Steven Salter

Round Rock, TX • steve@stevesalter.com • LinkedIn

Highly effective director of software engineering who values collaborative relationships and team-building, continuous improvement and iteration, and robust process to publish high quality releases on schedule and create meaningful experiences for end-users.

Skills

Client-side: Angular, React, TypeScript, JavaScript, HTML, CSS

Server-side: C#, .NET Core, ASP.NET, Web API, Razor, Node.JS, Python, PHP

Database: SQL (Oracle and SQL Server), TSQL, PL/SQL

Technology: Azure, Message Queues, REST, Dependency Injection, OOP, NUnit, XML, JSON, Bitbucket Pipelines, Octopus, Docker, Jira, Confluence

Methodology: Agile, Scrum, Kanban, TDD, DDD/CQRS

Experience

2023 – present

Director of Engineering

Managed a total of 12 people in development and DevOps / SRE
Improved sprint completion rate from an average of 29% to 81% by implementing process improvements and embracing Scrum principles.
Instituted a quarterly planning cadence and improved quarterly execution rate from 32% to 90% within two quarters by prioritizing goals, requiring work to be reviewed and estimated before being scheduled, and enforcing story point allocation budgets.
Built and maintained a development metrics application that integrated with Jira, Zendesk, and Jenkins to collect actionable data for quarterly business reviews.
Lead the team through policy reviews and workflow optimizations in preparation for a scheduled SOC-2 Type II audit.
Administered Jira and Confluence, and built a Forge integration to improve visibility of progress at the epic level.
Engaged in employee mentoring and coaching through regular 1:1 meetings and sprint retrospectives.
Assisted in the creation of an annual employee review process.

2020 – 2023

Software Engineering Manager

Led the new product development effort to bring enterprise agility capabilities to the Atlassian Platform, collaborating to define product requirements and technical implementation plans, and communicating current status and roadmap plans to leadership through the creation of quarterly milestones and monthly checkpoints tied to OKRs and goals.
Planned and executed a reorganization of the Jira Align codebase from a single monolith into a collection of new repositories and build jobs that could be run in parallel, reducing average build time per commit by 75%.
Wrote, deployed, and maintained an internal CI/CD traceability application as a containerized service on the Atlassian platform, ensured that our CI/CD process met internal compliance requirements, and provided on-call build and deployment assistance to developers in slack.
Facilitated institutional learning through risk analysis/pre-mortems, team and department retrospectives, root cause analysis sessions, and post incident reviews.
Created growth opportunities for engineers through biweekly 1:1s, quarterly check-ins, a promotion readiness process, and by hosting both a Udemy training club and a book club.
Created new team roles and processes for workstream/feature leadership and release management.
Nurtured a positive collaborative environment by building trust and safety, seeking and listening to feedback, being open to change, and encouraging honest communication.
Published blogs on management expectations, enabling collaboration and feedback, improving communication, and promotion fairness.
Performed hiring manager interviews to recruit and hire new engineers.
Organized logistics and events for a 90-person corporate gathering, hosting team-building events, collaboration workshops, and round-robin presentations

2020 – 2023

Software Engineering Manager

Released every 2 weeks for over 2 years, across a wide suite of applications and services, with a consistent sprint velocity (9% standard deviation) and completion rate (>90%).
Lead three development teams with a total of 14 direct reports to implement three greenfield web applications and maintain four others.
Solved challenging problems, implemented features, performed code reviews, and lead engineering review and design sessions as a hands-on manager.
Built application integrations, utilizing both RESTful APIs and event queues for message handling, including:
- Exposure history presented on the personnel record of fire crew members,
- Crew for an incident report populated using shifts from scheduling,
- Web application synchronization with an ad hoc reporting solution.
Automated our release process with Octopus and database migrations, allowing artifacts to be published with a single click.
Improved intra-company communication by automating sprint statistics gathering using JIRA and Confluence APIs, providing on-demand project status reports to executives.
Guided, mentored, and provided career growth opportunities through regular 1:1 meetings with team members.
Nurtured a positive collaborative environment by building trust and safety, seeking and listening to feedback, being open to change, and encouraging honest communication.

2012 - 2018

Senior Software Development Manager

Managed the implementation of instrument maintenance, chemical inventory, and material lifecycle verticals in use by small universities and Fortune 500 companies.
Collaborated with other product teams to build data-sharing integrations between laboratory applications using a hub topology.
Planned sprints, analyzed requirements, made architectural decisions, and grew the team from 3 developers to 8.
Trained new developers to become productive contributors and influencers, and regularly provided guidance to developers and performed code reviews.

2004-2012

Senior Software Developer, Product Architect

Built an application platform that allowed for rapid development of new vertical applications by the creation of dynamic business objects.
Implemented a custom EAV database model to represent dynamic properties of objects in a fixed Oracle relational table structure.
Invented an algorithm that translates structured hierarchical queries into dynamic SQL in order to populate a tree of results.
Created an event model for business object behaviors.
Wrote a REST API for CRUD interaction with business objects, and automated Swagger help page generation.
Automated database migrations to easily update structure, metadata, or data.
Enabled an upgrade path for both external and legacy applications.
Optimized SQL queries to improve performance against large data scale.
Authored ERD diagrams for physical and logical model of the schema.

Volunteering

2021 - present

Volunteer Instructor

Volunteer instructor for an organization that teaches software engineering skills to underrepresented groups in Austin, TX and across the US.
Taught programming and internship-preparation classes, including:
- Software Development Essentials (Python)
- Mobile App Development (Firebase)
- C++ / Raspberry Pi
- Elite 101/102 (Intern Prep)
Awarded Volunteer of the Year award in 2023.

Education

Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science
High Honors