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Senior Director of Engineering

Hearst Magazines, San Francisco
Nov 2020 – May 2023

Hearst Magazines is part of Hearst, one of the nation’s largest diversified media, information and services companies with more than 360 businesses. Hearst Magazines has a global audience of 200 million print readers and 400 million unique digital visitors, with 25 brands in the U.S., including Cosmopolitan, ELLE, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Harper’s BAZAAR, Popular Mechanics, and more.

They engage their audience across all mediums and channels - print, digital, video and social – with sophisticated content creation, distribution and data capabilities.

I led the engineering teams supporting Commerce (affiliate revenue) across all their brands. I also led the engineering teams for Bring a Trailer (leading car auction site in the US) and product development for Firstfinds (DTC commerce). Led the integration of Semantics3 staff and tech across the broader Hearst organization.

Highlights:

  • Led 50 engineers, 3 reporting managers, and 9 teams across 4 time zones.
  • Provided technical leadership for architecture and product development.
  • Managed a diverse group of stakeholders and built trust (evidenced by growing responsibilities from 1 product team to 4 product teams).
  • Pioneered A/B testing: Architected Optimizely Full Stack/Web across all teams/services.
  • Commerce: Increased use of AI engineering to deliver on categorization and product matching, drastically improved data quality, developed employee facing tools to report or automatically fix errors, decoupled commerce services, improved development process to reduce rollbacks and bugs by 95%.
  • Firstfinds: Led product from concept to execution with high executive priority. Concept to launch initiative in 6 months, hired team from scratch.
  • Bring a Trailer: Transitioned product development from external contractors to full-time Hearst team. Re-architected Wordpress/PHP application to Python/microservices architecture to improve uptime and maintainability. Eliminated weekly downtimes within 6 months.

Tech Stack and Tooling:
Python, PHP, FastAPI, Flask, Wordpress, Redis, Postgres, Neo4j, SNS, SQS, Datadog, New Relic, SumoLogic, Sentry, K8s, AWS

Co-founder and COO

Semantics3, San Francisco
Dec 2011 – Nov 2020

At Semantics3, we set out to organize the world’s ecommerce data — tracking product and pricing data across the web and making it highly structured. We provided ecommerce data solutions for marketplaces, brands and logistics companies via a suite of APIs. Our product suite also includes AI-based APIs such as Classification and Named Entity Recognition.

Use cases that we support include categorizing your products to a standard taxonomy, figuring out how your competitors are doing, seeing how your products are doing on various marketplaces, helping with tariff classifications, etc.

We were acquired by Hearst in November 2020. Raised $2.2M from YCombinator, E-Merge & others. Signed contracts with customers Microsoft, Facebook, Walmart and managed relationships with over 100 enterprise clients. I oversaw the data engineering, solutions engineering, product development and customer success - a total of 30 people. Actively wrote code until 2016.

Highlights:

  • Opened offices, hired and managed >30 engineers in SF, Singapore and Bengaluru.
  • Launched 2 highly profitable products - Realtime Large Scale Crawling and Webhooks APIs.
  • Handled enterprise customers with between $50k - $150k ARR, from discovery to deployment.
  • Responsible for retention metrics. Reduced MoM churn from double digits to <5% in 1 year.
  • Focused on analytics and metrics for better insights and data-driven decision making.
  • Team managed over 500 microservices, >40M URLs crawled per day, >5000 AWS instances.

Tech Stack and Tooling:
Perl, Python, Redis, Postgres, Elasticsearch, Metabase