Mike Douglas, Engineering Leader

Led the Engineering and QA department consisting of 13 people working across three teams on website, online insurance products, and API development.

• Lead product and engineering project on global expansion initiative
• Collaborated with marketing, insurance product, and leadership to maintain and evolve the primary insurance eCommerce platform
• Lead the Software Engineering and QA team of 13 people
• Hired, coached, and promoted software and QA engineers
• Built career path framework and mentored junior, senior, and lead engineers
• Built three-year technical roadmap in alignment with team and company direction

Worked as a Software Development Manager on Elastic File System (EFS), AWS's massively scalable elastic network block storage solution. Lead an internal team of software and system engineers focused on operational excellence within the EFS group. Built tools and processes to maintain the highly available, highly durable storage system for a global customer-base.

• Lead an engineering and systems team of 5 people
• Built a team roadmap outlining a multi-year vision of deliverables aligned with organizational goals
• Lead organization-wide discussions around operational issues and tooling improvements
• Coordinated initiatives across teams at AWS and within EFS around security, compliance, and operational safety
• Worked closely with Product teams to measure and align operational goals with feature and product goals

As a manager in the product engineering side part of the organization, I worked closely with Product and Design peers to build features and engineer the next generation of the InVision platform. I supported the org's rapid growth by hiring new engineers and managers, and leveling up members of my team.

• Lead a distributed engineering team of 5 people
• Coached engineers individually, providing regular feedback and aligning individual skills and growth areas with company needs and trajectory
• Coordinated cross-team projects around security, operational readiness, and product features
• Worked closely with Product and Design to plan and timeline core features
• Developed the team’s proficiency in project management, operational excellence, and technical mastery
• Built new teams by hiring and onboarding engineers and other managers
• Facilitated architecture discussions, process improvements, planning, and other agile rituals
• Coordinated with leadership to define strategy and roadmap features and improvements

I worked on the digital content side of the NPR network, focusing on member stations and their content creation tools. In this position I coordinated with station support, product focused people, and others from NPR Digital to deliver tools and features that brought stations into the NPR network and gave them the ability to publish their own content and measure their audience engagement.

• Lead an engineering team of 9 people
• Maintained web content delivery products, analytics tools, and reporting systems used by NPR member stations (station CMS, NPR One, NPR News)
• Built release schedules and quality measures focused on delivering measurable value to station stakeholders
• Coordinated with other NPR engineering teams on many features that brought station users into the nationwide network
• Hired and onboarded engineers
• Worked closely with operations team on Ansible-based deployment for products in production and local environments

Managed the team of software developers and testers maintaining the namesake eCommerce platform and business partner platforms in the industry. Grew the team into 12 engineers through hiring, training opportunities, team building and skill development. Interfaced with product, agile, and customer care teams to ship new products, platform redesigns, and new partners.

Managed a team of data analysts and rolled out a business intelligence tool with smart reporting and analytics used to guide product decisions and understand sale trends. Trained members on SQL, scripting, and coordinated with vendors on rollouts and product training.

• Lead an engineering and QA team of 10 people
• Ran the team that maintained the flagship direct-to-consumer web application, white label partner web applications, and internal admin tools
• Hired and recruited engineers, QA engineers, and data scientists
• Implemented engineering best practices like code reviews, testing processes and quality standards, and documentation policies
• Lead team-building and skill building activities: book clubs, lunch and learns
• Facilitated strategic discussions, architecture planning and technical direction
• Worked closely with operations to develop an internal environment provisioning and deployment system for testing large features in isolated on-demand environments (like an internal AWS)
• Lead a team of data analysts and scientists
• Deployed a BI platform and lead technical direction to aid financial and analytics reporting

Software engineering on the flagship eCommerce platform as well as partner sites and products in the travel insurance industry, while still supporting a legacy platform. Worked closely as an architect on many new initiatives including the development of an early MVC framework, and a framework for defining insurance products and rules using a custom DSL and rule-running engine.

Various IT gigs in schools and educational settings centered around network administration, server maintenance, and web development.

Primarily responsible for the development, deployment, and training of data collection and reporting systems for K-12 environments. Built charting and data analysis tools for educators to assess student achievement, surface areas of intervention, and track longitudinal standards-based scores. Also worked as a consultant for school districts in ETL-related tasks for yearly submission of students' standards-based scores to the Department of Education.

Worked as a system administrator for the two main offices and three satellite offices (schools), maintaining network equipment, servers, and client deployments. Played an active role in two building projects for magnet schools, building and supporting the network infrastructure which included video distribution, wireless networks, and desktop/laptop deployment of 500+ clients. Built internal web-based tools for tracking issues and time-tracking for consulting work done in school districts.