Apex, North Carolina, United States
Senior Director for Sonos Core Engineering Group. The group includes Software Release, Release Verification and Certification, Test Automation Infrastructure (for both functional and performance testing), Build Infrastructure (for web services, mobile devices, and embedded systems), DevOps, and Product Data. Our goal is to create seamless, friction free platforms that deliver high quality, small batch software releases to end users with no disruptions. We strive to improve our delivery metrics around release frequency, release failure rate, release lead time, and system time to recovery. We strive to create self-service platforms that empower development teams to create and own their services and features in production. We believe in Agile/Lean software development principals and embrace the challenge of improving the value stream provided by constantly building, testing, and releasing software. I am excited by the opportunity to be working in this space. The merger of development, testing, delivery, and operations is producing innovations that dramatically improve developer productivity and customer satisfaction.
- Managed a group of teams including software release, release verification and certification, automation infrastructure (for both performance and functional testing), build infrastructure (for web services, mobile applications, and embedded systems), devOps (cloud development platforms and infrastructure), product data (data engineering and data science)
- Managed set of teams dedicated to designing, building, and operating self-service tools and platforms that enable teams to create build/test/release pipelines. - Teams include full time engineers (20), interns, and contractors at near-shore and offshore locations. Teams organized functionally to cover release management, release verification, release engineering, automation and build infrastructure engineering. - Team responsible for over 150 software releases per year to alpha, beta, and production users as well as manufacturing lines and reverse logistics centers. Release failure rate of less than a 4%. - Team responsible for build and automation infrastructure handling over 400 check-ins per sprint, creating 900 builds and executing over 150,000 tests a day. - Incorporated Automation Infrastructure Engineering team. Aligned Build and Automation teams around shared infrastructure (GitHub, Jenkins, Artifactory, Python) and mission (fast flow software delivery). - Consistently high ratings in employee satisfaction surveys compared to company and industry benchmarks. High scores for meeting effectiveness, strategic adaptability, and career progression. Low team turnover.
- Managed Sonos Software Release Teams (Release Managers, Release Verification, Release Engineering) and Build Infrastructure Engineering Team. - Managed team through Covid pandemic without disruption to software delivery. Added second test vendor to improve redundancy and lower testing costs. - Led migration of Sonos Controller and Player source code from Perforce to GitHub with improvements across key success metrics (developer happiness, productivity, and commit rate). - Led development of GitHub Pull Request automation achieving over 98% completion rate and less than 1 hour time to results.
Responsible for managing test programs and projects in the Regional Applications Development - Americas organization. Duties include: program and project-level test strategies and budgets, test team design and onboarding, management of planning and execution, metrics gathering and analysis, status reporting and stakeholder management, issue escalation, and continuous process and performance improvement.
At Sonos, I had the unique opportunity to work at a company with an uncompromising commitment to their customers, and the ambition to produce only the absolute best hardware and software possible. I got to learn from extremely bright and driven people. I played a key role in defining the software quality assurance policies, processes, and teams that helped grow the company from a small startup to a market leader with products in millions of homes across the world. I was able to provide input on and influence key decisions on organizational and team design, facilities, product features, development and testing practices, and release risk and readiness. Worked with executives and senior management on organizational vision to achieve business objectives. Directly responsible for charter and strategy of several software test teams. Built relationships across the organization and communicated the services and value the teams offered. Created workforce and resource plans for teams. Conducted hiring, performance reviews, and career development for team members. Created dynamic workforce including interns, contractors, and outsourced testing partners to address peak workloads or special project needs. Worked with executive and senior management, product management, development, and software test to define test and release policies and procedures. Evaluated and managed implementation of development and test tools. Worked with new feature development scrum teams to ensure quality of new features and promote best practices across the teams. Created manual and automated test strategies to ensure coverage per release. Monitored project and test status and reported to executive and senior management. Reviewed and approved test plans, schedules, and artifacts to ensure process and procedures are being followed. Play Scrum Master and Product Owner roles on teams as necessary.
Created vision, strategies, and tactics for one of the software quality assurance teams at Sonos. Team was focused on embedded software, networking, content streaming, and web services. Hired, trained, and mentored test engineers on the team. Worked with outside vendors and technical recruiters to hire contractors. Developed a large test lab for multiple test engineers and functions.
Responsible for the day-to-day tasks of two to three small test teams. Provided guidance on testing strategy, scheduling, resourcing, and issue resolution. Contributed to hiring, training, and performance evaluations for team members. Performed hands-on testing for highly technical or time constrained tasks.
Truston developed an innovative fraud and identify theft recovery platform that powered Truston's own branded site and was sold as a white label product to third party partners. Responsible for manual and automated testing of the web site, web services, and backend database.
Openwave Systems is a leading global provider of innovative messaging software solutions. Responsible for all designing, planning, scheduling, writing, editing, and producing documentation related to Openwave products.