Summary

Engineering Director with 15+ years in technology and 10+ years leading globally distributed, cross-functional engineering teams — currently building observability products at scale on Grafana Cloud. Practitioner of servant-leadership and strategic management who aligns technical outcomes with big-picture business goals, and an advocate for operational excellence that improves resiliency, visibility, and maintainability. Proven at taking products from 0-to-1, scaling organizations through hyper-growth, and developing managers and engineers across disciplines. Known for integrity, empathy, active listening, dependability, and flexibility to build trust & rapport with direct reports, peers, and executive leaders.

Core Competencies

  • Manage, Mentor, Build, & Retain High-Performing Teams
  • Communicate with Technical & Non-Technical Stakeholders to Articulate Technical Concepts
  • Agile Methodologies & Best Engineering Practices
  • Incident Management & Post-Mortem Analysis
  • Process & Program Implementation to Improve Dependability and Efficiency
  • Team Engagement: Standups, One-on-Ones, & Team Meetings
  • Observability & Monitoring: OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Prometheus
  • Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform
  • Languages & Data: Go, React, Python, Postgres
  • Microservice/SOA Architecture

Experience

September 2021 – Present

Grafana Labs — Director, Software Engineering

Lead a globally distributed team of ~40 engineers (3 engineering managers and ~37 individual contributors) building applications on top of Grafana Cloud across Cloud Provider Observability, Kubernetes Monitoring, and Database Observability. Report to the VP of Engineering for the ~80–90 person Observability department, extending influence at the department level by coaching and mentoring fellow managers and contributing to department-wide strategy and execution. Products serve external customers, supported by a strong dogfooding practice that accelerates feedback. Tech utilized includes: Go, React, Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, Terraform, and the Grafana stack.

  • Led the engineering team that took Database Observability from concept to a shipping product, establishing a new offering within the Grafana Cloud portfolio
  • Drove Kubernetes Monitoring from a 0-to-1 initiative to a core paid product, growing billable adoption more than 11x over two years
  • Scaled Cloud Provider Observability, a free adoption-driving product, to ~2.6x monthly active organizations over two years
  • Helped lead the Observability department through a period of rapid, roughly 2x growth via hiring, organizational design, and restructuring
  • Own end-to-end planning and execution of the department’s week-long annual offsite for ~120 attendees, building cross-team rapport and alignment across a globally distributed organization
  • Founded and run a yearly R&D-wide mentorship program spanning ~150–160 participants across multiple disciplines and global regions, strengthening career development and knowledge sharing

August 2020 – September 2021

Oracle — Director, Software Engineering

Leading a team of engineers responsible for building out a new Continuous Deployment (CD) service for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as part of a new DevOps platform meant to drive adoption of OCI. Hired, managed, and developed a team of 20 globally distributed engineers, with one direct-report manager. Interviewed and hired to fill the parent organization consisting of 3 additional service teams composed of over 30 additional engineers, engineering managers, technical program managers, and product managers.

  • Orchestrated team networking activities to help a new, geographically diverse team learn more about each other, build rapport, and subsequently increase velocity
  • Created long term roadmap detailing features and improvements to be released after the service is released
  • Trained team on operational best practices that entailed proper monitoring, alerting, runbooks, root cause analysis, and communication during an operational incident. Tech utilized includes: JIRA, Confluence, Grafana
  • Contributed to and facilitated design discussions throughout service development
  • Maintained and executed project roadmap through assigning tasks for each two week sprint, creating tasks when needed, and grooming a backlog
  • Coordinated with other departments on development efforts. Created a joint development plan for the larger team to meet deadlines

April 2019 – June 2020

Pica Product Development — Director, Software Engineering

Produced IoT devices that integrate sensors and notify users when a sensor is triggered. Led teams responsible for mobile application development, API servers, internal support tools, and Amazon RDS database backend. Coached, led, and mentored 7 software developers ensuring engineering best practices.

