National EdTech R&D Program ($40M funding from CZI, Gates, and Walton)

Promoted to oversee total technical strategy, budget, and cross-functional leadership

Organizational Transformation: Architected cross-functional "Pod" operating model, dissolving legacy silos to integrate Engineering, Data Science, Product, and Research; scaled org from 7 to 20+ technical professionals: primarily engineers across Product, AI, and Infrastructure disciplines, plus Data Scientists and a Data Manager, managed directly and through an Engineering Manager and Data Manager as direct reports.

Strategic Financial Stewardship: Stewarding million-dollar annual budget, managing resource allocation, headcount planning, and delivery prioritization for tools serving 10,000+ users.

Efficiency via GenAI: Spearheaded AI Initiatives, reducing assessment development time by 50% and accelerating time-to-stability for new measures by months.

Talent Hiring & Development & Retention: Cultivated a "high-agency" culture resulting in zero turnover for key AI/Data leadership over a 2-year period; mentored the Data Manager into an Associate Director.

Recruited to build the foundational engineering team and product ecosystem from zero

Zero-to-One Product Launch: Directed the end-to-end development of 7 innovative, gamified products and narrative-based dashboards, moving from abstract concept to nationwide production in 24 months.

Engineering Rigor: Institutionalized a "Culture of Quality" by establishing automated CI/CD pipelines and E2E testing, ensuring 100% on-time delivery for major school district launches.

Scalable Architecture: Designed infrastructure from scratch to support 10,000+ users and capture millions of longitudinal data points per annum from immersive, 30-minute high-engagement sessions.

Promoted to lead rapid-response, cross-functional teams through critical "Back-to-School" cycles.

Strategic Product Pivot: Directed the technical transition from an individual teacher-centric model to a scalable school/site-based architecture; integrated Student Information Systems (SIS) to automate class-level organization, drastically accelerating site-wide onboarding and adoption.

Data-Driven Engineering: Partnered with Data Science to institutionalize pre-launch telemetry and logging; established a framework for real-time efficacy measurement of new features.

Architectural Mentorship: Empowered Staff Engineers to design a new auth micro-service architecture that became the organizational standard for future development; mentored multiple diverse teams of six to seven engineers.

Cross-Functional Leadership: Acted as the primary "connector" between Product, Data, Design, and Engineering to bring clarity to roadmaps during periods of high organizational transition.

Cloud Infrastructure Optimization: Engineered a 50% reduction in daily AWS S3 writes (millions per day) and optimized Postgres connection pooling for a platform serving 80,000+ students.

Disaster Recovery & User Trust: Architected a Web Storage API auto-save mechanism that eliminated data loss; this mitigated 100+ hours of manual support resolution following a major AWS outage.

Product Innovation: Improved the feedback cycle between teachers and students by implementing the ability to highlight granular changes in student work between revisions.

Tech Stack Modernization: Led transition from a monolithic Ruby on Rails and React to a decoupled micro-services architecture utilizing Remix and Prisma ORM; improved velocity and modularity.

Engineering Pivot: Accelerated from UX Design into a lead technical role; hired and directed a 6-member product engineering team to architect a 0-to-1 Watson Education AI platform for K12.

Drove application architecture and engineering for IBM Watson Education’s Cloud Platform play from the ground up. Developed and implemented strategy to provide AI services and easily consumable embeddable user experiences to education industry partners.

• New AI services by extending Watson capabilities and data analytics through Cloudant/MapReduce

• Cloud container/Kubernetes-based micro-service architecture with well documented APIs through Swagger

• Continuous delivery through GitHub Enterprise and Travis CI

• ReactJS with Jest/Enzyme (automated testing) hosted by NodeJS

Hired in and led six-member application development team (and larger extended team) in creating cloud-based cognitive application for educators that is adopted by numerous school districts. Established engineering rigor & best practices, responsive feature delivery through agile methodology, and culture of continuous learning/mentorship.

• Innovative product that is unique in marketplace

• First release within a year from initial design camp and monthly releases afterwards

• AngularJS with Mocha/Chai (automated testing) hosted by NodeJS

• Ran agile grooming, planning, scrums, and playback with 2-week sprints

Award

Strategic Business Unit award received for speed-to-market