapid growth I've dealt with contraction and plenty of other difficult problems including having to manage through preparations for us to become a public company, a change in CTO, and  a few rounds of layoffs as market conditions changed for our business. 

I have carved out a bit of a niche for myself as the technology leader of zero-to-one businesses within the company though I also manage teams untangling technical debt knots in legacy code and architecture. I manage some platform teams (like property search) as well as both real estate agent and consumer facing products. I am often involved in tech diligence for M&A of other companies that may make sense to add to our portfolio and spend time thinking about when and where it makes sense for us to invest engineering resources in our new endeavors.

I try to be the leader that the organization needs at the time so prior to my current role here at Better I also served as the interim Head of Data helping to lead that team through growth from 10 to about 30 before handing it off to focus on my current scope.

Better.com

Senior Director Of Engineering

Exit: Company fell apart and declared bankruptcy

I lead the engineering and data teams at Knotel. 

As engineering hire number 1, I have grown our Engineering team from just me to a startup unicorn valuation. In that journey, I started by working with our Product team to figure out what we needed to build and mapped out our systems architecture. From there I was able to figure out who we needed to hire and worked to grow our team, from  me to ~35 total including in-house engineers and contractors and we're still growing with aggressive hiring goals.

In my capacity as Head of Engineering, I am leading and growing the engineering team, figuring out a hiring and growth plan which aligns with the company's explosive growth and allows the engineering team to expand gracefully. I am making strategic technical decisions and helping to define the data model and systems architecture for modeling the fragmented commercial real estate industry and I am coaching and mentoring new engineering leaders. This is a very unique opportunity for me and I'm loving every minute of it.

Knotel has raised $560M in three rounds and its rapidly growing commercial real estate business. Throughout that growth we are continuing to digitize our business and build new products which are both internal-facing and creating transformative customer experiences.

I am doing my best to make sure Knotel's engineering culture is set up so we can attract top talent while being diverse and inclusive. I want every person who joins our team to love coming to work every day and work hard to ensure that's the case.

Knotel

Head Of Engineering

I am teaching a full stack coding bootcamp to students, mostly working professionals looking for a career change. The course I teach is part-time on nights and weekends and is an intensive 24-week course.

Students start with no knowledge of coding and finish as full stack developers having experience with frontend technologies like HTML/CSS/JavaScript, Node.js, React, MySQL, MongoDB, and computer science algorithmic concepts. The intent is that they can go from zero to fully capable and employable in just 24 weeks.

I find it incredibly rewarding to take students on this grueling and fast-paced journey and to see their remarkable growth through the relatively short duration of the course.

Columbia Engineering Coding Boot Camp

Instructor

Rutgers University Continuing Education

Exit: Acquired in part by Shoprunner, in part by Compass

Leading teams of engineers at Spring, a rapidly growing tech startup focused on fashion.

At Spring we are building the future of shopping, helping brands make the transition from brick and mortar to mobile and web. We have built and are scaling a single source marketplace for a growing list of great brands to sell their products direct to consumer.

I am leading teams to build solutions that scale. Our engineering organization is growing rapidly -- doubling last year and on track to double again this year. I am helping this organization grow. I am bringing my expertise at building scalable systems to the problems Spring is solving and I am mentoring engineers to grow with the company.

I am passionate about building awesome software and try my best to teach others, boost morale, and generally make Spring an awesome place to work as an engineer.

In terms of concrete projects and duties, I spent the first six months or so of my time at Spring building out a machine learning-backed fashion recommendation engine to offer Personalization to users of our app. Coming off of that I took over leadership of the Data Science team and am in the early stages of leading my engineering teams to rewrite the entire Catalog system that forms the backbone of Spring. We are working to find a way to do so without impacting current operations. I am also working with the Product team to develop a new Product Development Process we can introduce at Spring to help ensure better cross team collaboration and I am always working hard to look out for each of my reports and help grow them in their careers, recently promoting one of my reports to a manager leading a small team.

Spring Inc.

Director of Engineering

Exit: Acquired by Verizon

Leading the engineering team at SocialRadar, a startup specializing in location technologies reporting directly to the CEO. 

Architecting systems and ensuring applications are built to scale. 

Managing engineers by building out the team, working to keep morale and retention up, maintaining a positive engineering culture, providing technical guidance, acting as a mentor, and leading by example. Polyglot coder, committing code to anything needing attention on the front end, back end, or ops. 

Led team and kept most engineers on board through multiple pivots. This was very rough to navigate but through it I learned immensely.

Eventually, we were able to pull out a successful acquisition by Verizon.

SocialRadar

Led an engineering team to revamp the process by which the company took and processed contributions for political campaigns.

Spearheaded a rewrite of the core API for taking monetary contributions and the dynamic client-side form generation.

This resulted in forms that were more extensible, better looking, and auto-filling which led to significantly increased conversion rates.

NGP VAN

Senior Web Developer

Collaborated with a team to create custom tools to empower faculty and staff to create rich education content.

Primarily focused on the full stack of media uploads, from UI to storage, my work resulted in making it easier for educators to create content, students to upload files, and educators to review them.

Amherst College

Web Programmer

Specialized in software design and programming for internal processes including web development, custom Windows application development, and other various scripting.

Each project I developed helped automate some processes and liberate others from antiquated systems such as moving from an emailed MS Access file to a true database application.

Victor Quinn