As head of engineering, I recruited and hired our engineering organization; growing from just myself to 30 souls in twelve months.
I was also responsible for creating the first few production services, software development lifecycle, continuous integration and deployment, along with AWS hosting with physical backbone connecting us to Sear’s data centers.
I joined the team as the fifth member (and first engineer) at the end of 2014. Since then, I have helped grow the engineering team to over two dozen front-end and full-stack engineers. I wrote the first few services that today help serve all the front-end experiences. I also established the software life-cycle processes and tooling to ensure that we contintuously deploy and integrate for each and every commit.
We have grown rapidly, both in size of team, and scope of responsibility. As a consequence, we are continually adopting our processes and tools to meet our needs. We strive to automate everything we can, and additionally own everything we ship including unit-, functional-, integration-, and performance tests, devops and on-call. We do not throw our problems on to other teams to solve. We work side-by-side PMs and Designers to ensure that we collectively deliver world-class experiences for our customers. And even when we make a mistake, we help each other get back up and try again. Ultimately, my responsibility is foster a work environment where team members are empowered to do the right thing
every time.
