Summary
Overview
Work History
Skills
Websites
Timeline
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Dyllen Owens

Dyllen Owens

Head of Engineering
Remote,TX

Summary

A passionate and dedicated engineering leader, focused on solving challenging organizational problems, mentoring leaders, and creating exciting organizational opportunities to grow engineers into the next generation of leaders. My attitude is move fast, do so wisely, make difficult decisions early and transparently, while ensuring alignment across all stakeholders.

Overview

9
9
years of professional experience

Work History

Head of Engineering (Happy Returns)

PayPal
Remote, TX
2022.12 - Current
  • Managed a total of six senior engineer managers, with a total number of 60 indirect reports across all six engineering managers.
  • Worked directly with executive leadership to redefine our organization's roadmap planning process to support faster iteration and a higher degree of accuracy in hitting roadmap.
  • Overhauled the organization's incident management process and migrated tooling from confluence to Datadog for incident management tracking and execution. Our MTTA went from 18+ hours down to 1 hour. Our customer impact duration went from being untracked to being measured.
  • Worked with my team of engineering leaders to redevelop career ladder/framework to enable individuals to have a greater degree of understanding with regards performance and growth.
  • Revamped our mentorship program to help foster a greater degree of team-to-team engagement. The primary goal was to break down silos and give people more opportunities to interact with individuals across delivery teams.
  • Helped reinforce and instill a product-led organization. Teams developed SLOs based on core user journeys for their products and implemented metric-driven measurement systems (Datadog RUM, GA, Redshift for operational metrics).
  • Improved organizational quality reducing our yearly P0 incidents from 4 to 1 a year while maintaining the same velocity. I also reduced P1 bugs from 3 per 1k story points delivered down to 1.25 per 1k story points delivered. Implementing additional automated quality assurance tooling and establishing processes around tech designs and rollout understanding plans to emphasize the importance of high-quality deliveries.
  • Established engineering leadership principles and principal community leadership principles to align our engineering in one unified direction and understanding.
  • Revamped our velocity framework to more accurately account for true-engineering velocity. Leveraging indicators from Pluralsight, our Jira process, other Git metrics to define a comprehensive capacity framework to enable the business to more accurately plan and prioritize projects of high value & quality within our quarters.

Senior Engineering Manager (Happy Returns)

PayPal
Austin, Texas
10.2021 - 12.2022
  • Lead two teams of 8 engineers of varying levels of seniority, (highest being Sr. Staff).
  • Lead a core mission team to deliver a critical business functionality that increased revenue for the organization by 19% resulting in revenue retention for our merchant partners by a magnitude of 8x.
  • Managed 2 senior engineering managers directly with a total of 24 director reports.
  • Developed an OKR and KPI automation solution for the organization leveraging Tableau and various analytic platforms to enable teams to visualize and react to negative trends faster.
  • Created organizational OKRs and helped accelerate positive trends by restructuring processes that enabled teams to deliver on features faster with minimal friction between various functions.
  • Directly led the initiative to improve our organizations service availability enabling all teams to reach four nines of availability and greater than three nine's uptime.
    * Redefined the organizations roadmap and planning process instituting the SAFe (Scaled agile framework for enterprise). Improving our roadmap completion ratio from 70% to 85%.
  • Led overall hiring for the organization, hiring 23 engineers (senior, mid, junior) with a less than 20% of them underperforming and greater than 35% exceeding expectations within their first 90 days. This constituted our organization doubling in size in one year in a difficult market with an average offer to acceptance ratio of 66% (2/3).
  • Worked directly with our recruiting team to transition our interview process to a new ATS while maintaining a screen to interview ratio of over 70%.
  • Hired 5 senior engineering managers to bring the total up to 8 such that we could scale the organization to support our hyper growth.
  • Worked with my team of engineering leaders to redevelop the career ladder/framework to enable individuals a greater degree of understanding with regards to performance and growth.
  • Implemented a highly metric driven culture focused on associating metrics to product journeys and organization journeys to quantify action to impact. This has resulted in the organization having the ability to measure specific user journeys and correlate these back to individual enhancements and alterations.

Engineering Manager

Blameless Inc
Austin, Texas
09.2020 - 09.2021
  • Lead a team of 4 engineers to develop a key project (SLOs) which was critical in raise our series B (30 million)
  • Successfully mentored and promoted two of my engineers from Mid level to Senior level.
  • Our team maintained the highest velocity output within the company (11 story points per individual). We were diligent about planning, retros, and scope de-risking.
  • Responsible for interacting with our key product owner to help build new product areas. In one year we released two major features (Runbook Docs & SLO's).
  • Split my time evenly between being actively involved in coding responsibilities and (Commits, PR's, and architecture docs) while also being engaged in managerial duties.
  • Responsible for owning the developer experience of our product and work with my team to implement okteto as a unified DX environment. Reducing our on-boarding from a week to a single day. This allowed my engineers to focus more on delivering and less on ramping up new engineers to the team.
  • Leveraged OGSM(T)'s as a metric tool to track our teams specific goals within our quarter and year. This helped keep the team focused with concise deliverables and more clarity on expectations.
  • Implemented six sigma LEAN practice (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve Control), which enabled both the product owner and myself to be more critical with triage and reduce thrash by gating incoming request before hitting engineers.

