Leadership Evidence

This is not a leadership philosophy statement. These are things I’ve done, with enough context to evaluate the judgment behind them.

Scaling Engineering Teams

At Stitch Fix (2018–2021), I helped scale the technology organization from 20 to 200+ engineers as an Engineering Manager. This included:

• Hiring across experience levels while maintaining bar consistency
• Designing team structures that could absorb rapid growth without losing velocity
• Influencing org design decisions at Director scope, including team boundaries and reporting structures

At ezCater (2022–2025), I managed a team of 7 across two teams as Senior Engineering Manager, including Staff Engineers and Engineering Managers. The scope was narrower but the complexity was different: platform teams serving the entire engineering organization with high reliability expectations.

Hiring Judgment

I’ve made hiring decisions across the full seniority spectrum. My approach:

• Evaluate for judgment and learning trajectory, not just current skill match
• Bias toward candidates who can articulate tradeoffs, not just solutions
• Treat the interview as a technical conversation, not a performance

Grew and promoted eleven remote engineers at Stitch Fix, several receiving multiple promotions through structured coaching.

Remote Leadership

I’ve led distributed teams since before remote work was normalized.

• All eleven engineers I grew and promoted at Stitch Fix were remote
• I led remote-first teams at ezCater across multiple time zones
• My approach: high trust, clear expectations, asynchronous-first communication, and minimal meetings that are genuinely useful

Remote leadership is not a special skill — it’s leadership without the crutch of physical proximity. The fundamentals (clear goals, visible accountability, fast feedback) matter more, not less.

Operational Accountability

I treat operations as a first-class leadership responsibility, not a tax on product delivery.

• Built postmortem accountability automation at ezCater (see Incident Accountability artifact)
• Established on-call and incident response practices for platform teams
• Framed reliability investment as protecting existing product value, not competing with new feature development

Technical Proximity as a Manager

Builder/manager is uncommon at the senior level. Most engineering leaders choose one or the other. I’ve stayed hands-on through every management role — not as a hobby, but because technical proximity is what makes the leadership credible.

• Created the React natural-language analytics prototype at ezCater through conversations with Claude.ai — a demonstration artifact visualizing the future of our event metadata work (see Event Metadata artifact)
• Led redesign of the stylist workflow at Stitch Fix around algorithm-generated picks — a project requiring deep understanding of both the product and the data science platform
• During my sabbatical, maintained 321 GitHub contributions across 100+ repositories — demonstrating that technical currency is a practice, not a credential

This is what a senior engineering manager’s GitHub profile looks like when they stay close to the work. View profile →

Technical proximity means I can evaluate architectural decisions, review code meaningfully, and have credible technical conversations with Staff Engineers and Principal Engineers. I don’t manage from a distance.