Sean Massa's Resume / CV

https://massalabs.com/resume-cv
sean@massalabs.com
Chicago area, IL

Experience

Engineering Manager / Tech Lead

Organizational Development: Was a driving force (with a small group) that worked to define, roll out, and iterate the engineering career ladder. Drew on my personal collection of ~40 career ladders as well as personal experience creating multiple ladders in the past. Integrated company values, provided real examples, ran tests, and solicited feedback.

Team Building and People Leadership: Set the standard for continuous performance review process and hiring effectively. Provided clear understanding of the performance criteria, the weights behind them, and strategic advice on tackling each one. Planned for "what does a successful review cycle look like?" with those that reported to me. Consistently delivered detailed performance reviews, often called "the most useful review I've ever received".

Cross-team, Cross-functional Problem Solving: Drove, designed, collaborated, and executed multiple cross-team, cross-functional initiatives to address significant issues affecting the platform. This often came in the form of research, writing an RFC, getting agreement, and coordinating the work across teams.

• Git Provider Webhook Resilience: Events would be slow to deliver or missing entire from third-party git providers. In order to make the system resilient and users accommodated, wrote an RFC that described the specific issues (with examples), and a set of solution options. Lead the discussion around choosing one or more.
• Universal Promote: The platform generally takes Source Code into a Build that produces a Deployment that Aliases all configured Domains. It held a core assumption that a Deployment was Aliased right away, but that needed to change to allow more use cases. Wrote a large RFC that laid out the use cases, problems that needed to be solved, and how to get there. Coordinated across teams to get the work done.
• Deployment Reliability: The Build process had many contributors across teams, but had to be carefully monitored during rollouts to ensure reliable service. To ensure reliable rollout and quick recoveries, instituted a cross-team training and approval process that restricted deployments to only trained people.

Team and Technical Leadership: Worked with dozens of people across the company to get input and feedback on a long-term direction, developed a detailed technical and organizational plan, synthesized it into key points for presenting to leadership, then reoriented planning (not just on my team) to this north star. Wrote a detailed Vision document that made this direction clear with a guide for how to roadmap in that direction. This guide was structured to provide incremental value, allowing for changes in priorities to not waste time.

Made Hard Calls for Quality: Declared a "Code Yellow" for my team to stop product work to focus on a new test matrix that tests deployments across the dimensions: node version, framework version, and package manager. This allowed the company to deploy with confidence.

Hands-on Execution: Executed as an individual contributor in addition to other responsibilities. Moved projects forward, made improvements to CI/CD, and improved IDE support.

Tech Lead

I was the CTO of FlashRecruit, which was acquired by Talent Inc.

At Talent Inc., I'm working on integrated the FlashRecruit tech (job ingestion, chat system, recruiter dashboard, and potentially more) into the Talent Inc. system.

Contractor for Software and Organizational Development

I offered the following services on a contract basis.

Software Development:

• Node.js, Ember.js, Ruby on Rails
• Web Apps, Web Sites, Job and Scheduler Systems, Services

Organizational Development:

• Roles and Responsibilities
• Developing Interview and Recruiting Systems

Project Management:

• Project Planning
• Project Process Development and Implementation

Clients are confidential.

Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

Recruiting: Defined roles, sourced candidates, developed interview process, interviewed candidates, hired, and let people go as needed. See process details.

Project Management: Defined project management process for the team. Lead most projects. Tracked progress. Broke tasks down to the smallest, deployable, valuable thing. Sponsored others in leading projects.

Software Development: Implemented many systems, such as scheduled tasks, delayed jobs, job-candidate matching, large-scale emailing across multiple email campaigns, chat, apply, job ingestion, candidate ingestion, click tracking, event management, and reporting.

Leadership: Owned technical vision. Aligned with business vision. Grew and down-scaled the team as necessary, even though it was painful.

Tech Lead / Senior Software Engineer

Architecture Guild: Helped form and contribute to a group of people from across the organization to standardize our architectural decisions. The initial work was focused on documenting what we had. Then we started working towards shifting some of our existing decisions to more consistent tools that matched current and desired skill sets, hiring markets, and optimal use cases.

Roles and Responsibilities: Drove an effort to document current roles and their responsibilities as well as career development levels and guidance.

Community Engagement: Facilitated the Chicago Ember.js meetup events in the office. Helped coordinate sending 7 people to EmberConf and share our experiences when come back. Ran Lunch & Learn events where we watched instructional videos (like an EmberMap series) and discussed them in the context of our own work.

Tech Lead / Senior Software Engineer

Working on an Ember-based internal framework team with a focus on enabling other teams to build accessible web applications. This team ships an Ember addon that's a collection of web accessible Ember components.

