The long version,
chapter by chapter.

Ran engineering for UKG’s Onboarding and Recruiting solutions: nine senior engineers and a manager reporting to me, co-managing two junior managers, in an organization of 41 onshore plus 11 offshore. The job was hiring, developing, and keeping high performers, and I mentored three people into leadership positions in a single year.

The big technical lift: moving the platform from private cloud to public cloud on GCP, while onboarding and directing contractor teams in India to keep feature delivery going through the migration.

Two teams, a team lead, and 25 people. I organized and negotiated roadmaps in partnership with three product managers and a co-manager, and successfully merged two development teams into one. Trained team leads beyond my own teams, and ran a small three-engineer group exploring next-evolution products.

This is where I got serious about flow: cycle reviews, team metrics, throughput, and treating risk as something you estimate and communicate early instead of discovering late.

Led the Core HR development team, 15 engineers, building and enhancing the UltiPro Core solution. Tight deadlines in a very broad domain: keeping up with customer demand while building compliance features for PPACA, the Affordable Care Act. Also interviewed for the company’s internship program, assessing technical ability and fit, which felt like closing a loop that started when I was the one being interviewed.

Four years designing and building web pages and web frameworks for UltiPro: feature design, code, automated tests, and PR review, mostly in C# and ASP.NET with the JavaScript of the era. The years where speed and judgment got trained. I also onboarded a steady stream of engineers and interns, which turned out to be the first hint of where the career was heading.

Hired full time off the back of the internship. Quality as an engineering discipline: creating, reviewing, and documenting test cases with real test methodologies, then dragging the tooling forward: test cases out of Excel and into SpiraTest, automation suites off Fitnesse and into CI with Jenkins, plus internal automation tools I built and enhanced. Breaking software methodically before users could taught me more about how software actually fails than anything since.

My first job in software, fresh out of school. Before this I was a teller at Washington Mutual, the bank that later became Chase, so walking into Ultimate Software was walking into a different world.

I was put on Employee Performance Management, a product Ultimate had bought off the shelf with its entire engineering team abroad in the UK, and it had no automated tests at all. My job was testing pages and functionality by hand. As I learned the discipline, I built us a suite of automated tests that verified the core functionality on its own. About six months in, they hired me full time.