Senior Engineering Manager @ Babylist

July 2024 - Now

Responsibilities

• Started at Babylist managing Commerce and Android, then grew my scope over my first 18 months to own engineering across the full customer journey — from signup and onboarding, to maintaining a registry and buying off of one — plus Mobile (iOS, Android, and web).
• Absorbed two additional teams in 2026 when a fellow manager departed; onboarded and am now coaching the EM I brought in to take Commerce over.
• Stay hands-on alongside managing: I regularly ship code myself across iOS, Android, and web to stay close to the codebase, keep up with how AI is changing day-to-day development, and help solve the problems that matter most.

Primary Accomplishments

• Drove codebase and process improvements that led to increasing crash-free user rate from 97% to 99.5% on Android in the first month on board.
• Led the Commerce team to improve team organization and collaboration, ensuring the team could deliver 90% of projects on time in my first 6 months; a huge improvement up from 15%.
• Worked with the Director of Product to re-align the Commerce team on a new product vision and roadmap for 2025. I ensured that there was clarity in why we were making this pivot and found interesting product, design, and engineering challenges in the coming year to get everyone on the team excited about our new path.
• Championed Shipping Intent in Cart from insight to launch: identified that gift givers had no way to confirm a shipping destination before checkout — a trust gap that left people unsure their gift would end up in the right hands — pushed it onto the roadmap, and designed the test. Results: +14% total revenue, +20% BL Shop revenue, +17% merch margin, all statistically significant.
• Kept Commerce delivering on time (>80%) through a mid-cycle staffing gap by stepping closer to the team and coaching engineers to fill it — the team didn’t miss a beat, and cross-functional partners’ confidence in our execution went up.
• Launched the reusable registry discount, my first large project at Babylist — worked with Product, Finance, and Data to design a beta-group test strategy that became our standardized discount offering, with lasting impact on financial performance.
• Cut Commerce’s day-to-day operational support load in half by building a triage dashboard and automating our most common pain points, freeing the team to spend more time on roadmap work.

Mobile Platform Leadership

• Took Android to full feature parity with iOS, then designed and secured buy-in (VP Eng, EMs, and PMs) on a horizontal ownership model that unifies both platforms under shared release, testing, and platform stewardship processes.
• Authored an iOS architecture modernization proposal backed by a controlled experiment showing iOS took 2.3x longer than web for AI coding tools to navigate, and kicked off a SwiftUI working group modeled on Android’s earlier Circuit/Compose migration.
• Started a monthly Mobile Developer Forum to close the gap between our Android and iOS teams, giving both a shared home to talk AI tools, testing, and design.
• Own mobile platform governance end-to-end: App Store and Google Play account migrations, CI/CD vendor evaluation, and the release process both platforms run on today.

AI Enablement

• Drove our first mobile AI adoption OKR, moving nearly every mobile engineer to daily AI usage, and built the supporting infrastructure: CLAUDE.md files and Datadog plugins across our iOS, Android, and web repos, an AI-focused mobile coding interview, and a PR analytics tool EMs use for calibration.
• Stayed hands-on to keep this credible: merged 70+ PRs across 11 repos in a single half while managing four teams, including a scripted remediation that fixed over 2,000 broken registry items after an incident.
• Organized and led two company-wide Hackathons (~100 people each) since taking ownership of the event, reframing them around using AI tools to improve daily work rather than just pitching ideas, and proposed moving to a twice-a-year cadence.
• Built a structured pipeline to get our best hackathon projects into production, and watched that investment pay off directly: one engineer used the momentum from a hackathon to build an AI tool that cut a week of manual work down to days, and agentic AI is now a standard part of how the team ships.

Building the Team

• Coached a Staff engineer from struggling with planning and estimation into a trusted technical leader who now ships high-quality work, meets deadlines, and leads on AI adoption.
• Grew another engineer from an implementer into someone trusted with complex, cross-functional ownership, expanding their scope while keeping the coaching tight enough that they never felt lost.
• Ran source-a-thons and refined interview loops for iOS and Staff SRE roles, directly contributing to closing key hires for the org.
• Proposed a mid-level engineering rotation program and a framework for evaluating EM readiness, both adopted org-wide.

