Professional Summary

Accomplished technical leader with 19 years of expertise in consulting, enterprise architecture, and software development, consistently delivering scalable, high-performance solutions that meet complex user needs. Adept at driving innovation through platform engineering, developer experience optimization, and agile methodologies, I thrive in shaping efficient systems that empower teams and accelerate project delivery. My proven ability to understand user requirements and translate them into actionable, transformational software solutions ensures successful outcomes for large-scale enterprise projects.

Work Experience

Salesforce / Heroku Chicago, IL (Remote)

Heroku Technical Architect Director, Heroku Professional Services Jan 2025 - Present

Leads cross-functional development teams to deliver strategic, high-visibility projects for Salesforce/Heroku’s enterprise customer portfolio. Spearheaded technical marketing efforts for a Heroku Loyalty architecture, developing comprehensive examplar blueprints and technical strategies. Serves as a key technical liaison between Professional Services and enterprise clients, ensuring alignment between customer requirements and platform capabilities.

Cisco Systems, Inc. Chicago, IL (Remote)

Principal Engineer, CX Engineering Jan 2021 - Nov 2024

Provided technical leadership as a member of Cisco’s Senior Technical Talent (STT) organization, driving high-impact decisions, setting architectural standards, and aligning solutions with business goals. Mentored engineers, guiding them through complex challenges and supporting long-term career growth. Collaborated with cross-functional teams, including product managers, engineers, and architects, to ensure technical solutions aligned with business goals. Tackled complex problems, introduced innovative tools and methods, and strategically planned for long-term scalability and system evolution. Actively contributed code to critical areas to set a high standard for quality and influence technical culture across teams, driving the engineering organization’s long-term success.

Key Accomplishments

• Led the migration of critical CX Cloud components to a next-generation Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) and CI/CD (CircleCI) platform, improving deployment efficiency and cloud infrastructure scalability by developing custom, reusable Terraform modules for containerized deployments.
• Responsible for CX Engineering’s CI/CD Pipelines, successfully migrated Terraform state within a critical 2-week deadline.
• Chaired an architecture review board to foster a culture of feedback on technical decisions, aiming to enhance technical alignment across engineering teams through a Request for Comments (RFC) and Architecture Decision Record (ADR) process.
• Led the architecture design for Cisco’s “Hardware as a Service” offering, creating a REST and Kafka Stream-based interface for data exchange. Collaborated with IT and engineering teams to ensure seamless integration, meeting critical business requirements with urgency.
• Pioneered the development of an on-prem Application Platform to standardize and automate the building, deployment, and operation of microservices, overcoming existing fragmentation and enhancing Developer Experience.

Salesforce / Heroku Chicago, IL (Remote)

Director, Customer Solution Architect, Heroku Nov 2018 - Jan 2021

Served as the primary technical liaison for 10 of Heroku’s largest enterprise clients. Leveraged expertise in diagnosing and resolving technical issues to navigate critical challenges, such as performance degradation from large data transfers and outages due to improper architectures.

Key Accomplishments

• Contributed to Heroku Support’s Leadership team by shaping proactive customer engagement strategies, including designing and leading the development of tools to identify at-risk customers and deliver preemptive support, effectively mitigating the risk of production-down incidents.
• Established efficient incident and escalation protocols, reducing resolution times during major outages.

Director, Customer Success Group, Lightning Cloud Practice, Salesforce Feb 2018 - Nov 2018

Collaborated with CXO-level executives from Salesforce’s top 25 accounts, delivering tailored recommendations for Lightning Platform migrations, resulting in improved customer engagement and satisfaction. Responsibilities included gathering detailed business requirements, analyzing customizations within each Salesforce Org, performing gap analyses, and collaborating with Salesforce Technology & Product teams to address functional gaps.

Key Accomplishment

• Led customer enablement initiatives with a focus on change management to ensure smooth transitions, contributing to a rise of over 40,000 monthly active users (MAU) on Salesforce Lightning within six months.

Served as the subject matter expert in custom applications, integrations, open-source development, and enterprise architecture, specializing in Heroku. Leveraged hands-on expertise in application engineering, system architecture, DevOps, and product development to ensure efficient, high-quality solution delivery across multiple projects. Led cross-cloud, high-risk architecture assessments and deal scoping, providing strategic guidance on the design and implementation of scalable, forward-looking enterprise architectures, which improved client outcomes and mitigated potential risks in complex cloud deployments.

Key Accomplishments

• Designed the architecture for a Targeted Offer Engine for a major Canadian financial institution, delivering a scalable, event-driven system that processed marketing offers based on transactional spending. This solution, built on Heroku, integrated with Salesforce and leveraged technologies like TypeScript, Node.js, Kafka, and Redis to power a large-scale B2C back-end API, resulting in streamlined offer management and enhanced customer engagement through email/SMS notifications.
• Collaborated with Salesforce’s pre-sales team to define solution proposals leveraging Heroku, Heroku Connect, and open-source frameworks.

ÄKTA Chicago, IL

Director of Web Engineering Feb 2014 - Oct 2015

Built and led a high-performing team of front-end engineers by recruiting top talent and establishing robust engineering processes, resulting in the delivery of high-quality, maintainable web solutions that met business objectives and enhanced customer confidence. Implemented best practices with open-source technologies and fostered close collaboration between design and engineering teams to deliver custom, scalable solutions tailored to clients’ unique business goals.

Key Accomplishments

• Led the development of a custom web experience for prospective students for a major U.S. educational institution. Technologies Utilized: AngularJS, HTML5, CSS3, Salesforce.
• Directed the development of a prototype for a first-responder control center experience for a leading manufacturer in government and public safety infrastructure. The solution, built with Angular, NodeJS, WebSockets, and Heroku, provided first responders with real-time social media information, demonstrating innovative technology use and helping secure future business opportunities for the company.

UX Engineer Feb 2013 - Feb 2014

Joined ÄKTA as an Interaction Designer and Engineer Consultant, working to help ÄKTA’s clients realize their product vision. Led interaction design and engineering effort for long-term projects.

Key Accomplishment

• Defined the complete information architecture for a complex mobile point-of-sale iPad application, authoring two 200+ page interaction definition documents used by the mobile engineering team for implementation.

Skills

Education

Syracuse University Syracuse, NY

B.S. Computer Engineering, L. C. Smith College of Engineering & Computer Sciences 2002-2006

Graduated Cum Laude with minors in Electrical Engineering & Mathematics

Patents & Awards

Distinguished Speaker Award - Cisco Live 2022 & 2023

Graphical user interface for a display screen

United States Patent D636,782 | Issued April 26, 2011
The ornamental design for a graphical user interface for a display screen

Graphical user interface for a display screen

United States Patent D636,783 | Issued April 26, 2011
The ornamental design for a graphical user interface for a display screen

Publications

Field trial of a dual device user experience for iTV

Proceedings of the 9th international interactive conference on Interactive television, 2011
Authors: Hiren Mandalia, Santosh Basapur, Gunnar Harboe, Ashley Novak, Van Vuong, Crysta Metcalf
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2000145

Of social television comes home: A field study of communication choices and practices in tv-based text and voice chat.

ACM - CHI ’09 Proceedings, 2009
Authors: Elaine Huang, Gunnar Harboe, Joe Tullio, Ashley Novak, Noel Massey, Crysta Metcalf, Guy Romano
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1518792