You can read more about me at mikekrisher.com. I've been in the industry for over two decades. In recent years, I have been focused on people and process. I ✨still✨ write code but spend a fair amount of time thinking about how to solve the problems teams experience. I believe the majority of those problems are due to a lack of proper planning and setting expectations.
In my current role as Director of Engineering at Blue Lava (now Zyston), I’ve had the opportunity to help define our roadmap, strategize on hiring, introduce tools like story mapping and feature planning, work directly with customers on feature requests, and implement automation that enabled my teammates to deliver more efficiently.
Before Blue Lava, I was Director of Engineering at Nike, where I led several teams of over 40 engineers responsible for the transition to real-time data and analytics. I was asked to streamline a number of disparate systems into a singular data platform with real-time capabilities. Under my leadership, the teams implemented everything from data capture, ingestion, streaming, warehousing, and machine learning. I focused on hiring and promotion, introducing roadmaps, budgeting, vendor relationships, establishing support efforts, and working cross-functionally with many internal stakeholders.
Before joining Nike, I directed the data platform efforts at Recurly with a core focus on building a high-functioning team. In the process, we introduced a DevOps culture that was soon adopted by the rest of the organization.
In my 25+ years of experience, I’ve worked across the full tech stack spanning from JavaScript to APIs to data platforms. I am genuinely interested in combining my implementation experience and acquired managerial skills into being a strategic engineering leader that consistently enables teams to deliver.
- What I'm reading - Titanium Noir, Nick Harkaway
- What I'm listening to - FredVonJupiter mixes on Mixcloud
- What I'm learning - Rust
- What I'm writing - Posts about teams from a mamanger's perspective, and Rust as of late
- What I'm drinking - Some roasts from Deeper Roots (Cincinnati, OH)
- Echo - an AI copilot for customer sucess managers
- Tembo - a CLI for the Postgres as a platform company
- Schemabook - a SaaS I'm building, schema/data contract stuff
- Zyston - Rust, WASM, Events, langchain, Typescript, Kafka
- Blue Lava - Ruby and Rails stuff, AWS, Events, Kafka, and Debezium
- Nike - Realtime data and analytics platform, AWS and Kafka
- Recurly - Data and Analytics platform, AWS stuff
- Kenna Security - Ruby and Elasticsearch stuff
- Harvest - Ruby and Rails stuff
- Proctor & Gamble - Mr. Clean, Swiffer, Dawn, etc, Flash and SOA stuff
- Google - Gadgets, Gmail, another super secret thing that never saw the light of day, JavaScript stuff
- Cuban Council - whatever El Presidente sent my way, a large list of creative projects, ASP, Flash, PHP, etc.
- Death Cab For Cutie - site admin for a few years, PHP
- Macromedia and Adobe - Lots of Flash stuff, everyone remembers Flash right?