Director of Software Engineering

Director of Software Engineering — Vanguard Tech Systems

Seattle, WA | March 2020 – Present

• Direct 4 software engineering squads totaling 36 developers to build cloud-native SaaS systems, increasing annual system availability from 99.9% to 99.99% through enhanced SRE practices.
• Manage a $4.8M annual department budget, optimizing hosting assets on AWS and Azure to reduce operational expenses by 24% ($1.1M saved) while supporting a 40% growth in customer transactions.
• Led the multi-year migration of legacy payment clusters to a modern Docker and Kubernetes microservices setup, decreasing average API response latency by 45% (from 420ms to 230ms).
• Standardized CI/CD automation pipelines and integration testing suites, increasing deployment cycles by 55% and reducing post-deployment incident tickets by 32% across all products.

Software Engineering Manager — Peak Platform Labs

Seattle, WA | June 2014 – February 2020

• Supervised 2 Agile engineering teams of 16 developers to deliver a new data ingestion platform 20 days ahead of schedule, using Jira and Git metrics to track sprint velocity and milestones.
• Collaborated with Product Management to draft Scope of Work (SOW) documents, reducing feature creep by 30% and saving approximately 90 engineering hours per 2-week sprint cycle.
• Redesigned relational SQL database schemas and optimized indexing strategies for high-throughput tables, improving query times by 38% and lowering CPU utilization spikes by 45% during peak load.
• Mentored 6 junior and mid-level developers, facilitating promotions to senior roles for 3 team members and maintaining a 94% retention rate within the engineering department over 5 years.

Software engineering leadership, Agile and Scrum methodologies, Software architecture design, Microservices, Cloud infrastructure management (AWS/Azure), DevOps and CI/CD pipelines, Budget management and optimization, Vendor and SLA negotiation, Site reliability engineering (SRE), Cross-functional coordination, Database optimization, Team mentoring, Git, Docker, Kubernetes, Jira, Confluence

Legacy Monolith Modernization

Role: Technical Director

Tools: Java, Spring Boot, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, Jira

Led the 14-month modernization of a core transaction engine to microservices, completing the project 4 weeks early and reducing query latency by 45% for 8M customers.

Cloud Cost Optimization Initiative

Role: Director of Software Engineering

Tools: AWS Cost Explorer, Terraform, Kubernetes, Slack, Confluence

Designed and implemented automated cloud scaling policies and cleanup scripts, reducing quarterly infrastructure costs by 24% while supporting 12M monthly users.

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional (2020)
• Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) (2015)
• Project Management Professional (PMP) (2021)

• Languages: English (Native), Spanish (Conversational)
• Professional Memberships: IEEE Computer Society member since 2015
• Availability: 4 weeks notice