Derek Harmel
Senior Software Engineering Manager
A seasoned technical software engineering manager with 19+ years of experience building applications and systems including complex UI/UX, visualizations, analytics, and data processing and orchestration. Skilled in creating collaborative, inclusive, globally distributed, and successful engineering teams.
Contact Info:
[email protected]
LinkedIn
Based in Virginia
Recent Experience
Team Lead — June 2023 – Present
- Managed a remote engineering team responsible for Automation, Monetization, and Marketplace.
Optimizely
Senior Engineering Manager — May 2021 – June 2023
- Managed two globally distributed engineering teams of on-shore and off-shore developers within the Optimizely Data Platform (ODP) product.
- Provided both teams with continuity through various Product Management personnel and roadmap transitions.
- Led the ODP engineering effort of integration into the Optimizely enterprise systems, such as PLM, billing and invoicing, SSO, GDPR compliance through multi-region deployment, and security auditing and remediation.
- Rebuilt the ODP Application and Marketing Automation team from 2 at acquisition to 7 full stack engineers.
- Built the ODP Integrations team from scratch to 4 developers including a manager.
- Guided the ODP Integrations team through inheriting 20+ existing integrations and greatly improved observability and stability.
- Product managed and architected a new type of audience sync integration to increase customer value.
Zaius
Engineering Manager — October 2017 – May 2021
- Managed a team of on-shore and off-shore software and QA engineers on a cross-functional team.
- Delivered many successful projects, including Omni-Channel Campaigns (1), Campaign Performance Analytics (1, 2, 3), Segment Builder (1), Campaigns Dashboard (1, 2), and Campaign Recipes (1).
- Onboarded, managed, and made successful Zaius’ first offshore engineers.
- Drove an initiative to create a micro-frontend architecture to provide a better developer experience.
Staff Software Engineer — February 2016 – October 2017
Senior Software Engineer — April 2013 – February 2016
- Lead two other developers in the creation of our Google and Facebook audience sync feature.
- Created the Campaign Builder interface from scratch.
- Built out all of the metrics, monitoring, and alerting for the Marketing Automation system.
- Drove adoption of a modern front-end stack using TypeScript, React, and Webpack.
Independent Consultant
Software Engineer — November 2011 – April 2013
Verisign
Functioned as a consultant and contributor of a skunkworks team to build a prototype of a serverless functions product. I taught developer and QA team members best practices of Ruby, Ruby on Rails, and JavaScript development and testing. I personally contributed a significant portion of the product UI for the serverless function management.
RotoDraft
Built a first-of-its-kind real-time scoring engine for RotoDraft’s daily live fantasy sports product.
RecoveryLibrary
Built a custom analytics feature for their customers (various mental health organizations) to understand how participants used the content within RecoveryLibrary.
Skills
Professional
Project Scoping & Planning
Incremental Delivery
Project Management
Hiring & Interviewing
Code Review
Debugging
Architecture
Agile Development
Technical
Ruby, Ruby on Rails
TypeScript, Node.js
React
AWS
SQL, MySQL, Snowflake
Docker
Redis
Grafana & Prometheus
Tools
JIRA
Confluence
Github
Github Actions
TeamCity
Jellyfish
PagerDuty
Datadog