Skip to profile

Baylee F.

VPE at Hinge: scaled eng team to 70 and app to millions

I’ve been consulting and building tech products for 14 years. I was the VP of Engineering at Hinge and spent six years there, building the team and scaling the app from zero users to millions. Before that, I was a Technical Lead at Yeti (a tech consultancy) where I built two apps featured as Best New App on the App Store, and in the distant past I was a Senior Consultant at Booz & Company doing strategy consulting.

Problems I can help with

Strategy

  • Capabilities and trade-offs. Evaluating what is possible and what trade-offs (quality, speed, cost, etc.) are required.
  • Achieving scale. Recommending service architecture and data architecture that will allow your company to scale without getting bogged down in over-engineering.
  • Tech debt and refactoring. Understanding the true cost of technical debt and planning right-sized refactors.

Team and culture

  • Hiring. Identifying necessary skills for new hires. Implementing a proven hiring process, including conducting interviews and training existing team members on how to hire.
  • Organizational design. Structuring your team for success at different sizes depending on company goals.
  • Engineering levels and evaluation matrix. Formalizing levels that will scale with your company.
  • Compensation. Creating and communicating fair, industry-benchmarked compensation that solves for new hires, existing employees, and tricky equity situations.
  • Leveling up technical leaders. Coaching and mentoring existing leaders who are talented but inexperienced.

Planning, delivery, and quality

  • Goal-setting. Identifying KPIs and setting ambitious, realistic goals that marry company value with individual desires and development.
  • Roadmapping and planning. Setting up quarterly and annual planning processes that have buy-in and utility.
  • Quality and reliability. Reducing downtime and engineer burnout by improving incident management and diagnosing reliability problems.
  • Process and communication. Improving collaboration and communication between in-company stakeholders and with customers.
Hire Baylee
Baylee F.

Work

Experience

Sep 2016 — Oct 2022
Hinge

Hinge

VP of Engineering

The dating app designed to be deleted

  • Led mobile, backend, platform, and QA for all product development (Growth, Monetization, Core Experience, Recommendations, Bad Actors, Internal Tools)
  • Led company-wide reorg from horizontal/functional alignment to vertical, cross-functional teams
  • Increased deployment velocity 5x
Sep 2013 — Jun 2016
Yeti

Yeti

Technical Lead

App development consultancy

  • Led backend development for two apps featured on App Store as "Best New App" (Gotta Go and Tape)
Oct 2010 — Apr 2013

Booz & Co. (now Strategy& at PWC)

Senior Consultant

Management and strategy consulting

  • Financial modeling, market research, C-level presentations