work history
Honeycomb Insurance
roles
December 2024 - Current
Joined as the third hire to stand up the US engineering arm — no PM, no established process, just a direct line to my VP and CTO and a mandate to build. Created the US engineering function from the ground up — process, hiring, product alignment, and technical direction. Twelve months in, we had a team of eleven across three multi-discipline teams, shipping against hard deadlines with defined goals and measurable outcomes.
accomplishments
- Defined and owned the entire hiring process: job descriptions, recruiter relationships, salary negotiation, offers, and final decisions — including overriding leadership when needed. 100% retention over 14 months.
- Established sprint discipline and took on product management responsibilities until a PM was hired, bridging the gap between executive expectations and engineering delivery
- Drove technical direction for the US, including architecture decisions on service boundaries vs. monolith and vendor negotiations (e.g., large-scale Okta migration replacing a homegrown system)
- Shifted application support from reactive ticket resolution to a function focused on measurable outcomes for internal and external customers
- Added OKR-aligned goals and uptime/performance metrics to all project delivery, establishing a culture of accountability in a previously unmeasured org
SteelSeries
roles
February 2022 - July 2024
March 2021 - February 2022
Joined as the manager of a four-person US team maintaining an e-commerce platform. Left having built a global engineering organization of fifteen engineers supporting three brands and 3 million monthly active users. The core work was transforming what the team was — not just growing headcount, but evolving the function from maintenance mode into a cloud services org capable of owning complex, cross-brand infrastructure.
accomplishments
- Doubled e-commerce conversion from 0.75% to 1.5% through core web vitals improvements; reduced page load from 10 seconds to 4 seconds
- Scaled from four US engineers to fifteen globally distributed engineers, plus scrum masters, product managers, and QA — hiring, structuring, and growing the org through multiple phases
- Improved department velocity by 40% over two quarters while maintaining uptime SLO
- Reduced AWS costs by 50% and improved uptime to 99.99% by building DevOps discipline across all engineering teams
- Cut external SaaS spend by $500k/year through a combination of AI tooling, internal builds, and contract consolidation
- Mentored engineers to senior and technical lead promotions; designed and documented architecture with scale, developer experience, and long-term ownership in mind
ActiveCampaign
roles
February 2019 - March 2021
June 2017 - February 2019
accomplishments
- Scaled the Automations team from six to twenty-one engineers; hired and developed an additional engineering manager to split the organization as it grew
- Led org-wide React adoption and migration, architecting an iterative transformation from PHP/jQuery within the Automations product
- Initiated a monorepo structure to support multiple frontend technologies, shared dependencies, and localization at scale
- Rework of the Automations section improved performance and API latency, resulting in a 12% increase in the rate of first automation created — a core activation metric
- Mentored engineers from mid-level through staff, and supported IC-to-management transitions
Earlier
roles
September 2015 - June 2017
August 2011 - February 2015