I lead engineering and empower people to ship great things

I'm a product-minded engineering leader focused on strategy, practices, and culture to increase velocity of SaaS startups/scaleups. Vast majority of 15+ year career spent in remote/distributed or hybrid companies.

I like empowering engineering orgs, teams, and people to ship great things. Passionate about developing people to increase their impact. Big on collaboration to push business forward, especially between Engineering, Product, and Design. Proponent of data-informed strategy and user-centered design.

Broadly agile, and flexible to methodology as long as we're shipping. A bias for action and single threaded ownership. I've been happiest with prudent levels of unit/e2e testing, tight CI/CD times, and feature gating for releases.

My engineering experience is full stack web services+apps, but skewed toward the surface area of end users. Past decade has been mostly React.js + ecosystem (Next.js, Redux, React Router, etc). These days I reach for TypeScript + Remix/Next.js when I can find time to code. Enough experience in Rails, Node.js, Django, Postgres, AWS, CI/CD, various ops systems to be dangerous. Looking for an excuse to use Rust.

Sound like a good fit for your company or just want to chat? Please reach out via email: jason @ this domain.

Recent roles

• Director of Engineering at Shogun. Joined at series B during pivot to a nascent product with 5-figure MRR customers during globally distributed headcount growth (80->200 in 6mos). Led 3 product teams, grew team leads into managers while increasing headcount from 12->25. Oversaw FE SWE hiring. No VP Eng, so reported directly to CTO collaborating directly on engineering strategy. Worked with new functions (Chief Sales, Chief Marketing, VP Product) to enable business expansion.
• Senior Engineering Manager at JUUL. Led platform & product ecommerce teams on global stores doing $300MM/yr under expansion from 7 to almost 20 countries with varied and shifting regulatory compliance. Authority for frontend infrastructure & best practices. Realized design system component library w/Dir Design to uphold brand consistency and increase velocity. Led biweekly developer forum for knowledge sharing.
• Director of Engineering at Flow. Oversaw a team of 10-12 developers across 3 platforms working on Flow's core project management product. I worked with our team leads to establish good process, how to mentor their reports, and guide the technical direction of Flow. I represented the technical side of Flow within the leadership team, and strove to find opportunities to best meet business goals through technology. In addition I filled in anywhere from PM to ad hoc QA work to keep the train on the tracks for Flow's 2,300+ paying teams.
• Lead Engineer at MetaLab. Led teams of developers building products for clients from early-stage startups to Fortune 50 companies and frequently interacted directly with clients to ensure service delivery. I spearheaded the technical hiring process for frontend developers, and worked with leadership to ensure our technical culture was healthy, our process was sound, and that we maintained healthy margins on each client.