Mike Frey
Software Eng Leader in Remote, USA, he/him
About
Mike Frey is an engineering leader whose career has primarily focused on software architecture, leadership and mentorship within product focused engineering organizations. For over twenty years, Mike has lead engineering teams for many successful initiatives including full-text document search, indexing millions of documents, at InVision; tournament management and live sports scoring applications for thousands of youth and amateur sports organizations at SportsEngine; and a suite of widgets for delivering news, market data, and insights into the back-office systems of Dow Jones' biggest clients.
As a mentor and leader, Mike built world-class engineering teams at Total Expert, YA and InVision and has helped shape the careers of many software engineers of all experience levels. Mike strives to improve the efficiency and efficacy of engineering teams through the introduction of patterns, practices, and tooling aimed at helping engineers deliver high quality, high impact products to customers.
As a natural teacher, Mike is also active in the engineering community, giving talks at software engineering conferences as well as a local technology meetup he organized for over five years.
Contact
Work Experience
As an Engineering Director, I am responsible for leading the engineering group for Total Expert's marketing product line with the these four teams:
Campaign Management - which owns a purpose-built marketing workflow engine (PHP, RabbitMQ, MariaDB) responsible for processing 10 of millions of messages and sending millions of emails and SMS messages daily.
Communications - currently a project team building out next generation 2-way SMS product, and will later refocus around broader comms initiatives like email, telephony, SMS, print/mailing, and notifications.
Web Skeleton - which owns the product's layout (header/footer/nav) as well as a design system and component library.
Mobile Gateway - a team focused on delivering a backend-for-frontend API to power our sales enablement mobile app focused on SMS and CRM activities.
Other recent projects include
- building a new engineering rubric for both technical and management tracks
- planning a multi-quarter re-platforming effort across six engineering teams
- leading hiring/staffing for the Communications team
- advising on architectural patterns for improving scheduled event processing (96% reduction in processing time with a 40% volume increase vs prior year)
- implemented new defect triage and QA processes, improving TTR and reducing customer found defects
As a Principal Engineer I worked to improve the patterns, practices, and processes employed by the broader engineering organization of ~60 developers. My primary focus was improving the front-end development processes by migrating a large Vue 2 app out of a very large PHP monolith, and splitting the Vue app into more manageable bundles along functional and team boundaries.
As the EM of the Communications squad I lead a team of six engineers alongside Product and Design partners to deliver meaningful collaboration tools to InVision's 7+ million users.
Responsibilities:
- Partnering with Product and Design leads to establish vision and strategy for communication within our core products.
- Hiring high-caliber engineers and cultivating existing talent.
- Partnering with other technical leaders on technical architecture and road map.
- Ensuring operational excellence of the team's products and services.
At InVision I...
- have led several teams and both large and small scale engineering initiatives
- work with product and design to plan solutions to meet business goals without sacrificing engineering architecture or user experience
- mentor junior and senior engineers on both engineering practices and soft skills
- help establish best practices for improving operability and observability of services
- was the subject matter expert on our very complex permissions system
- spent a 1 year rotation on the architecture team
Technologies: Golang, Node.js, Typescript, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Apache Kafka, ElasticSearch, Docker
Development Methodology: Agile, Scrum
I served as the principle engineer and architect for YA’s product development team, where I managed development and lead architecture on a next generation platform for processing consumer incentive programs.
Technologies: Javascript, Node.js, Angular.js, PostgreSQL, AWS RDS, Lambda, HTML5, CSS, AJAX, REST, SOA
Development Methodology: Agile, Scrum
I served as an architect for a development team of 60 people building spors management and registration tools for league and tournament organizations. My accomplishments include:
- Lead development on live scoring applications for ice hockey, lacrosse, football and baseball.
- Improved development speed through the introduction of new technologies like Node.js and Angular.js into the development team and championed their use.
- Worked alongside other to author an 18 month technical architecture road map.
Technologies: Javascript, Node.js, Angular.js, Backbone.js, jQuery, HTML5, CSS, AJAX, REST, SOA, Ruby, Rails, AWS, MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL
Development Methodology: Agile, Scrum
I lead a team of developers on several large projects ranging from cross domain content integration, mobile, and destination websites. Highlights include:
- Technical strategic & development lead for Dow Jones’ content integration effort. We built a suite of highly customizable browser-side widgets which integrate directly into a client’s already established workflow to deliver Dow Jones content.
- Technical/Architectural consultant to the Wall Street Journal for their native Android tablet app and mobile website.
Technologies: JavaScript, jQuery, HTML/HTML5, CSS, AJAX, REST, SOA, Java, ASP.Net MVC (2 & 3), C#, .NET 4.0, HTML/HTML5, CSS, WCF and SQL.
Development Methodology: Iterative, Agile
Side Projects
Free fantasy movie game built with Angular, Node.js, and Postgres.
Online real-time table-top game map built with canvas, web sockets and backed by Rails and Postgres.
An award show game for movie lovers. Angular, Node.js, Mongo.
Custom fantasy football draft board built for a friend's league. Angular, Node.js, and SQLite.
Speaking
Awards
Education
Volunteering
Founded NodeMN in 2013 and grew it to over 1100 members over 6 years and gave many many talks.