I spent 15 years at Google as IC, TLM, manager and manager-of-managers, leading teams of 3 to 45 engineers in both search and internal developer tools divisions, and driving infrastructure improvements that significantly improved latency, resource use, reliability and security of critical Google systems. I've also been VP of Engineering at a Series A startup where I grew a team of engineers and data scientists to solve gnarly climate-tech analysis and forecasting problems. And for the past several years, I've been an independent coach/consultant to startup CTOs, co-founders, and other technical leaders, helping them work through both team dynamics and technical design challenges.
Distillation of my experience and thoughts on one of the most difficult management problems: how to handle low performers. See also this, on the team dynamics of difficult conversations: https://summerstir.com/blog/tips-for-tough-conversations
Consulting with engineering and technical leaders on team building, optimizing team collaboration, project management, people management, and systems design.
Helped several YC funded startup co-founders grow their teams and expand their product deployments while maintaining high morale and product quality.
Nov 2021 — Aug 2022
Camus Energy
VP of Engineering
Camus provides power utility companies with software that helps them decarbonize their grids faster while improving reliability and saving money.
Grew the engineering team from 9 to 17 over the course of nine months, including major senior hires of veterans from companies such as Google and Facebook
Coached technical leads on effective planning and execution, resulting in improved estimation, feature release timing, and productivity
Jul 2005 — Mar 2020
Google
Senior Staff Software Engineer
Google organizes the world's information to make it universally accessible and useful.
Led the engineering team for Custom Search Engine, which launched a customizable version of search for website owners and grew it to >$100M annual revenue
Launched several mobile search UI affordances for faster search on mobile devices
Conceived and launched a series of search latency and resource efficiency improvements, making average search time hundreds of ms faster and reducing machine resource usage per search by double-digit percentages
Grew an internal developer tools team from 5 to 45 engineers, building frameworks and tools for Google's own mobile app developers on Android and iOS
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Learn what a forward deployed engineer does, how the role differs from traditional software engineering, and why hire one to support enterprise customers.
