Principal Engineer

Decision Ownership: Made 50+ architectural calls autonomously during 289-endpoint migration, escalating only the 3 decisions with multi-year organizational impact. Leadership trusted the judgment.

Dispute Arbitration: When teams disagreed on migration approach (big-bang vs. strangler fig), evaluated trade-offs, committed to phased strangler pattern. Result: zero major incidents, 96% traffic migrated.

Digital Archeology: When source code didn't exist, found another way. Reverse-engineered Acucobol via bytecode analysis, producing 45+ migration specs (50K+ lines).

Platform Strategy: Shaped 4-year technical roadmap for $2B+ transaction platform, advising executive leadership on build-vs-buy decisions and architectural investments.

Executive Partnership: Provided strategic technical guidance across Operations, Customer Service, and Engineering, influencing product roadmaps and risk mitigation strategies.

Innovation Leadership: Pushed GPT-3 adoption (2022, pre-ChatGPT) before anyone was asking for it. Built the ROI case that freed AI tooling budget across the organization.

Flagship Execution: Single-handedly led and delivered the Instacart integration—ButcherBox's most visible partnership—owning architectural design, cross-team coordination, and executive visibility end-to-end over 6 months.

Led migration of 289 API endpoints achieving 96% production traffic on Laravel, delivering 34% faster response times and 4x order processing improvement (300→1,300 orders/5min).

Achieved $336K annualized savings (FinOps tags + invoices): cloud infrastructure ($278K), DataDog optimization 62.5% ($12K→$4.5K/month), RDS consolidation ($32K). Removed 500,000 lines legacy code.

Built real-time debugging platform (Redis/Xdebug/BPF) reducing MTTR by 95% (incident logs, 90-day window).

Diagnosed Redis pooling issue achieving 95% DNS resolution improvement and 97-98% OTP auth improvement.

Mentored 10+ engineers through 185+ 1:1 sessions; gave 558 peer recognitions fostering positive culture. CTO recognition: 'Tyler is AI' for innovation leadership.

Led first load test in company history—5 sessions, zero system failures, 85-90% confidence for peak traffic. Attended every strategic meeting throughout tenure.

Built 50 per-developer daily/weekly metric reports tracking adoption and bottlenecks per-ticket/per-feature/per-developer; built 0→1,500 automated test cases driven by business requirements from tickets and QA features.

Built Operations engineering team from 0 (solo) to 9 engineers, then broke it into specialized squads: Operations backend, CS Support (Zendesk dashboard app), and backend API migration team.

Transitioned to lead all 3 teams simultaneously—12 engineers total across Operations, CS Support, and API migration—with clear ownership and delivery accountability.

Engineered backend optimizations handling 10x traffic surge during COVID with zero scaling incidents, while competitors experienced significant downtime.

Built platform recognized internally as gold standard for Testing, Stability, Documentation, Innovation, and cross-department collaboration.

Led migration from monolithic architecture to Event-Driven Microservices on Azure and Kubernetes, establishing patterns adopted company-wide.

Boosted application performance by 87% in first 90 days by refactoring critical backend paths and React frontend—establishing immediate credibility.

Technical Co-founder: Defined architecture vision for international e-commerce platform spanning AWS (US) and Aliyun (China), solving 'Great Firewall' latency at scale.

Strategic Partnerships: Negotiated and architected integrations with 19+ payment gateways including ICBC (world's second-largest bank). No payment infrastructure, no transaction volume.

International Recognition: Won 2nd place at an international technology competition in China. Credibility isn't claimed; it's placed by a panel of judges.

Rescued failing insurance platform 6 months behind schedule by restructuring architecture and coordinating 6-8 remote developers—delivered on-time with zero regulatory compliance issues.

Delivered real-time quoting engine handling complex state-specific regulations for all 50 states, processing quotes in under 2 seconds across 200+ rule variations.

Coordinated blended remote/on-site team under pressure, maintaining stakeholder confidence through transparent communication and consistent weekly delivery milestones.

Secured and executed multiple NewBalance.com contracts, directing performance engineering that improved page load times 40% and increased conversion rates measurably.

Operated as Fractional CTO for 5+ enterprise clients simultaneously, managing end-to-end SDLC and establishing engineering standards that outlasted engagements.

Delivered performant, scalable web applications using Node.js, PHP, and Angular—building a consultancy with 100% client retention rate over 4 years.

Led development of multi-channel sales automation achieving +1,700% YOY sales and -44% overhead reduction (shipping -44%, labor -17%) within 1 month of deployment.

Designed centralized inventory orchestration engine integrating Amazon, Overstock, NewEgg, and 6+ additional marketplaces into unified platform.

Managed team of 4 (3 developers + designer) developing MLM/Direct Sales management platforms from conception to production.

Developed core development tools and coding standards adopted across all company projects, establishing engineering consistency.