Jeff Putz

Yottaa is a product suite that delivers performance benefits to 1500 sites and top eCommerce brands such as Ralph Lauren and Lands End.

Backed by PSG Equity, a leading PE firm, my job is to modernize and transform the organization, creating a scalable economic engine for Yottaa.

• Report to the CEO and part of the executive leadership team.
• Lead Development, Operations, QA, DevOps and Information Security teams.
• Responsible for mission critical ecommerce infrastructure serving billions of requests per day though a combination of the public cloud and our own 8 global data centers.

Accomplishments

Leading the team through multiple initiatives to increase the operating results for the technical organization:

• Execution - uplevel core operations including SCRUM teams, project management, and roadmap planning. Improved velocity and project success rate; 30% improvement in planning accuracy.
• Efficiency - aligned costs with revenue, driving a 26% more cost efficiency while achieving 40% improvement in time spent on innovation.
• Technical - led advancements in automated testing, CI/CD, and observability; 66% improvement in time-to-delivery KPI.
• Engagement - installed communication strategies and OKRs to help individual contributors connect their work to the larger goals and mission. 100% of my team now has 1:1s and quarterly goals.
• Transparency - implemented framework to help the organization coordinate and communicate the status of WIP to stakeholders. Eliminated cross-functional confusion and lack of trust.
• Continuous improvement - launched programs to operationalize continuous improvement; 20+ topics already moved to Done.

I'm taking a leadership role driving strategic investments across revenue generating opportunities:

• M&A activities and business integration planning
• offshoring & partnerships
• AI strategy and execution

Hydrow created innovative hardware and software technology to bring the on-the-water, outdoor experience of rowing to the home.

• Report to the CEO and part of the executive team.
• Lead Product Development, QA, and DevOps teams responsible for the design and delivery of multiple products (cloud, rower, Android and iOS native apps).
• Tapped to lead BI, data engineering, and Product Management teams.
• Responsible for subscription products which power $40MM of ARR.

Accomplishments

• Led development of product features supporting our 2nd entry into the market, a lower priced rowing machine that could ship via FedEx or UPS.
• Led development of major fitness features including workout pause and circuit training.
• Drove key infrastructure projects including increased scalability (10x), A/B testing, new CI/CD tech, and web-based administration tools.
• Improved quality by driving adoption of quality KPIs, introducing bug triage protocols, and maturing software development process. These changes resulted in 76% drop in critical defects in three months.
• Improved velocity by creating culture of constant measurement and improvement. Drove 40% reduction in manual acceptance testing steps.
• Optimized cross functional alignment by a) organizing Engineering into multiple self-contained, mission-driven teams (squads) b) revamping executive reporting and communication c) partnering and relationship building with key internal stakeholders.
• Started co-op program in order to build stronger talent pipelines.

True Fit is a consumer facing, web scale, enterprise solution for top retailers such as Macy’s, H&M, Levi’s, Kohl’s, Ralph Lauren, and Under Armour. True Fit leverages AI/machine learning to personalize the shopping experience for 20MM users a month across 250+ sites.

• Managed team of 70. Reported to the CEO.
• Led Development, Operations, Data Engineering, QA, and DevOps teams responsible for the design and delivery of multiple product lines.
• Organized around small cross-functional teams (squads) running Scrum.
• Spearheaded the creation of an offshore team of 25+ engineers in India. Recruited founding Mumbai team and drove successful implementation of combined Boston and offshore R&D.
• Nurtured high-performing engineering teams that are empowered, accountable, and are constantly improving.
• Managed technology roadmap and technical debt strategies
• Built and managed DevOps function responsible for deployment orchestration, CI/CD, and infrastructure as code on GCP and AWS.
• Built and managed Cloud Operations Team responsible for 24/7/365 monitoring, incident management, and on-call rotation.
• CISO responsible for designing and managing all information security programs including audits, vendor assessments, ISO-27001, GDPR and CCPA compliance.

Additional Contributions

• Defined core cloud architecture that supported massive scale and performance requirements.
• Designed and built a data warehouse, dashboards, reports, and BI infrastructure.
• Designed and built custom ETL frameworks that support 100s of customer feeds and over 25MM records on a daily basis.
• Designed and built a Bash/Ruby/Python abstraction layer on top of Linux and cloud infrastructure and created a DSL to facilitate platform software integration.
• Managed two cloud migration projects, one to AWS and the other to Google Cloud.
• Negotiated 100s of customer contracts.

True Fit Product &Technology

• Designed to operate at web scale. Highly distributed, serving 1 million personalized recommendations per minute @50ms or less.
• Architecture is made up of dozens of microservices, highly configurable UX layer, JavaScript integration libraries, responsive web UIs, REST APIs, and mobile SDKs.
• 2 PB data lake built on Hive.
• Multiple machine learning pipelines, including NLP and machine vision systems.
• Stack leverages Scala, SQL, MongoDB, Postgres, Spark, RabbitMQ, Memcached, Tableau, Angular, React, AWS, GCP, Jenkins, GitLab, Bash, Ruby, Python, Kubernetes, Ansible, Artifactory, Terraform, Ubuntu, TensorFlow, ElasticSearch, and VertexAI.

Lattice Engines (acquired by Dun & Bradstreet) is an enterprise-grade SaaS solution aimed at increasing the revenue generated by sales organizations by using AI and intelligent workflow. Key customers include Del, HP, Microsoft, and American Express.

• Rebuilt the technology and the engineering team of 15 across development, QA, and product management.
• Led the definition, development, and delivery of the company’s first enterprise product. Defined and implemented software frameworks, engineering processes, metrics, and procedures.
• Promoted to CTO.
• Key technologies: C#, .Net, Flex, IIS, Windows Server, SaaS, SQL Server/Analysis Services.

ProfitLogic (acquired by Oracle) built big data analytics applications for retailers such as The Gap and JC Penny.

• Built product (promotional spend optimization) and team from scratch and managed team of 20 across two sites.
• Developed technical vision, software architecture, build vs buy strategy, and product specification.
• Technical lead for multiple M&A opportunities.
• Technology: Java, SaaS, J2EE, and Adobe Flex/Flash, Web 2.0, rich client UIs, AI, big data.

Frictionless (acquired by SAP) built a SaaS enterprise suite that lets purchasing departments manage and analyze corporate spend. Customers include Aetna, Bristol-Myers Squib, Cigna, MetLife, and Phillip Morris.

• Lead developer of enterprise application framework that powered over a dozen web applications. Developed MVC system that used XML/XSL to separate application/display tiers, built-in BI reports and charts, low-level business object and data persistence, and auto-generated APIs.
• Technology: Java, J2EE, XML/XSL, Oracle

Early career development roles. Part of Motorola's advanced surveillance systems architecture team.

• Developed embedded software for combining and registering radar/video imagery from multiple sources in C++.
• Designed and developed real-time radar visualization application from scratch. Hugely successful architecture and product, selling to multiple government customers and supporting many international missions.
• Acted as technical interface between US and European partners - emphasis on collaboration and joint architecture development.
• Developed large suite of software for displaying intelligence data from non-US surveillance systems.