Other Org-wide Impacts

• Worked with Staff Site Reliability Engineer on adjusting our incident response approach and tooling to promote more involvement in site events, quicker resolution times, and better communication with non-technical stakeholders.
• Led the rollout of Notion for our company intranet. Created onboarding documentation and guidelines on how and when to use Notion. Continued pushing teams to move and create documentation in Notion to improve centralization, which was a big pain point for our growing org.
• Created standardized release processes for our iOS and Android teams, moving us from ad hoc releases to a shared rotation with an easy-to-follow weekly schedule.
• Created and fully own Squad Shuffle, a program that rotates engineers across teams to broaden experience and strengthen career growth; established it as an ongoing mechanism for 2026.
• Co-organized the 2026 company offsite for 65+ people in Chicago, owning the bulk of planning and logistics alongside our Product Director.
• Built and ran exercises for our engineering org’s Builder Finance Curriculum, closing the gap between engineering decisions and business economics.
• Built the monitoring and mitigation playbook that got engineering and Site Merch aligned for BFCM 2024, one of our highest-stakes weeks of the year.

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Senior Engineering Manager @ GameChanger

June 2021 - June 2024

Responsibilities

• Built and led two high-performing cross-functional, multi-platform teams.
• Worked closely with a dedicated Product Manager and Product Designer to run projects week-to-week and plan out quarterly and yearly roadmaps.
• Pushed my teams and my engineers to adopt an MVP mindset so that we could ship small pieces of work and monitor their impact before continuing to invest.
• Worked with platform teams to ensure our system scaled with the rapid growth of users.

Ownership and Accomplishments

As a senior EM at GameChanger, my ownership areas changed as the company grew and our focus areas changed. I’ve broken this section down by ownership area.

• Video and Clips
  • Took ownership of our automatic highlight clips infrastructure after the initial MVP release. Worked with my engineers and platform team engineers to improve the scalability of the infrastructure (APIs, modeling, and DB) to handle the generation of 200MM+ highlight clips and easily support clips for a variety of sports.
  • Moved video and clip data from the main DB into its own DB; critical effort for scaling.
  • Advocated for and owned a project that improved the visibility and usefulness of one of our best-converting features (highlight clips). This increased user engagement with highlight clips by 11x and increased subscriptions coming from highlight clips by 3x.
• Subscriptions
  • Owned a project for seamlessly raising prices on recurring subscriptions via App Store and Google Play.
  • Oversaw a project to migrate $1.5MM worth of recurring subscriptions from the legacy app to the new app — phase 0 of the sunset plan; without auto-migrating these customers, a lot of this money would have been lost.
• Legacy app
  • Created and owned a side team that worked on shutting down GameChanger Classic (legacy app), running it alongside my full-time team by empowering trusted engineers to own projects and run meetings with little oversight.
  • Owned the iOS development of a feature that let users import their teams from the legacy app, working closely with backend and Android to design and implement it.
  • Shut down legacy features one by one, working carefully in the old codebase, and coordinated marketing campaigns to get users to move to the new app.

Building the team

• Promoted one of my Senior Engineers to EM; managed and coached them while also taking over another team of 1 EM and 6 engineers.
• Promoted the first staff Android engineer in the company and worked with them to sharpen their leadership and organization skills to increase their impact and effectiveness.
• Heavily involved in interview processes across the tech org — helped calibrate for new roles like Technical PM and Staff Mobile, and directly hired 10 engineers in my three years there with a 100% acceptance rate.
• Worked with the Director of Engineering on building a calibration and promotion process for consistency across the engineering org.

