Current
#8
Lead → Staff → Technical Lead Manager
ActiveCampaign LLC
Jul2023 - Current
2.25 yrs
Leadership Team Management Backlog Management Prioritization Resource Allocation Quarterly Planning Process Optimization Change Management Apache Kafka Apache Druid Data Infrastructure System Design Incident Management React Golang
Technical Lead Manager (Aug 2024 – Present)
Stepped into a dual leadership role across Data Operations and Data Engineering teams in the absence of an Engineering Manager. Heavy focus on people management, process, and organizational effectiveness:
- Backlog & Prioritization: Owning backlog management and prioritization for two teams, ensuring alignment with business goals while managing competing demands from stakeholders
- Resource Allocation: Balancing engineer capacity across operational support, project work, and technical debt—making tradeoff decisions daily
- Quarterly Planning: Collaborating with Director on H1 2026 planning, defining team OKRs, and scoping multi-quarter initiatives
- Process Optimization: Introducing lightweight process improvements to reduce friction—refining standup formats, improving ticket hygiene, and establishing clearer escalation paths
- Change Management: Navigating organizational uncertainty during the EM gap, maintaining team morale and productivity through transparent communication
- Team Stabilization: Providing reliability across two teams—mentoring engineers, running 1:1s, and ensuring consistent delivery
- Druid Initiative Lead: Driving the adoption and deployment of Apache Druid across the company, leading a team of ~10 engineers. Successfully launched and delivered; selected to demo at Company All-Hands alongside the CEO
- Data Strategy Modernization: Partnering with the CTO and Distinguished Engineer to architect the next-generation hybrid data storage layer—migrating from legacy HTAP to Apache Iceberg + Kafka lakehouse pattern
Staff Engineer (Feb 2024 – Aug 2024)
Transitioned from team lead to staff-level IC work, focusing on cross-team technical initiatives:
- Architecture Ownership: Managed the organization’s Apache Druid adoption, scaling to 9 production instances supporting analytics for a $165M+ ARR customer base
- Geo-Redundant Pipeline: Designed and delivered a geo-redundant WhatsApp webhook ingestion pipeline—incident-free in production for 6+ months
- Cross-Functional Coordination: Led a working group of Java engineers to address systemic performance bottlenecks, delegating remediation tasks via incident follow-up protocols
Lead Engineer, Tracking Team (Jul 2023 – Feb 2024)
Led the Tracking/Ingestion team responsible for high-volume event capture (clicks, opens, site visits, WhatsApp message reception):
- Team Turnaround: Rebuilt trust with the wider organization by stabilizing the platform from 1-2 incidents/month to zero incidents in production
- Mentorship: Developed a mixed-seniority team (3 Senior, 2 Junior), improving engineering standards and delivery reliability
- Internal Tooling: Built administration tools using React, Vite, and Svelte to improve visibility into backend data operations for support teams