Work Experience

I am incredibly proud of the work I did here, the teams I assembled, the evolution from startup mentality to enterprise-level performance and process, and the communities I brought together outside of team or pillar borders. I had the pleasure to build a team around Enterprise Permissions, attacking immediate needs, and helping plan the roadmap and architectural decisions for future and long-term success. Being short of leaders, I was requested to concurrently manage and build processes on the Identity squad (6-month interim) handling SSO, SCIM, and other integrations. I built a Community of Practice that empowers engineers to share their vast knowledge with others, continuously growing each other and sharing awareness across team boundaries. The culture of collaboration and winning as one team was beginning to feel right. I listened intently to all engineers of their concerns inside and outside of the code and collected, weighted, prioritized, and elevated these concerns across the entire company to start making sweeping changes. With the goal of creating shared solutions for shared problems.

I spent eight great years at Nike and it was a tremendous ride. I got my start rebuilding the checkout experience for Nike.com and we were the first team to fight for and bring NodeJS to our build servers in 2015. I was later requested to be on the first 5-person team to build the first Nike.com experience in the cloud using AWS and our custom-built frontend framework. Over the next two years the Nike's cloud efforts went from two small teams to dozens with over 300+ engineers.

After two years on the cloud efforts, I spent two years within Nike Innovation assembling project-based teams and creating a plethora of applications to support and provide innovators with new insights using massive data that was collected on our new data platform from hundred of measurement devices. I formed and led the teams, guided project planning and delivery, and was an active team member in the building phase.

I was recruited back to Nike Digital to support more cloud efforts to build Cloud Cart and deploy to 30+ countries in six months, to help evolve our global navigation, and was later asked to join and help rearchitect and build a the next generation of Nike.com using NextJS and microcomponents (micro front-ends).

I took my leave when I relocated with my family and working remotely was not an option at the time.

Pop Art, a fast-paced interactive marketing agency, is where I learned how to not trust the brain when managing up to 10 concurrent projects at a time when quality and timeliness are expected of you. I wore many hats; from lead front-end engineer, strategic planner, consultant, researcher and budget planner/enforcer. As a developer, we worked with numerous CMS systems and frameworks using PHP, .NET, and JavaScript. Clients included Daimler, Pacific Foods, Yogi Tea, Freightliner, and Skedco.

The VFD had a systemic communication problem, and I was hired for a temporary role to develop a scheduler/calendar for firefighters and admins to manage training, events, and news. After completing the request within the first few weeks of a three-month contract, they felt the value that was possible and requested additional features. After the contract, they created a new position to grow and maintain this new system that evolved into a robust solution that simplified firefighters, chiefs, and support staff daily work-life. The 'Fire Intranet' survived another 5 years of usage without any further support or updates.

Truly an eye-opening and inspiring experience for a college student. Starting as an intern, our team, Center for Process Excellence, had the opportunity to embed within teams across Pinnacle West subsidiaries to help them visualize their current operations and help them optimize how they work. We saw tremendous success but I was always bothered by one fact: most of our success metrics were qualitative and based on client sentiments.

As an engineer, I wanted quantitative comparisons of before-and-after that concretely showed the evolution of process. From this concern, I created an automated solution for ingesting all process data and outputting graphs and charts that break down the type of work, quantity of work, and compares to a baseline of a healthy system for the type of work the team delivers. With a simplistic view of Primary Value and Secondary Value, it further broke down into work categories to define where time is being spent and if this aligns with expectations.

The tool and philosophy behind it was later patented by the company.

I studied Electrical Engineering for two years before pivoting to Computer Information Systems with a minor in Communications. During my education, I worked full-time as a System's Analyst and Web Developer, was an active member in the business fraternity Alpha Kappa Psi, took on client work as part of the Consulting Scholar Program, and taught introductory business classes.