Justin Weiss

Aug. 2007–Sep. 2012 Developer / Senior Developer Avvo, Inc. Seattle, WA

Sep. 2012–Oct. 2015 Dev Manager Avvo, Inc. Seattle, WA

Oct. 2015–Jan. 2017 Director of Engineering, R&D Avvo, Inc. Seattle, WA

Jan. 2017–Sep. 2017 Software Architect

• Technical and people leader through every stage in Avvo's growth, from 19 people to a multi-hundred-million-dollar exit.
• Led product architecture and technical strategy for R&D, Data Engineering, and Infrastructure.
• Reviewed and provided guidance on all major technical initiatives.
• Prototyped, evaluated, and integrated new technologies.
• Guided Avvo.com’s move from a monolithic Rails app to a Microservice Architecture using Docker, improving dev team productivity, ability to scale organizationally, and unlocking new product opportunities.
• Represented Avvo Development at senior leadership meetings and events outside of the company.
• Led the web development team of 30+ engineers to deliver features on Avvo.com, Avvo Legal Services, and internal sales and development tools.
• Set overall technical strategy, hiring strategy, dev team organizational structure, and worked with company leadership to set product strategy.
• Responsible for development team productivity across seven cross-functional groups.
• Worked closely with other department leaders to coordinate strategy, work, schedules, and staffing.
• Worked closely with our Agile Coach to improve team health, happiness, and performance.
• Responsible for the development team budget of over $3.5m.
• Responsible for defining roles and responsibilities for all development team members.
• Coordinated with the Finance department to provide software capitalization details, saving the company over $600K in taxes, including over $200K in 2016.

• Grew the development team by over 100% over two years, and 300% over four years.
• Kept dev retention of 90% in 2015 and 2016, during a time of massive company growth and change.
• Led the team through two large reorganizations.
• Grew four employees from IC to dev manager.
• Put good, high-potential technical management in place. Frequently received comments from devs that they were working for “the best manager they ever had”.
• Improved hardware provisioning and deployment success rates from 30% to 90%.
• Cut production deployment times in half, from 30 minutes to 15.
• Led the Avvo dev management team as we designed Avvo’s summer internship program, the dev mentorship program, the Avvo Team definition, the Avvo Tech Tenets, and technical strategy and architecture discussion.
• Created Avvo’s dev hiring and onboarding process, leading to developers shipping in their first week, if not first day.
• Oversaw the launch of Avvo Legal Services, an $Xm business in 2016.
• Started a company Hackathon, resulting in the creation of a continuous deployment app, Avvo’s first AppleTV app, a map of service interconnections, and a tool saving hundreds of hours of sales’ time per month.
• Introduced random lunch pairings, leading to many new connections and relationships between different parts of the organization. So successful that it led to an Avvo Accelerator Award nomination.
• Built patterns for communicating between siloed teams, through workshops, cross-team events, and "dev on loan" programs.
• Defined a concrete set of expectations for engineering managers, leading to more engaged management and development teams.
• Launched an initiative to record Avvo’s dev culture and improve decision making, improving the speed at which the team could make decisions.
• Launched the Avvo Engineering Blog.
• Built strong, collaborative relationships between development, product, UX, data engineering, and infrastructure.
• Built or made improvements to nearly every feature on Avvo.com’s main site and internal tools.