Case study · Comcast, Sidecar, Genesys, American Family Insurance · 2006 – 2025
Building quality teams, and growing the people in them
Automation is the part of my work that is easiest to show. The part I am proudest of is the people: engineers I hired, coached and watched move into senior and leadership roles.
- Teams
- From one engineer to fifteen, onshore and offshore
- Roles
- Test Automation Lead, Senior QA Manager, Director of Engineering Enablement
- Scope
- Hiring, mentoring, Scrum and project management, incident management, roadmaps, releases
Building a function from nothing
At Sidecar, an AdTech company, I scaled quality engineering from the ground up, starting with an initial team of 6 automation engineers. I architected a shift-left strategy focused on engineering enablement, bridged QA and DevOps to simplify the delivery pipelines, and was promoted from lead engineer to senior manager to director inside three years.
Three of my direct reports there moved into leadership and senior roles. That is the number from those years I care about most.
Hiring and growing people
At Genesys I built and led a quality team of 6 engineers, from associate to senior. I screened and interviewed the automation engineer candidates, then gave each person a tailored mentorship track and an individual career-development plan. Those plans led to promotions and strong retention in the group, and accelerated the technical growth of the junior engineers.
At American Family Insurance I led 15 onshore and offshore automation engineers, managed the automation backlog and priorities across several product testing teams, and trained teams on test automation and continuous integration.
Running the work, not only doing it
- Roadmaps and estimation. A 12-month technical roadmap for test automation at Genesys, with the backlog build-out and estimates behind it.
- Scrum Master and project manager. As a principal engineer at Comcast I took turns as the team's Scrum Master and project manager on its rotation.
- Incident management. At Genesys I served on the incident manager rotation for production incidents.
- Project leadership. Project test lead for NextGen Healthcare's telehealth product, where the test strategy cut escaped defects by 50% and raised coverage by 75%.
- Release decisions. I convene and run the go/no-go for releases today, including a late-evening payroll deployment carried through a same-session rollback when live testing caught defects, with no customer affected.
- Reporting that leaders use. Standardized quality metrics and reporting at Genesys, giving executives data-backed insight into release readiness and team velocity.
Comfortable in any shape of team
Nearly eleven years at Comcast, a startup at Sidecar, three years at Genesys, and contract engagements for federal healthcare, commercial healthcare and insurance. I have been the only quality engineer in the building and the manager of a team spread across time zones. The common thread is the same job: shipping with confidence.