Tell us about your career journey.
I graduated from SUNY Stony Brook with a BS in Mathematics. In my final year of studies, I started to form an interest in software development and took some introductory courses. Ultimately, post graduation, I was recruited into my first job as a Webmaster at a fast growing startup called The Knot (theknot.com). As a webmaster, which is not a common position at web companies anymore, I was part developer, part devops, part site administrator, part QA, and part anything else that was needed to move the product forward…typical startup stuff! I really took a liking to the developer part of my job and ultimately transitioned to the developer/software engineering team where I spent a good portion of my time building, rebuilding and optimizing our code to handle the massive growth we were seeing year over year.
I spent 13 years at The Knot (later becoming known as XO Group and now The Knot Worldwide), watching them IPO (then delist when the dotcom bubble burst and subsequently relist again on NYSE), become a multi-brand online media company, evolve into a global company with operations overseas (Australia, China), and provide me opportunities to grow through the ranks into engineering management and ultimately senior technology leadership.
From XO Group, I was recruited into a CTO role at Spafinder Wellness where I spent 4 years rebuilding their tech stack, scaling their team, and evolving their product centered around digital payments at a time where digital payments were really taking off. I left Spafinder Wellness to spend 4 years at LaCalle Group, managing technology for their portfolio of brands, including Continued.com and Simucase.com, centered around digital learning technologies for professionals and aspiring professionals.
For the past year and a half, I have been the CTO at Hired (formerly Vettery), where I oversaw the acquisition and merger of Hired and am now focused on scaling out the Hired platforms to continue to disrupt the hiring process, connecting ambitious talent to top teams. One consistent theme I have seen across my career in Technology Leadership, is how challenging and time consuming hiring great talent is. Having an opportunity to contribute to solving this challenge is ultimately what drew me to Hired.
What trends do you see emerging within the Software Engineering landscape?
CI/CD, JavaScript technologies (ie. ReactJS, AngularJS) and containerization (ie. Kubernetes, Docker) continue to grow in adoption and remain hot technologies. Machine Learning (ML) is seeing heavy adoption and investment across many companies and industries, as it finds increased usage in product solutions (such as Hired’s Marketplace) and in optimizing business operations. Security is an area that Engineers, and Technology groups in general, are having to become increasingly aware of and proactive towards, as the threats companies face continue to grow and become more complex, aided by the shift to distributed work and increased investment in cloud technologies. And, lastly, one of the newer hot trends is of course Blockchain technology, which is seeing adoption in medical records solutions, secure online voting, and other spaces outside of cryptocurrency (NFTs and DeFi).
How do you see Engineering teams evolving in the future?
Software engineering tools, languages, platforms, and practices are continually evolving and have been as far back as I’ve been involved with them, and certainly prior to that. A big shift we are seeing as a result of the Covid-19 Pandemic, and that I believe is here to stay, is a shift to more distributed engineering teams. This is not a new concept, by any means, but something that many organizations that were reluctant to embark on are now more openly adopting. The evolution of technology up to this point has facilitated it (ie. Slack, CI/CD, cloud computing etc), the Pandemic opened the door for it, and the increasing shortage of engineering talent in the world is going to keep it going.
Any advice for tech candidates who are currently searching for a new role?
Well, the obvious is to get your profile on Hired updated! But other than that, keep learning and keep engaging with new technologies to stay as relevant as possible in the marketplace. Join developer communities. Contribute to open-source projects when you can. Technology is changing faster and faster, and you need to keep up with that pace.
Interested in joining the Hired Engineering team? Click here to view our open roles!
Source: Talent Acquisition - hired.com
