Seattle, Washington, United States
20+ years building and scaling engineering teams, platforms, and delivery systems. Led global orgs up to 35 engineers (in the US + India), operated as interim VP of Engineering, and managed distributed teams across three continents. I'm am currently applying that experience as co-founder and President/COO at a growing software + services company. At Indisea (2024-present), I've led growth from $0 to $620k in revenue 2025, personally owned SOC 2 Type I and Type II attestations end-to-end, designed our multi-account AWS and multi-subscription Azure architectures. At Go1 (2022-2025), I led 6 different teams over 4 years including Content Platform, Content Management, Content Intelligence, and DevOps across the US, Australia, and Vietnam. We delivered Content Gateway (250+ content providers, 100k+ learning objects), shipped production LLM metadata enrichment using Azure OpenAI, and reduced hosting costs by 25% year over year. Zero unwanted attrition through reorgs and reductions. At Avalara (2014-2020), I grew from Sr SW Engineer to Director of a 35-person global org (2 US managers, Director in Pune). I served as interim VP of Engineering for nearly a year following a sudden leadership departure. Built Content Central, a tax content management system still in use. Side work: shipping Chief of Staff Agents in Slack and AI consulting (more at caseymargell.com)
Co-founded engineering services company building integrations ("connectors") between eCommerce platforms, ERPs, and sales tax compliance / automation systems. As President/COO, own operations, customer delivery, contract negotiation, compliance, and growth. - Grew business from $0 (mid-2024) to ~$620k 2025 revenue, on track for $1mm+ in 2026 - Scaled engineering team from 2 to 11 dedicated staff in/around Pune, India (14 total including founders) - Personally owned SOC 2 Type I (May 2025) and Type II (Feb 2026, Sensiba LLP) attestation end-to-end at 14-person scale - Designed and implemented Azure multi-subscription and parallel AWS multi-account architectures to adhere to SOC 2 controls (AWS Organizations, per-customer member accounts, IAM Identity Center SSO, cross-account Terraform)
Led engineering teams building Go1's enterprise learning platform across US, Australia, and Vietnam. Repeatedly asked to take on teams needing leadership, managing 6 different teams over nearly 4 years spanning Content Core, Content Platform, Content Management, Content Intelligence, Global DevOps, and Developer Experience. - Inherited Content Gateway mid-flight (new MongoDB-backed platform replacing a failing MySQL monolith), narrowed its growing scope, and drove it to delivery. Became source of truth for 250+ content providers and 100k+ learning objects. - Shipped production LLM-based metadata enrichment using Azure OpenAI, improving content recommendations and compliance tagging. 100% of eligible objects tagged for content restrictions; skills feedback loop where learners validate AI-generated tags. - Drove 25.86% YoY combined hosting cost reduction (Azure $2.69mm to $1.85mm) despite 62% MAL growth. Cost per learner $0.594 in Feb 2024, 41% lower than year prior. Levers included SCORM migration to Cloudflare R2, AWS account consolidation, GitLab to GitHub Actions migration, and cost accountability tags. - Rolled out Multi-AZ HA and formal Incident Management process after Aug 2023 Sydney Azure outage took 8.5 hours to resolve. Same failure mode is now non-fatal. - Restructured Content Ecosystem into 3 focused teams (Feb 2025) after 3 incidents impacting user's ability to play content highlighted the need to accelerate legacy service deprecation. Peak 12 direct reports across 3 teams spanning 3 major geographic regions. Zero unwanted attrition with engagement scores (Culture Amp) consistently above Go1 company averages. - Drove engineering-wide service ownership assignment in partnership with POGOs and Engineering Leadership, establishing a responsible team for each of Go1's 433 services (mid-2023 audit). Audit also surfaced 57 unused services and became foundational for on-call, incident response, and Operational Excellence practices.
Joined Series A fintech startup ($10mm round on $35mm pre-money) after VP Eng exit. Operated as acting head of Engineering reporting to CEO through spring 2021, until new VP hired in June. - Authored 2021 engineering strategy (multi-version, Mar and Jun) naming 7 threats with resolutions, hiring budget (~$1mm/yr salary), and alignment to a $100mm Series B target at $5.9mm ARR. Wrote the 4 job descriptions (QA Manager, Sr FE, Sr SDET, Sr SWE) that anchored the hiring plan. - Hired 7 engineers in ~10 weeks (Apr to Jun 2021), matching the plan directly (Sr SWEs, Sr SDETs, QA Manager, SDEs). 48 documented interview loops Feb-Jul. - Built QA from 1 overwhelmed manual tester into a QA Manager + 2 Sr SDETs with a published automation strategy (TDD direction).
Joined as Sr Software Engineer on AvaTax Tax Engine; promoted to Engineering Manager (2015), Director (June 2017), and Interim VP (2019-2020). Built and led Content Engineering from struggling distributed team into a 35-person org across Seattle and Pune, delivering the content platform underpinning Avalara's real-time tax calculations. - Delivered Content Central, a modern app that replaced spreadsheet- and legacy-tool-based workflows for Content Researchers. By Jan 2019, 12,485 boundaries/jurisdictions managed in CC with 2 people supporting 10,000 boundaries that previously required substantially more staffing. Still in production 9+ years later. - Scaled Matrix Master into Avalara's enterprise upmarket entry point (Kroger, CVS, Rite Aid, Hudson Group). Grew from 30 customers/8 people to 70 customers/4-5 people at $2mm revenue / 60% margin. Onboarded Wipro as offshore capacity partner and designed UPC-matching process that cut manual research on Kroger's 2mm+ UPC file to ~5-10%. - Took over Pune engineering org after Director-level departure. Hired and onboarded new Director (July 2019), raised performance standards, retained 100% of high performers. Team velocity moved from 40% (Jul 2019) to 76% (Dec 2019) with 97% utilization. - Led Content Engineering Action Plan (People-Process-Product) reshaping the 35-person org's structure, introducing automated maintenance processes, and putting ACM deprecation and Content Central expansion (VAT, Excise, Brazil, Communications) on a roadmap with named owners and dates. - Introduced Agile/Scrum, RCAPA (Root Cause and Preventive Action), code/architecture reviews, and split-timezone standups across inherited teams. Moved Content Engineering from largest single RCAPA contributor (17% of company total, Oct 2019) toward zero-RCAPA deliveries.
Hired and developed a team to develop internal tools to streamline an internal team’s workflow and greatly expanded the number of internal contributors to a sellable output. Delivered v1 of the tools July 2014 and began iterating on user feedback and scoping v2. Was laid off in August along with a significant % of Simply staff. Key Technologies: C#, Silverlight, MS SQL