Bill Couch

Bill Couch

Engineering Manager @ Figma in New York City, he/him

About

At work, a highly-motivated technical leader motivated by collaborating with diverse, hard-working thinkers and creatives who demonstrate passion toward their craft.

Outside of work, health and creative pursuits are my priorities, including running, cycling, strength training, and photography for couch.studio.

Work Experience

2023 — Now
New York

Growing and leading the Prototyping Fidelity team, responsible for tooling to build interactive previews of user flows for collaborative iteration, user testing, and stakeholder presentations.

2022 — 2023
Senior Engineering Manager at Twitter, Inc.
New York, NY

Led and grew a high-performing full-stack team of engineers across iOS, Android, web, and backend platforms, building key parts of Twitter's paid subscription product, Twitter Blue, when its mission was to support journalism and heavy news consumers with features including Top Articles and Reader Mode. Organized and aligned engineering org from Revue and Scroll acquisitions. Coached and grew engineers to Senior and Staff+ roles. Coached peer managers through team transitions and performance management. Partnered cross-functionally to organizational and process impact, and increase non-advertising revenue for the business.

2017 — 2021
Engineering Manager at Twitter, Inc.
San Francisco, CA

Supported and scaled a high-performing web platform team from 2 to 12 engineers building features around conversational content and media on twitter.com, including Fleets, reply conversation controls, Direct Message improvements, video playback UI and UX for uploaded, live (Periscope broadcasts), and looping video, plus other new product explorations. Supported unifying Twitter's live video infrastructure and end-user experience across in-house and third-party solutions. Evolved interviewing and hiring processes to grow web and consumer engineering leadership team. Partnered with peer EMs to evolve the career promotion process across the engineering organization.

2016 — 2017
Staff Software Engineer at Twitter, Inc.
San Francisco, CA

Integrated Periscope on Twitter's web properties including Twitter Cards and Tweet Embeds. Added support to monetize Periscope broadcasts on twitter.com with pre-roll advertising. Key facilitator and engineer in unifying Twitter's live video (NFL, content partnerships) and Periscope broadcast products, technical stacks, and engineering teams. Facilitated work to establish best practices for decentralizing engineering operations around the world.

2014 — 2016
Senior Software Engineer at Twitter, Inc.
San Francisco, CA

Rebuilt user profile pages on web, in addition to migrating the Twitter web server client from Ruby to Scala. Helped rebuild Direct Messages on web, including the launch of Group DMs. Launched the Periscope web player at periscope.tv with the release of the Periscope iOS app, after its acquisition by Twitter. Further developed the web client, introducing user profile pages, growing the team from one to five engineers, and evolving the site into a rich, universal ReactJS application.

2011 — 2014
Software Engineer at Twitter, Inc.
San Francisco, CA

Built and designed individual internal web application tools in Ruby including an internal-Quora application for company-wide discourse with executive leadership. Open-sourced an audience moderation node.js application called Ospriet as a sample Twitter API application. Launched the Twitter Archive feature allowing Twitter users to download a full copy of their Tweets, with an offline, browser-based interface to explore.

2008 — 2011
Interactive Designer at USA TODAY
McLean, VA

Front-end design and development for editorial interactive graphics and cross-platform web applications, running on Django. Collaborated with Mercury Intermedia, an external development studio, on UI design, features, and strategy for applications on mobile platforms including iPhone, iPad, and Android.

2007 — 2008
Multimedia Artist at Orlando Sentinel
Orlando, FL

Developed, built, and designed interactive Flash graphics and multimedia packages. Collaborated with reporters, editors, videographers, photographers to achieve and deliver rich storytelling experiences. Created graphics for the print edition of the publication.

Speaking

2018
Effective 1:1s at Twitter #OneTeam
Houston, TX

Presented session at first 4,000+ company-wide conference on practical techniques and tools for ICs and managers to ensure the time together is most effectively used to address the interests, concerns, and needs of an individual contributor.

2016
Huntington Beach, CA

Joint presentation with Pieter-Jan Speelmans of OpenTelly to discuss how Periscope integrated OpenTelly's HTML5 HLS video player, THEOplayer, into Periscope's web client to enable playback via LHLS Media Streaming on any device with near-realtime performance.

2012
Austin, TX

A moderated panel with independent and in-house designers and engineers from Facebook and Twitter to discuss when and whether to use instinct or data analysis to inform design decisions. Audience input gathered via custom-built, and open-sourced Twitter API project, Ospriet.

2011
New York, NY

Workshop panel with Jennifer Brook and Craig Mod to discuss how the NYTimes, USA TODAY, and Flipboard handled designing printed content on the emerging tablet platform in the form of the Apple iPad.

2010
Storytelling Techniques and Tablets at The Poynter Institute
St. Petersburg, FL

Joint presentation with Andrew DeVigal of the New York Times discussing compelling storytelling techniques for tablet devices.

Awards

2011
Innovator of the Year, USA TODAY for iPad from Gannett
2010
Best Free Newspaper iPad Edition, USA TODAY for iPad from Advertising Age

2010 Media Vanguard Awards

2009
Award of Excellence, Information Design, USA TODAY for iPhone from Communication Arts

2009 Interactive Annual

Education

2003 — 2007
Bachelor of Arts at University of Michigan
Ann Arbor

Dual major in Communications, Screen Arts and Cultures

Contact

Website
LinkedIn
Mastodon
Glass
Instagram
Twitter
GitHub