Accessibility: Built, tested, and fixed web accessible components that conform to the legal requirements and web standards. Worked with screen readers such as NVDA to ensure a good screen reading experience.

Community Building: Working to improve communication to client teams about the status of their defects, what we're working on, what we plan to work on, and what we've done. Building a community mindset around the core addon that emulates large open source projects, such as Ember itself.

Team Processes: Improving team development processes by relying on a strong Retrospective process to drive the rest of the change the team wants to do. Changes are very problem focused--what's the real issue we're trying to solve, what possible options are there to solve that problem, what are the pros/cons of each, and after we've chosen one, how do we know if it was successful.

Tech Lead / Senior Software Engineer

Worked to standardize project processes, code quality standards, and the performance review process.

Promoted learning and career development in the dev team through pairing, code review, and other feedback.

Developed a web scraping system in Node.js and a standardized cache layer using rails-api.

Worked on the primary API (rails), brand dashboard (rails), and creator dashboard (ember). Refactored related code as I went along to balance systemic improvements with shipping features.

Lead major effort (as tech lead and project manager) to decouple the existing system from one social network in order to generalize it across an arbitrary number of them.

Software Engineer

UI Engineering: formed and lead the UI Engineering team responsible for standardizing web application development; created a standard ember-cli blueprint for app development; paired with teams to ramp them up on Ember and help with initial Ember versions of their app.

Engineering Voice: formed and lead a group of engineers who wanted to participate and own our own Engineering voice; this included group ownership and operation of the Groupon Engineering Blog, @GrouponEng, Conference Sponsorships, Meetup Organization, Public Speaking, and Open Source.

Community: Assumed ownership of Geekfest; helped it grow to an average of 80 attendees every single week; worked on and released an Anti-harassment Policy for our public events.

Testium: wrote a new test library called Testium for sync tests written in Node.js: based on mocha, selenium, and custom sync node WebDriver bindings; used by 40+ internal teams on 75+ projects.

Splitting the Monolith: worked on core team that built out a Node.js infrastructure to support all product teams moving off of Ruby on Rails; 40+ teams with 75+ applications.

Design Sprints: lead several Design Sprints in an effort to put intentional design into applications that were not afforded a designer.

Open Source: promoted use of, contribution to, and release of open source projects; reviewed internal projects for open sourcing; helped build groupon.github.io to showcase our commitment to open source.

Promoting Personal Growth: developed and implemented many different processes that promoted and improved personal growth of engineers: a buddy program, mentoring other engineers, codeschool.com access, safari books online access.

Training: created and ran internal training courses across offices on various topics: coffeescript, promises/streams, javascript, node.js, ember.js.

Recruiting: performed tech, pair, and phone screen interviews for many candidates; worked with tech recruiting to improve processes.

Software Engineer

Internal Development

• Maintain internal tools used to enhance the development, management, and sales processes
• Develop new plugins for Microsoft Dynamics CRM
• Improve development practices by introducing unit testing and better source control

Client Development

• Championed the removal of unnecessary code in core components
• Rewrote an import process to use SQL directly into the CRM tables instead of the CRM API because the API was way too slow!
• Optimized SQL queries to operate on 6 million records in a reasonable amount of time and disk space.

Contractor for Software Development

I created a platform that streams data from network sockets on remote machines, compiles the data into a data structure, and provides visualizations of that data (with HighCharts) to a web browser in real time (over socket.io).

The data was stock information sent back from high-frequency trading systems at stock exchanges.

Support Engineer

Responsibilities:

• Writing SQL scripts to correct data
• Debugging SQL Stored Procedures and fixing them
• Debugging Enterprise-level ASP.NET Applications and fixing them
• Developing Tools to automate common tasks
• Interviewing candidates for peer positions

Web Software Engineer

Responsibilities:

• Designing, Developing, Testing, and Maintaining ASP.NET applications for internal use
• Maintaining legacy applications written in Classic ASP and .NET 1.1

Web Software Engineer

Responsibilities:

• Maintenance of existing code base
• Wrote web pages in VB.NET and ASP .NET against a DB2 back-end
• Utilized and modified custom Web Services to access data
• Used AJAX Controls to enhance web forms and page postback handling

Typesetter

Part-time during high school and college; full-time during summers.

Responsibilities:

• Typeset marked-up pages
• Proofread typeset pages
• Wrote scripts to structure large quantities of data
• Setup book projects using Adobe FrameMaker and Quark eXpress

Software Development Internship

Responsibilities:

• Wrote web pages in C#.NET and ASP.NET against a SQL Server back-end
• Created a custom control that connected to a GMail account in order to fetch specialized news reports via Google Alerts
• Created and integrated custom pages into the Content Management System

Education

B.S. Computer Science