2024

Jan - March

I managed an initiative to offer forward-flow arrangements, starting with a partnership agreement with a regional credit union, on an extremely tight schedule. Within two months, we were engineering complete and delivered all necessary functionality by the end of the first quarter. This allowed our credit union partner to purchase a portion of the loans we originated, while we continued to handle the servicing.

I also managed a team that began a multi-month initiative to improve how we detect and respond to suspected fraudulent activity. We delivered functionality that allowed our primary stakeholders to self-manage their fraud rules and dynamically update them without the need for engineering involvement. We also designed and began implementing tools for evaluating those fraud rules against data returned by our fraud vendor and determining the appropriate response (such as declining the application outright or requiring additional proof of identity).

Overhaul of bug-reporting process

I identified that our bug-reporting system was in drastic need of a revamp and decided to do something about it. I proposed changes to add structure and clarity, and I got buy-in from stakeholders throughout the organization.

I wrote this blog post describing how we changed our chat-ops processes, improved our response times, and made our stakeholders happier.

2023

Nov - Dec

I guided one of my teams through a hard pivot from building a new fraud model to integrating with a new fraud vendor. Our Fraud Risk team had identified that we would be able to better identify fraudulent loan applications using the new vendor's off-the-shelf functionalities than we would using a custom model against our previous vendor's data. It was difficult for the team to set aside several months' worth of work as part of this pivot, but I worked closely with my product manager to explain the reason for the change and support the team through it.

July - Oct

Working alongside our compliance team, we performed a thorough review of our Adverse Action processes and implemented robust logging, monitoring, and auditing to ensure regulatory compliance.

We also began a new initiative to overhaul our proprietary fraud model, moving from a scorecard approach to a machine-learning model.

April - June

On the product side, my teams focused on automating time-consuming manual processes that were leading to stalled loan applications. One team built automation for return-customer workflows, adjusting debt calculations based on whether or not a trade-in was involved. Another team automated the process of obtaining consent for applicants with consumer statements on their credit reports. It also overhauled the audit logs for stipulations, allowing the business-intelligence team to identify bottlenecks in credit specialists' workflows.

On the tech-wealth side, we launched regression tests using synthetic loan-application data, a project I had pushed for because it allowed us to finally answer the question, "Will this change affect how we make loan decisions?" We also added our pre-commit hooks as a build check for PRs, allowing us to enforce formatting rules throughout the codebase.

On the management side, I mentored another manager who wanted to improve his delegation skills and make sure his team got the credit it deserved. I also planned and launched an engineering guild focused on onboarding and continuing education.

Jan - March

Managed two backend teams supporting loan application decisions (a pre-decision team and a post-decision team) during a difficult macro-economic climate, with a focus on credit tightening and reducing operational expenses. The pre-decisision team performed an overhaul of the main decisioning pipeline and updated the FICO version used in decisioning. The post-decision team implemented new fraud, high-risk, and KYC rules that allowed us to cut our stipping rate from greater than 50% of applications to under 20%, which reduced operational costs.

C-suite adopts my proposal

In mid-2023, I began raising concerns about our practice of deriving custom credit attributes based on raw credit-report data. It was slow, error-prone, carried increased compliance risk, and did not follow standard industry practices. Working with our VP of Data Science, our Credit Risk department, our Compliance department, and other key engineering stakeholders, I crafted a proposal for shifting to precomputed credit attributes provided by the credit bureau.

(I also established a back-up plan that would allow us to decrease the time it took to create new custom attributes from weeks to minutes, using easily updatable rule sets and a lightweight parsing library based on JSONata).

Fortunately, though, the proposal was adopted with enthusiasm from our C-suite, and we began contract negotiations with the credit bureau. While those negotiations were protracted, we were eventually able to begin our integration in early 2024. All future ML models will rely on these precomputed attributes, rather than our in-house derived attributes, which will greatly speed up our model development lifecycle.

2022

Aug - Dec

Chose two project leads and coached them to deliver a major upgrade to the in-house model used to generate a credit-worthiness score. We delivered the project (slightly) ahead of schedule. Began managing a second backend team handling post-approval process.

