I lead CommentSold's dropshipping engineering team. This is a diverse, fully remote team, currently comprising four US-based engineers and two India-based engineers. I work closely with project managers and senior leadership to plan features and build roadmaps, I work with the engineering teams of dropshipping partners scattered across the globe, and I manage the entire engineering lifecycle of this part of our major e-commerce platform, from architecture to deployment.
My team is responsible for our first serious move away from a monolithic code base in favor of an increasingly microservice-based architecture, we manage remote inventory from dozens of suppliers that's being sold by hundreds of CommentSold merchants (and sometimes merchants outside of CommentSold), and we provide a robust API that allows new suppliers to easily add their products to our ever-growing catalog.
In addition to managing the team and the big picture, I do some full-stack engineering work (Laravel/PHP, Vue3, and TypeScript).
The most important thing for me when it comes to managing people is compassion: I will never let my team members prioritize work over their own physical or mental well-being, and if I catch someone putting in extra hours, I gently admonish them and ask them to stop. I strive to help everyone set career paths and actively work towards reaching milestones along them. I also do my best to make sure that everyone can work on the things that they, personally, find most appealing or interesting (e.g., I put my engineer with a serious interest in DevOps in charge of coordinating with our DevOps team to figure out the best way to independently deploy our microservices).
Over the past two years, I've become somewhat of a walking encyclopedia on our platform's dropshipping architecture, business logic, and partner relationships, and I use that knowledge daily to do everything from helping engineers with code to helping meet partner needs.