  • Led staff development initiatives such as succession planning and training, ultimately ensuring teams were cross-trained & consistently sharing knowledge
  • Managed technological teams that worked with: Ionic, Loopback (Node/Typescript framework), and Angular
  • Gained buy-in from senior leadership to implement new communication processes via weekly updates using Confluence which increased visibility interdepartmentally
  • Created a comprehensive, multi-tiered, technical support plan consisting of documentation, basic first-level phone support, and JIRA usage to track tickets
  • Composed and deployed new development practices across engineering teams including pull requests & code reviews, software versioning, improved code commenting, ticket etiquette, and educating teams on writing tests
  • Drove & defined a strategic proof-of-concept that identified & managed test failures and alerted engineering when code would fail. Within 1 month, implemented this new system that successfully caught 3 different issues via end-to-end checks, server, and API checks. Technologies: Sensu Go, Prometheus, PushGateway, Grafana, OpsGenie, Slack, Node Exporter, and Alert Manager
  • Utilized data visualization tools such as Prometheus & Grafana for metrics & monitoring
  • Managed technical vendor engagements such as OpsGenie and GitHub

December 2009 – 2021

My Social Sports — (Freelance) Full Stack Engineer

Designed, implemented, and maintained an application that facilitates co-ed sports leagues throughout the country. Re-wrote the PHP application to Django/Python, using the entire operational stack in Digital Ocean — Django/Python, Nginx, Postgres. The platform now processes 15K+ registrations annually and has achieved $940K in revenue.

November 2010 – March 2019

Oracle/Dyn

October 2014 – March 2019

Sr. Engineering Manager

Led teams that wholly owned the flagship product that managed DNS, the eCommerce DNS offering, and ‘Portal’ which was an internal service. Hired, managed, and developed a team of 40 distributed engineers, with 5 direct-report managers across several products, platform engineering, and database administration teams globally.

  • Consolidated & refined release management procedures across 4+ engineering teams, affecting 150+ people to adopt CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins & Chef)
  • Supported teams regarding skills development and succession planning; addressed skills gaps & advocated for training; developed new roles to create career paths into team lead positions
  • Managed 3 technical vendor partnerships: Vivid Cortex, Twilio, and Nexmo/Vonage
  • Built from the ground up a Sustaining Engineering department to reduce technical debt. Tech: Perl, Python, DNS, JIRA, Confluence, Grafana, Graphite, Nagios, Ansible, Chef
  • Established a project plan to transition the core eCommerce product ($40M/year) into a newer, more efficient data center

October 2013 – October 2014

Engineering Manager

Led a team of 8 Engineers that developed and maintained the flagship Managed DNS product. Responsible for backlog prioritization, clearing roadblocks, managing professional development, and conducting performance reviews.

  • Created & implemented a new workflow for ticket management & issue resolution streamlining tickets from customer service straight to engineering teams
  • Partnered with leadership to develop a technical debt reduction plan
  • Instituted a living, on-call rotation policy that led to shorter turnaround time on issue resolution

August 2013 – October 2013

Sr. Software Engineer

November 2010 – August 2013

Software Engineer

Education

Bachelor of Science, Computer Science — University of New Hampshire

Leadership Exchange Program — Intelligent.ly

Volunteer

April 2026 – Present

Supervisor of the Checklist — Town of Londonderry, NH

Appointed to fill a mid-term vacancy on the board responsible for maintaining and correcting the town’s official voter registration checklist, including registering voters and verifying records ahead of elections.

2014 – 2021

Board of Directors & President of the Board — Noah’s Ark Child Care Center

  • Managed a $2M operations budget covering salaries and all facility expenses
  • Organized and ran monthly meetings with 12–15 board members reviewing critical topics, upcoming events, staff concerns, and committee updates
  • Technology Subcommittee Chair: Implemented G-Suite Applications, an internal software system, and created a new WordPress website
  • Improved succession planning capabilities by adding a second Assistant Director and cross-training on all Executive Director responsibilities

2020 – 2022

PTA Vice President — North Elementary School, Londonderry, NH

  • Volunteer Coordinator Chair