March - Aug

Chose two project leads and worked with them to migrate to a new credit-pull API. Our team performed thorough testing to validate data consistency between the two APIs and surfaced multiple discrepancies that even the credit bureau was unaware of.

Jan - Feb

Worked with team to support loan decisions for a new vertical, lawn and farm tractors. Despite a tight timeline, we launched on time.

Other recent items of note

Led an initiative to apply the Black auto-formatter to Python code throughout the codebase, via pre-commit hooks.

Created an engineering onboarding hub, Octane University, and promulgated the use of C4 system diagrams.

Led an initiative to significantly reduce decisioning speed. Within the span of six months, we reduced our latency from a p95 of nearly 120 seconds to under 30 seconds.

2021

Nov - Dec

Worked with other engineering manager to split up a large team.

🎉

Joined Octane Lending as a senior engineering manager!

Aug - Oct

Launched flagship mobile app, presenting personalized content for kids from preschool through age 12.

June - July

Built custom CMS for managing multimedia content, using the react-admin library.

April - May

Helped hire and train cloud engineering team, transitioning away from expensive contractors. Designed serverless architecture for internal tools and recommendation engine for mobile content.

🎉

Joined Encantos as a principal engineer, managing the cloud engineering team!

Jan-March

Delivered an overhaul of our CMS transforms library to two enterprise clients, switching from server-side modifications to more flexible client-side SDKs.

Encantos tech stack

Our Encantos Cloud team created serverless resources using AWS SAM.

This allowed us to manage our own infrastructure as code and rapidly iterate without the need for additional DevOps resources.

2020

Nov - Dec

Worked with team to add impression reporting information to our APIs, allowing clients to pass the data directly to their preferred analytics providers, rather than tracking impressions primarily through our web UI.

Oct

Began managing the Customer Data team, while continuing to manage the Enterprise Integrations team.

Sept

Began managing the relationship with an offshore QA automation team, who helped us create end-to-end tests for our APIs.

July-Aug

Managed projects to assist with GDPR / CCPA compliance.

Jan-Jun

Large, client-specific feature enhancements to our JSON transform builder (visual UI) and corresponding transform library.

Book published

Experimenting With Kids: 50 Amazing Science Projects You Can Perform on Your Child Ages 2-5 was published in April 2020.

2019

Nov - Dec

Expanded functionality of primary decision API.

🎉

Monetate was acquired by Kibo Commerce!

Jan-Sept

Began working with external contractors, building dynamic transforms for our largest client. Also integrated with a Fortune 100 client's headless CMS.

Book published

Experiments for Newlyweds: 50 Amazing Science Projects You Can Perform With Your Spouse was published by Sourcebooks in April 2019.

2018

Aug - Dec

Coordinated development of features to improve multi-domain experience management for largest client, built in such a way that we could enable for all other clients using API-driven decisioning.

Jan-July

Created new tools that enabled clients to build custom, omnichannel actions that could be easily configured by non-technical users.

Conference Speaker

Presented a session at the Linux Foundation's annual API Strategy and Practice Conference in September 2018.

The title of the session was, "The Evolving API: Designing While Requirements Are Still In Flux."

2017

Sept - Dec

Build and successfully delivered a proof-of-concept CMS transforms interface that would allow a prospective enterprise client to apply personalization to their JSON-based CMS payloads. Upon delivery, the client signed a multi-year, multi-million dollar personalization contract.

🎉

Appointed technical lead of the newly formed Enterprise Integrations team. This team was created to offer co-development work to some of our largest clients, with a focus on building features with strong potential to be incorporated into our core products.

Jan-July

Served as a senior engineer on a full-stack product analytics team.

2016

July-Dec

Served as a senior engineer on a full-stack product analytics team.

Jan-July

Served as a senior engineer on a team building email personalization products.

2015

July-Dec

Served as a senior engineer on a team building email personalization products.

Jan-July

Served as a software engineer on a customer-data platform team.

2014

July-Dec

Served as a software engineer on a team building new analytics dashboards.