Staff Software Engineer

Blameless Inc
Austin, Texas
03.2020 - 09.2020
  • Worked in a reduced capacity environment due to COVID, and maintained the speed and delivery of my teams product (SLOs).
  • I extensively worked with customers to iterate and implement requested features which was instrumental in moving accounts from POV to Close.
  • Responsible for LRP and Day-to-day planning of engineers. This allowed our product to continue with direction in lack of a dedicated PM/O.
  • Drafted technical documentation for product architecture, this freed my teams other engineers to work on critical work.
  • Delivered a number of product demonstrations for potential customers. Further allowing my other engineers to focus on critical engineering work.
  • Developed a SLO error budget calculation around functional service units, which transitioned our product from competitive to differentiator.
  • Consistently moved around the platform to bring projects back on-track and deliver around tight deadlines with high ambiguity.

Senior Software Engineer

Blameless Inc
Austin, Texas
03.2019 - 03.2020
  • Helped maintain a large React.js / Redux application.
  • Helped pioneer and implement Typescript with full typescript migration plan. Spearheaded a massive refactor of old MVP code, to a more robust code solution. Improving test coverage, load/throughput reliability, and service extension.
  • Implementing things like deep linking, better i18n, improved accessibility, in the vein of making the product more accessible and user friendly.
  • Worked closely with CEO / COO to create feature specs and drive feature development of large pieces of work. (Very little over sight, with large responsibility).
  • Proactively took the lead on creating company standards for feature implementation by creating boilerplate documents for feature spec design, and regression test cases.
  • Wrote a Go micro-service to help leverage change management within our SRE platform.
  • Worked in a highly micro-service organization leveraging tools like Kubernetes and Helm + Helm-Vars to manage secrets.
  • Refactored existing Python code in the Nameko framework and improved testing by bringing coverage up to 90%.
  • Responsible for helping implement more SCRUM based practices while instituting best practices for agile development.
  • Was responsible as team lead to evaluate new technologies and tech stacks. Wrote proposals and established best practices within the code-bases to ensure consistency across engineering disciplines (FE, BE, Infra).

Senior Software Engineer I

Blizzard Entertainment
Irvine, California
01.2017 - 02.2019
  • Helped build and support Blizzards pioneering eSports platform. Using React.js, Alt.js as the Flux implementation as well as LESS, and ES6 syntax.
  • Helped ensure performance of application was the highest quality, by optimizing JavaScript calls, caching intensive workloads and determining if functionality should be offloaded to web-workers, preventing layout thrashing by reducing re-paints, memoizing other heavy utility calls.
  • Added and maintained features on our social section of the native client. Which was implemented in Vue.js as well. We used a FLUX paradigm utilizing Vuex as the store + FLUX implementation.
  • Helped maintain and add new features to the Java API backend which was created to provide data to the profiles within the Blizzard client.
  • Helped maintain small feature sets in C++ but didn't architect large portions of the application.
  • Worked on the native Blizzard client, which was implemented using Vue.js an alternative to React.js with a pseudo electron wrapper implemented with native CEF and C++.
  • Migrated a number of Java 6 & 7 projects to Java 8 which helped patch a number of security vulnerabilities in our Java products.
  • Refactored a number of Java services to use Streams as opposed to loops which helped with the improved efficiency gain goals Blizzard had.
  • Supported and maintained the large scale http://wcs.battle.net/sc2/en website. Managing and supporting both the API and Admin panel responsible for supporting and delivering the content. Highly AGILE team management, PR / code review style engineering strategy.
  • Helped build an eSports API that powers the admin tool to track and maintain various collegiate and professional tournaments. Using Java Spring, Hibernate DB, H2, Flyway, REST Docs, Jackson.

Software Engineer

Verys
Irvine, California
01.2015 - 07.2017
  • Worked on a multi integration project between salesforce - service now - jira. Leveraged JIRA's SDK framework to build a robust JIRA plugin built in java 8. Used Jersey to build out restful web service extending core JIRA functionality. Built a robust integration system in Service Now using OOP Javascript.
  • Wrote technology proposals for ZeniMax, Cafrino, and ACTIVE Network. Prototyped, and evaluated new frameworks to determine their benefit within the organization.
  • Wrote SDLC guidelines for release, deployments, and proper code pull request reviews.
  • Maintained and updated a Ruby project for an acquisition by ACTIVE Network called Virtual Event Bags. We wrote new features integrated with active's proprietary payment processing system and their user management micro service API.
  • Built and setup push button deployment scripts for three of our largest projects, all ranging from simple 2 servers with an LB to 10 servers with an LB. Utilized Ansible, Chef & Puppet for new EC2 instances, and work with a Salt deployment system on a legacy project.
  • Built boilerplate scripts that could spin up new EC2 instances from a company website for hosting staging sites for development and client review purposes.
  • Built an entire python application for Oakley, using Flask, Celery and RabbitMQ in a micro SQLite db. Custom built API in Flask that used Celery to push off task to a RabbitMQ sever that was then trackable to notify the client when the task finished.
  • Managed a team of 4 developers, providing task prioritization, code sign-off, framework strategy, testing strategies, and career growth.
  • Became a Team Leader in the company within my first 3 months, implementing security standards and technology to make the company more efficient, and provider more reliable SDLC coverage and tracking.
  • Built a Data management system to integrated with an iOS app. Used Laravel 5.2 integrated with websockets, ES6 Javascript, SASS, and Gulp

Skills

Javascript & Typescript

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Timeline

Head of Engineering (Happy Returns)

PayPal
2022.12 - Current

Senior Engineering Manager (Happy Returns)

PayPal
10.2021 - 12.2022

Engineering Manager

Blameless Inc
09.2020 - 09.2021

Staff Software Engineer

Blameless Inc
03.2020 - 09.2020

Senior Software Engineer

Blameless Inc
03.2019 - 03.2020

Senior Software Engineer I

Blizzard Entertainment
01.2017 - 02.2019

Software Engineer

Verys
01.2015 - 07.2017

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Dyllen OwensHead of Engineering