Hi 👋 — I'm Lauren Davis Smith, a Senior Director of Engineering, working @Automattic on @WooCommerce
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Quick Facts
- I've been leading remote based engineering teams for 7 years and working remotely for the majority of my career
- I believe in delivering holistic solutions while keeping a close eye on overengineering
- I feel that teams perform their best when provided with clarity, transparency, and flexibility
- I am passionate about shipping reliable software while maintaining a low-risk, low-stress environment
- I am profoundly against any form of micromanagement
- I view engineering management as a support role; if I provide clear processes, a stable environment, and transparency my teams will succeed
- I value process management as a way to control quality without sacrificing speed
Engineering Leadership
@Automattic - Senior Director of Engineering
January 2022 - Present
Remote
@Automattic - Director of Engineering
October 2020 - January 2022
Remote
- Oversaw the growth of our engineering group from 2 teams and 21 engineers to 12 teams and 75+ engineers in less than 18 mos.
- During this time our engineering teams took a barely released product to 18 countries, 100+ currencies, 6 additional payment methods, and 2.5+MM installs along with many more features.
- Worked with engineering managers to create team handbooks, onboarding materials, team rituals, project management processes, and other tools they would need to build their teams from scratch.
- Ensured that all engineering managers had clear expectations for themselves, and provided that clarity to the members of their team.
- Facilitated the deployment of an additional 1.5MM in additional spending for external contractors through 2022.
- Provided the technical direction between our engineering teams and our strategic payment partners to ensure that blockers are anticipated and roadmaps stay aligned.
- Built an architectural leadership group, contributed to the developer apprenticeship group, and mentored engineering managers to invest in engineering leadership growth.
@Automattic - Senior Engineering Manager
February 2020 - October 2020
Remote
- Oversaw 2 engineering teams of 14 highly distributed engineers
- Managed 1 engineering manager while also being an engineering manager for another 9 engineer team
- Onboarded our first developer advocate at WooCommerce and acted as a product owner and sole stakeholder over the creation of a community portal.
- Built and piloted a developer apprenticeship program in my engineering team to allow for internal mobility of our support staff that showed interest and ability in becoming engineers.
- This program has become so successful that it has been taken over as a core company initiative with an entire team backing it and we’ve now seen dozens of dev apprentices successfully “graduate” from the program and become engineers.
@Automattic - Engineering Manager
Sep 2017 - February 2020
Remote
- Built an engineering team from 3 engineers to 9 engineers and 2 designers in under 12 months that managed a catalog of over 100 products.
- Introduced a release train into our workflow allowing us to scale from dozens of releases per year to over 600.
- Reduced our bug queues by 60% by providing a framework for triage, pr reviews, release management, and post-release support.
- Provided engineering leadership and technical direction during the integration of a key acquisition.
- Successfully navigated our team through multiple company reorgs while consistently maintaining the division top scores for team satisfaction in our bi-annual company surveys.
@Thomson_Reuters - Manager, Technology / Lead Software Engineer
Jan 2016 - Sep 2017
Carrollton, TX
- Managed a distributed team of 34 UI engineers across Dallas, Portland, and Bangalore.
- Built and ran a weekly developers forum to facilitate conversation pertinent to front-end development across the company.
- Prior to my departure this weekly forum grew in size from an average of 5 engineers to over 30.
- Oversaw the front-end development for a migration of a legacy on-premise software application to a cloud-based SaaS solution in under 18 mos.
- Crafted an interview process from the ground up allowing us to conduct hundreds of interviews over a short period of time without a significant impact on our roadmap.
- Paired with the platform architecture team to ensure that our application could be deployed into a variety of environments due to fixed requirements by our sales team.
- Partnered with UX to ensure we met accessibility guidelines; partnered with QA to ensure our triage focused on the highest impact bugs; partnered with the API team to ensure that our data contracts met the needs of the front-end designs.
- Presented several talks on antifragile software practices.
Software Engineering
@Home_Depot - Online Software Engineer II
Aug 2014 - Jan 2016
Irving, TX
- Worked as a full-stack engineer on the product information page which receives hundreds of millions pageviews per month
- Built a Chrome extension that facilitated add-to-carts from any website
- Built an e2e test suite with Phantom/Casper
- Rearchitected and refactored nearly all of the JavaScript for the product information page bringing down load times and providing easier ongoing maintenance
@Koken - Senior Web App Engineer
Jan 2011 - Aug 2014
Remote
- Was employee #1 brought on to build a new CMS for photographers; Koken was acquired in 2015 by NetObjects
- Built the majority of the underlying Koken architecture that has allowed for extensibility through the Koken marketplace
- Built a suite of initial extensions to kick off the Koken marketplace including image galleries, lazy loaders, and preloaders
- Engineered a complex inheritance model on top of KnockoutJS to allow for a more responsive UI when doing photo manipulation in the browser
- Built an e2e test suite on top of PhantomJS & CasperJS
Various Web Agencies - Front-end Developer
Oct 2006 - Jan 2011
Remote
- Wrote ActionScript, JavaScript, CSS, PHP and HTML for top clients including: AT&T, National Breast Cancer Foundation, United Sports, Allied Waste, MAC Cosmetics, Hagar USA, and many others
- Built JavaScript widgets to add functionality to various content management systems
Current resume is available upon request.