Jan-July

Served as a software engineer on a team building a dynamic image compositing tool, like a web-based version of Photoshop, but with the ability to personalize portions of the image at the time it is viewed.

2013

July-Dec

Joined the platform engineering team and began working on a dynamic image compositing tool.

Jan-July

Worked on a team that provided custom Javascript features for clients to enable personalization and A/B testing.

Book Published

Experimenting With Babies: 50 Amazing Science Projects You Can Perform on Your Kid was published by Penguin Random House in October 2013. It has since sold more than 100,000 copies.

2012

Jan-Dec

Worked on a team that provided custom Javascript features for clients to enable personalization and A/B testing.

2011

Aug-Dec

Worked on a team that provided custom Javascript features for clients to enable personalization and A/B testing.

🎉

Joined Monetate as a software engineer!

Jan-July

Managed editorial operations for DelawareOnline.com during the morning, wrote code for special projects in the afternoon.

2010

Aug-Dec

Managed editorial operations for DelawareOnline.com during the morning, wrote code for special projects in the afternoon. Built a site-scraping application that pulled and parsed live voting data from government sites for the 2010 elections.

2009

Aug-Dec

Managed editorial operations for DelawareOnline.com during the morning, wrote code for special projects in the afternoon. Created a series of PHP scripts that monitored user-submitted comments and apply robust filtering to remove abusive comments. Developed an alternate interface to our CMS that allowed drag-and-drop uploads and improved efficiency. Developed a Greasemonkey script that made substantial enhancements to our CMS, including some AJAX-ified functionality that enabled us to write entire stories with one click using scraping and a natural-language algorithm I developed.

2008

Aug-Dec

Managed editorial operations for DelawareOnline.com during the morning, wrote code for special projects in the afternoon. Created an email alert script that scrapes from about a dozen sources and feeds us near-real-time tips about traffic, weather, etc. Created a Greasemonkey script that overlays SiteCatalyst page-view stats on stories that appear on our homepage. Developed an application that uses geocoding to send breaking-news alerts to users based on their location.

2007

Aug-Dec

Managed editorial operations for DelawareOnline.com during the morning, wrote code for special projects in the afternoon.

🎉

Joined The (Wilmington, Delaware) News Journal as a web update editor.

Jan-July

Served as the deputy copy chief for Forbes.com. For about two months during the spring of 2007, our copy chief was out on medical leave, so I temporarily stepped into his role, attending planning sessions with the management team and interviewing candidates for copy-desk roles.

🎉

Promoted to deputy copy chief of Forbes.com.

2006

March-Dec

Served as a copy editor for Forbes.com.

🎉

Joined Forbes.com as a copy editor.

Jan

Worked as a copy editor for Men's Journal magazine.

2005

Nov-Dec

Worked as a copy editor for Men's Journal magazine.

🎉

Joined Men's Journal as a copy editor.

Jan-Aug

Served as a full-time volunteer in the DeSales Service Works program. I worked in the computer lab at an inner-city high school and tutored kindergarteners.

2004

Aug-Dec

Served as a full-time volunteer in the DeSales Service Works program. I worked in the computer lab at an inner-city high school and tutored kindergarteners.

Jan-July

Served as managing editor of Delaware Today magazine. As managing editor, I was in charge of tracking each page through the editorial process and enforcing deadlines. I was also the primary liason for our freelancers. I also coded dynamic content for the magazine’s website, including photo galleries and reader polls.

2003

Jan-Dec

Served as managing editor of Delaware Today magazine. As managing editor, I was in charge of tracking each page through the editorial process and enforcing deadlines. I was also the primary liason for our freelancers. I also coded dynamic content for the magazine’s website, including photo galleries and reader polls.

2002

Jan-Dec

Served as managing editor of Delaware Today magazine. As managing editor, I was in charge of tracking each page through the editorial process and enforcing deadlines. I was also the primary liason for our freelancers. I also coded dynamic content for the magazine’s website, including photo galleries and reader polls.

2001

🎉

Joined Delaware Today magazine as managing editor.