Jerome Thibaud

Work

• 

  Engineering turn-around at Big Health

  • Organizational Transformation
  • VP of Engineering
  • Head of Engineering
  • Systems thinking
  • Technology Strategy
  • Goal Setting
  • Risk management
  • Recruiting

  Big Health's mission is to help millions back to good mental health. They offer a suite of digital therapeutics products that are safe and effective non-drug alternatives for mental health.

  
  

  This 150 people company was stuck in a multi-year attempt to consolidate their old and new products into a new platform. This resulted in trust issues, stalled product roadmap and low morale. 

  
  

  By empowering our remote teams across US and Europe, growing from 20 to 60+ engineers and managers, eliminating organizational inefficiencies, investing in new capabilities, clarifying and instrumenting goals, we were able to evolve into the necessary structure needed to serve the business, complete the replatforming and enable new opportunities. 

  
  

  It has been inspiring to see how much folks can achieve when given clear goals, autonomy and the proper tools.

  https://www.bighealth.com/

  • 
    Python
  • 
    amazon aws
• 

  Turning the "Mobile App" project around

  • Chief Software Architect
  • Technical Product Management
  • Engineering Management
  • Microservices

  Ticketfly was an event ticketing platform providing independent venues, small arenas and festivals such as Burning Man with a fully integrated solution for event management, web presence, marketing and online ticket sales. Ticketfly was acquired by Pandora for $450M in 2015 and later acquired by Eventbrite in 2019.

  
  

  Ticketfly had acquired a 10-person startup with the intent of having them build a version of their former product for our platform. Unfortunately, the team was not integrated well with the larger team and the project quickly went nowhere.

  
  

  I added structure to the team’s process, introducing a Kanban board and rhythm, a fast pace and a strong message of urgency. We built a roadmap with Epics and Stories based on the information they had and my intimate knowledge of the platform. I helped them define their architecture and testing strategy which I documented in a central body of knowledge for the team. I worked with them for a few sprints and later watched them finish their project successfully adding one of the most requested features to the Ticketfly offering.

  
  

  It was a tough couple months but there was great satisfaction and pride when the product shipped. 

  https://www.ticketfly.com

  • 
    Scala
  • 
    Grails
  • 
    amazon aws
• 

  Architecture and Mediation at StubHub

  • Chief Software Architect
  • Vendor Management
  • Mediation
  • Coaching
  • Devops

  Stubhub is a secondary market event ticketing platform offering individuals the ability to re-sell their unused tickets but also allowing large venues and organizations to manage their inventory risk.

  
  

  This 1500-person company had embarked into a large modernization initiative with the goals to move away from their own datacenter and to the Google Cloud Platform and standardize their services under a unified platform. A massive endeavor to port a highly tuned infrastructure and their 250-person engineering team to the cloud. A very siloed organizational structure made it even more challenging.

  
  

  Through diplomacy and relationship building, I was able to align stakeholders, bridge gaps between teams and improve trust. This created more engagement with the initiative and unblocked teams.

   

  On the technology side, we explored the relevant capabilities of GCP, from databases to service orchestration as well as introducing an event driven architecture built on Confluent’s offering of Kafka. The overarching goal being to support team productivity and support the scale of StubHub's activities.

  
  

  Alignment proved key. It was great to witness more collaboration across teams. Everyone pushing in the same direction instead of against each other.

  https://www.stubhub.com

  • 
    Google Cloud Platform
  • 
    Confluent
• 

  Scaling the Big Health Engineering Team

  • Head of Engineering
  • Hiring Strategy
  • Hiring
  • Technical Recruiting
  • Budgeting and Planning
  • Vendor Management

  Big Health's mission is to help millions back to good mental health. They offer a suite of digital therapeutics products that are safe and effective non-drug alternatives for mental health.

  
  

  The company was suffering from a scarcity mentality which was at odds with its product ambitions. 

  In the context of a multi-year replatforming project and supporting existing operations, this team of 12 engineers, their managers and a few QA contractors were making little visible progress in the eyes of management.

  
  

  Making the work of the existing team visible was the first step to convince leadership to increase the budget and adjust compensation. This was followed by a tight collaboration with the people and operation teams to scaffold the recruiting and onboarding process, build the pipeline and overcome an unfavorable market at the time.

  My team grew to 60 engineers and contractors, and 7 managers, with a spike of 20 hires over a period of 7 months with above market retention over 2 years. This new capacity allowed for sustained progress across all work initiatives.

  
  

  It was very validating to see the throughput increase across all teams once we had crossed the required capacity threshold and had built some slack in the system.

  https://www.bighealth.com

  • 
    Python
  • 
    amazon aws
  • 
    Lever
• 

  Scaling Ticketfly for ever bigger live Events

  • Chief Software Architect
  • Full-Stack Engineer
  • Scalable Web Applications
  • Scalability
  • Microservices

  Ticketfly was an event ticketing platform providing independent venues, small arenas and festivals such as Burning Man with a fully integrated solution for event management, web presence, marketing and online ticket sales. Ticketfly was acquired by Pandora for $450M in 2015 and later acquired by Eventbrite in 2019.

  
  

  Ticketfly’s client base grew fast and the business was eager to add bigger and bigger venues and festivals to its client base. Online ticketing is a bit like setting yourself up for a DDOS attack, everyone will come when the tickets go on sale at the advertised time. Burning Man was amongst the most demanding with 20,000 tickets and 150,000 visitors for the main on-sale alone.

  
  

  As engineer number 6, owner of the inventory and payment systems, I had to quickly assess the existing services which were failing repeatedly and re-architect them to handle the ever increasing load, going deep into the framework and technologies we used. I ended up contributing to most of the platform (frontend, backend, infrastructure) and an aspect that differentiated me from my colleagues is that I could positively influence the process, organization as well as the product.

  
  

  The constant learning and the realization of a vision into technology is why I am in this business.

  
  

  https://www.ticketfly.com

  • 
    amazon aws
  • 
    Grails
  • 
    Scala
  • 
    Terraform
• 

  Integrating Ticketing Platforms after an Acquisition

  • Full-Stack Engineer
  • Technology Strategy
  • Chief Architect
  • Devops

  Eventbrite is an event ticketing platform offering individuals and venues with an integrated solution to manage their live events, market and sell their tickets online.

  
  

  Eventbrite acquired Ticketfly in 2019. In that context, key capabilities of the Ticketfly platform had to be integrated into the Eventbrite platform and clients migrated.

  
  

  I was Ticketfly’s Chief Architect at the time of the acquisition. My contribution at the organizational level was to offer a model for structuring the cross-functional teams based on Domain Driven Design. The benefit being low coupling between the teams to allow for more independent operations, resilience and an org more easy to scale. 

  
  

  At the technical level, I trained the Eventbrite teams on the Ticketfly architecture and participated in porting Ticketfly’s “enterprise grade” authorization system to the Eventbrite platform. I also helped define scenarios to handle migration of users and data between the systems. This allowed the business to capture most of Ticketfly’s client base and corresponding revenue before the ramping down of the platform 3 years later.

  
  

  On the Ticketfly side, myself and a few others managed operations, applications maintenance and AWS infrastructure. This enabled continuous operations for the clients remaining on the platform, supporting their businesses and protecting Ticketfly and Eventbrite’s reputations.

  
  

  It is sad to witness the end of the great enterprise. But I am happy that it was ultimately a story full of successes both on the tech and business sides.

  https://www.eventbrite.com

  • 
    amazon aws
  • 
    Python
  • 
    Scala
  • 
    Grails
  • 
    New Relic
  • 
    SumoLogic