Ernie Miller

Summary

Passionate engineering leader and systems thinker with 20+ years spent leading, coding for, and caring deeply about people. Proven track record of influencing engineering culture with and without authority. Creator of a hiring process that drove 300% team growth, increased representation from underrepresented groups, and received praise such as "this restored my faith in the tech industry," from successful and unsuccessful applicants.

Skills

• Leadership
• Coaching
• Communication
• Empathy

• Recruiting
• Distributed Teams
• Systems Thinking
• Public Speaking

• Ruby
• Rails
• Elixir
• Phoenix

Open Source

• Rails Core contributor.
• Contributor to Elixir Mix and OTP guide.
• Author of multiple Ruby gems, some of which are actually useful.
• Creator of Venture, a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style conference presentation application.
• Write regularly at https://ernie.io.

Work Experience

• 8/2017 − Present
• Splice
• New York, NY (remote)

Senior Engineering Manager

• Designed a recruiting and interview process for ICs and managers that drove 300% growth, increased representation from underrepresented groups, and received praise such as "this restored my faith in the tech industry," from successful and unsuccessful applicants.
• Scaled the backend engineering team at an unprecedented rate, tripling its size in 8 months
• Scaled the leadership team as hiring manager for two additional engineering managers
• Supported hitting our quarterly revenue targets by leading the over 40% of our engineering organization building and supporting our revenue-generating products
• Led team members through two wide-ranging reorganizations as we grew
• Improved efficiency by redesigning our engineering organization's meeting schedule, both cadence and content
• Contributed to individual growth of leadership team members, both peers and direct reports, through coaching/mentorship
• Improved company culture through contribution of ideas and processes to our broader team, and by acting in advisory capacity to our VP of Engineering
• Helped Splice scale by managing relationships with external consultancies and business partners

• 1/2016 − 7/2017
• CareZone
• Seattle, WA (remote)

Engineering Manager

• Improved engineer happiness and efficiency through creating and leading a team devoted specifically to developer tooling, refactoring, and process optimizations
• Reduced technical debt by upgrading our application's frontend build process and leading efforts for a major version upgrade of our core application's framework
• Protected against future debt by introducing framework update guidelines and processes
• Reduced engineer stress and increased confidence when on-call by defining and implementing improved on-call processes, documentation, and tooling
• Secured critical infrastructure through coordination of our bug bounty program
• Improved deployment efficiency and consistency by standardizing our build and deployment tooling to pave the way for our migration to Kubernetes

• 9/2014 − 12/2015
• nVisium, LLC
• Herndon, VA (remote)

Director of Engineering

• Greatly increased researcher efficiency through development of a library that generated attractive security assessment report PDFs from their findings
• Improved developer happiness and efficiency through implementation of streamlined processes and improved infrastructure to support them
• Improved reliability by driving TDD adoption
• Managed and mentored team members
• Generated leads and visibility through software conference representation

• 10/2013 − 9/2014
• Appriss, Inc.
• Louisville, KY

Senior Rubyist

• Improved reliability and reduced regressions by implementing tests and educating team members in effective TDD
• Improved the engineering culture by challenging existing approaches and architecture choices
• Grew individual team members through coaching/mentoring

• 7/2013 − 9/2013
• Wantful
• San Francisco, CA (remote)

Senior Engineer

• Improved application responsiveness by optimizing bottlenecks
• Drove increased sales by improving the quality and maintainability of our recommendations engine

• 6/2012 − 7/2013
• LivingSocial
• Washington, DC (remote)

Software Engineering Team Lead/Manager, E-mail Tools

• Grew, mentored, and directly managed the team responsible for tooling that created/scheduled most of LivingSocial's outgoing e-mail
• Delivered on-time and on-budget by making the architectural decisions and tradeoffs, and managing product and project management relationships
• Increased employee efficiency with improvements and extensions to our internal deal management application
• Secured critical infrastructure with audits and fixes of Rails security vulnerabilities
• Reduced hosting and maintenance costs and increased reliability by authoring a library that could allow us to shut down a redundant web service in the critical path of all e-mail delivery

• 10/2011 − 6/2012
• Rails Machine
• Savannah, GA (remote)

Lead Solutions Architect

• Improved company culture by advising the CEO on management issues
• Consistently delivered results by triaging incoming work and coordinating project planning and estimation efforts
• Helped customers scale by recommending architectural and hosting approaches for prospects and existing clients, and committing to their codebases when required
• Drove team growth by interviewing and hiring engineers
• Drove individual growth by coaching/mentoring team members
• Improved efficiency by updating internal tools
• Solidified our presence in the open source community through contributions to our OSS projects

• 9/2009 − 10/2011
• Mission Data
• Louisville, KY

Senior Architect

• Reduced training costs by mentoring junior engineers
• Ensured client satisfaction by leading development efforts and partnering closely with clients on iOS, web, and other projects
• Consistently delivered projects on time and under budget

• 10/2006 − 9/2009
• Insight Communications
• Louisville, KY

Systems Developer

• Increased efficiency by driving internal adoption of Ruby on Rails to replace ASP.NET and other technology with longer development cycle time
• Reduced expenses by acting as an interim Remedy Admin/Developer
• Eliminated Remedy licensing costs by leading the transition to an open source ticketing system
• Ensured Insight's technical relevance by evaluating and recommending new technologies

• 6/1999 − 10/2006
• Charter Communications
• Greensburg, PA/Louisville, KY

Systems Administrator/InfoSec Officer/Sr. Applications Developer

• Reduced the cost of acquisition for Charter by transitioning Helicon Online accounts and data to Charter infrastructure
• Secured the data of all customers in the Mid-Atlantic region across dozens of *nix servers
• Reduced software licensing costs by solely developing the in-house application that handled our customer database, trouble ticketing, and equipment polling that served all Charter business customers
• Reduced software licensing costs by developing the SNMP cable modem monitoring and provisioning package used in Charter's cable systems throughout the country
• Reduced training expenses by mentoring team members in software development