Bill Eisenhauer
Austin, TX · bill@billeisenhauer.com · (972) 951-3759 · github.com/billeisenhauer · linkedin.com/in/billeisenhauer · portfolio.billeisenhauer.com
Summary
Engineering leader who never stopped building. Four decades in software have given me pattern recognition across major developer-platform shifts: mainframe, web, Rails/SaaS, mobile, data-science-in-product, and now AI-assisted engineering. Recently led platform and product teams at Stitch Fix (through IPO) and ezCater while staying close to architecture and code. Used a sabbatical to return to full-time building with AI-assisted development: 321 contributions across 100+ repositories, each starting from a real problem.
Core Strengths
- Builder/manager hybrid — hands-on through every leadership role
- AI-assisted development adoption, tooling strategy, and engineering productivity measurement
- Platform architecture and developer experience (event systems, metadata, data science integration)
- Scaling engineering organizations from 20 to 200+ engineers, fully remote
- Operational accountability — reliability, incident culture, and systems that enforce follow-through
Selected Experience
- 321 GitHub contributions across 100+ repositories in the past year
- Built production SaaS applications, an MCP server with 26 tools, cross-platform publishing pipelines, and AI agent frameworks
- Codified a repeatable AI-assisted development workflow: plan → implement (TDD) → review → demo → ship
- Developed judgment about where AI accelerates, where it misleads, and where human oversight remains critical
- Owned the event and messaging platform serving the entire engineering organization — 7 reports including Staff Engineers and Engineering Managers
- Led migration from legacy event tracking to RudderStack — stood up the instance, managed the vendor relationship, and architected the transition from third-party cookies to Conversion APIs (~$3M projected annual savings)
- Progressed an IaC-based metadata layer for event tracking with the staff engineer, moving discoverability from Slack debugging to a structured registry
- Diagnosed a persistent incident problem as cultural, proved it with data, and built automation to enforce postmortem accountability over real pushback
- Created a natural-language event analytics prototype through Claude.ai conversations — visualizing the future of event data before the organization was asking for it
- Helped scale the technology organization from 20 to 200+ engineers; influenced org design at Director scope
- Grew and promoted eleven remote engineers, several receiving multiple promotions through structured coaching
- Led redesign of the stylist workflow around algorithm-generated picks, reducing time-per-Fix and improving unit economics
- Conducted 100+ technical and cultural interviews, emphasizing product mindset and growth potential over credential matching
- Created the Smart Fix Assignment Service — a cross-platform, real-time integration with the data science platform that became the template for embedding algorithmic intelligence into products
- Established a data science plugin point that let algorithms iterate with minimal engineering friction, contributing to historic keep rate and AOV improvements leading into the 2017 IPO
- Ground-floor engineering in a product-focused, data-driven environment that hired engineers for product taste
Earlier Career
Rebuilt team and culture after acquisition-driven attrition. Progressed from architect to development manager. Directly led development of a feature on a compressed timeline to preserve $1MM in revenue. Designed a Ruby-based data export application for 700+ tables that became a revenue-generating add-on.
Full-stack Ruby on Rails backend and JavaScript frontend for TripCase mobile travel app. Built and maintained the web services API consumed by iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android clients. Led the Android client rewrite using Backbone.js and PhoneGap — one of the first substantive HTML5 apps released on a mobile device. TripCase ran until April 2025; code I wrote in 2010 was still in production 13 years after I left.
First engineer. Inherited an outsourced application and grew the team from one developer to three practicing Agile, delivering v2 of the product. Full responsibility for the SaaS platform (Ruby on Rails / MySQL).
Independent consulting including a 10-month telecommuting contract with Google building RESTful web services and infrastructure tooling in Ruby on Rails with TDD. Additional client work for GetARoom (Hotels.com founders), Stylepath, and agency projects.
Five years architecting Java-based systems. Led the first Spring Framework deployment in the company — a federation of 20+ web applications replacing legacy architecture. Deployed Nokia’s first Ruby on Rails application. Designed the consumer database service eliminating customer data fragmentation across the corporation.
Prior: marchFIRST, FirstPlus Financial, Ernst & Young (January 1994–July 1998), and Electronic Data Systems (February 1986–January 1994). At EDS, designed and developed the first red-light camera violation detection system in the United States, deployed in New York City and profiled on ABC PrimeTime Live.
Co-authored GeoKit, an open-source Ruby on Rails geocoding library.
Education
Texas A&M University — B.S. Computer Science, Minor in Accounting, 1986