Other Org-wide Impacts

• Led two EMs and several engineers from across the org to redo our technical interview process for mobile engineers — reducing touchpoints while maintaining a high bar and better assessing for staff-level roles.
• Built out a technical onboarding process that let engineers and EMs onboard more easily; owned and iterated on it throughout my tenure, and it became a critical tool during our scaling efforts.
• Revamped our monthly hack Friday into quarterly three-day hackathons, which produced sustained energy and successful projects ever since.
• Enabled a couple of passionate engineers to revamp our technical proposal process after I noticed low cross-team engagement — proposal volume and engagement increased dramatically as a result.
• Implemented a quarterly engineering pulse survey to focus the engineering leadership team’s efforts.

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Engineering Manager/Full-stack iOS Engineer @ Wyzant

5 years before GameChanger

Eng Manager

Responsibilities

• Worked with product, marketing, and SEO to break down and prioritize projects, keeping both business goals and direct reports’ personal goals in mind.
• Cultivated an environment of open, honest feedback, met regularly with other EMs to keep teams consistent and set org-wide goals, and helped direct reports grow personally and professionally.
• Continued full-stack engineer responsibilities at reduced capacity.

Projects

• Dramatically improved page load times for all of our SEO-facing pages ahead of Google’s Core Web Vitals release by deferring non-critical assets, cleaning up messy DB queries, and adding CI tooling to catch performance regressions on PRs.
• Set up top-of-funnel A/B testing on Wyzant’s onboarding flow (Rails + Flipper routing users to separate Vue app copies) that increased new user conversion, and partnered with the data team to analyze results.
• Worked with Marketing to understand Wyzant’s legacy partner/affiliate program and cleaned up the years-old code and infrastructure behind it.

Team Lead

Responsibilities

• Improved our sprint processes with new project and task card templates, using an experiment-driven approach to these changes.
• Worked closely with product to break down requirements into project plans, and kept stakeholders in the loop with clear, non-technical communication on project status.
• Maintained full-stack engineer responsibilities below.

Projects

• Proposed and built the architecture for Ask An Expert video answers (think Yahoo! Answers, but for Wyzant subjects), reusing existing Wyzant services and coordinating with their owners wherever possible.
• Led a full redesign of our SEO landing pages with the design team, executed in Rails partials, JS, SCSS, and Webpacker.
• Built and maintained an ETL process to manage which of our 2.5 million SEO landing page records (only ~200k of which were valuable enough for production) were “live” at a given time.

Full-stack & iOS Engineer

Responsibilities

• Built and maintained various parts of the Wyzant platform, ensuring quality through close work with QA, unit testing, and monitoring.
• Worked full stack across the whole platform — Go backend/Rails frontend for landing pages, Ruby on Rails for Ask An Expert, Go + Elasticsearch for the tutor search API, Vue.js/Marionette/Python for the online lessons tool, and Objective-C (early Swift migration) for iOS.
• Gave task-based status updates to team leads and PMs, and began learning how to scope larger projects and write quality cards and acceptance criteria.

Projects

• Tutor search API - Scope out and rebuild Wyzant’s Tutor Search application in Go with ElasticSearch to improve usability and conversion rates
• Online tool walkthrough - Create new walkthrough in Vue.js to improve tool usability, improve our tracking, and reduce Customer Support request load
• Ask An Expert launch - took over the project for migrating Wyzant’s Ask An Expert platform when it was a little less than halfway finished. Caught up quickly in order push it to production on our tight timeline
• Built a custom messaging app in iOS. Worked closely with backend and Android engineers to build this feature from the ground up

Other Wyzant responsibilities

• Create and lead an internal social and culture committee to improve employee recognition and promote cross-team socialization
• Assist with interviewing, recruiting, and onboarding processes for engineering and several other teams

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Other (various companies, 2016 and previous)

• Native iOS development; Swift and Objective-C
  • Usually focused on UI. Drove really complex UI interactions in BMW Connected Drive app.
  • Wyzant mobile apps (read my blog post about transitioning from mobile to web at Wyzant in 2017)
• Experience working with external clients to understand their needs, develop requirements, and collaborate on implementation
• Cross-platform mobile development with Xamarin
• Tech evangelist for Xamarin
  • Variety of public speaking engagements (demos, Xamarin workshops, meetups, new feature announcements)
  • Write technical blog posts, build and maintain demo apps