KNOX S. WHEATLEY
Carlsbad,CA
Summary
Engineering executive with 15+ years leading global teams to deliver cloud native, mission critical platforms across adtech, fintech, and connected fleet. Known for translating strategy into roadmaps, aligning product and engineering, and shipping resilient systems with strong cost, security, and reliability guardrails. Comfortable from code to boardroom, with a track record in org design, platform modernization, and regulated environments. Recently completed Penn Engineering’s Artificial Intelligence Essentials and actively expanding skills in applied ML for platform efficiency and developer productivity.
Overview
11
11
years of professional experience
1
1
Certification
Work History
Senior Director, System and Service Operations; Senior Director, Software Engineering
INDEX EXCHANGE
REMOTE
04.2022 - 09.2025
- Scope. Senior leader across software engineering and production operations for a global adtech platform. Progressed from running software delivery to owning cross functional system and service operations.
- Cross functional leadership. Orchestrated product, platform, SRE, and security stakeholders to improve reliability, latency, and developer throughput for revenue critical services.
- Platform hardening. Drove observability, incident response, and post incident learning practices that reduced time to detect and time to restore across core services.
- Delivery excellence. Instituted portfolio planning and quarterly business reviews to align capacity with business priorities, improving predictability and stakeholder confidence.
- Talent and coaching. Hired, mentored, and grew managers and senior ICs; clarified career ladders and set measurable expectations for outcomes, quality, and leadership behaviors.
- Scope. Senior leader across software engineering and production operations for a global adtech platform. Progressed from running software delivery to owning cross functional system and service operations.
Senior Director, Software Engineering
SOLERA (VIA OMNITRACS ACQUISITION OF SMARTDRIVE)
SAN DIEGO, CA
06.2021 - 04.2022
- Scope. Senior engineering leader in a multi acquisition environment integrating products and teams in fleet safety, operations, and telematics.
- Post merger integration. Unified roadmaps, standards, and operating rhythms across acquired teams to reduce duplication and accelerate shared platform investments.
- Cloud and reliability. Partnered with operations to uplift service SLAs and security posture for fleet facing workloads handling high volume telemetry and video data.
- Executive alignment. Translated product strategy into pragmatic sequencing and investment proposals with clear cost, risk, and value tradeoffs.
- Scope. Senior engineering leader in a multi acquisition environment integrating products and teams in fleet safety, operations, and telematics.
Senior Director, Operations
OMNITRACS (ACQUIRER OF SMARTDRIVE)
SAN DIEGO, CA
08.2020 - 09.2021
- Scope. Owned Production Operations, IT, Cloud Operations, and Network functions supporting connected fleet solutions.
- Operational maturity. Implemented SLOs, error budgets, and runbook driven operations; improved on call health and incident communications with customers.
- Cost and capacity. Introduced environment lifecycle policies and capacity forecasting to balance performance with spend.
- Scope. Owned Production Operations, IT, Cloud Operations, and Network functions supporting connected fleet solutions.
Director, Software Engineering
SMARTDRIVE SYSTEMS
SAN DIEGO, CA
01.2019 - 10.2020
- Scope. Directed software engineering for driver safety and video intelligence products later acquired by Omnitracs.
- Shipping value. Led multiple cross functional squads delivering customer requested analytics and integrations that increased adoption and retention.
- Team building. Recruited senior technical leaders, clarified ownership boundaries, and matured agile practices to improve cycle time and quality.
- Scope. Directed software engineering for driver safety and video intelligence products later acquired by Omnitracs.
Director of Software Engineering; Scrum Master; Technical Lead
FICO
SAN DIEGO, CA
10.2014 - 01.2019
- Scope. Led a 12 person engineering team delivering Application Fraud Manager across on prem and cloud deployments.
- Product growth. Product strategy. Partnered with product to define and present the roadmap; shipped versions 3.1 through 3.4 with features that expanded market share and revenue growth from roughly 1M to 15M.
- Technology leadership. Architecture. Guided design and development using Spring, Couchbase, Elasticsearch, XML and JSON services, JavaScript, and REST APIs; supported both FAC and AWS deployments.
- Ways of working. Change management. Migrated teams from Rally to Jira and from SVN to Git to increase transparency and collaboration.
- Customer engagement. Stakeholder management. Served as customer liaison for key accounts to de risk deployments and accelerate value realization.
- Earlier career available on request: engineering leadership and architecture roles across fintech and enterprise software including Tillster, Kinzan, and additional Union Bank assignments.
Education
B.S. - Computer Information Science
Regis University
MBA Coursework - undefined
Regis University
Skills
- Engineering Strategy and Roadmapping Org Design and Scaling Platform Modernization Cloud Architecture and Operations Site Reliability and Incident Management Data and Event Driven Systems Budgeting and Vendor Management Security, Compliance, and Governance Agile Delivery and Portfolio Management Executive Stakeholder Management Collaborative leadership Culture transformation Team management Policy development
- Technical Toolkit: AWS Go Lang Java Python REST and event driven services Spring Elasticsearch Couchbase Oracle and MySQL AngularJS and modern JS frameworks Git and Jira CI and CD practices Observability and performance engineering Containers and orchestration GraphQL SaaS SOA and integration patterns
Certification
- Certified Scrum Master (CSM)
- Artificial Intelligence Essentials – University of Pennsylvania, School of Engineering
Timeline
Senior Director, System and Service Operations; Senior Director, Software Engineering
INDEX EXCHANGE
04.2022 - 09.2025
Senior Director, Software Engineering
SOLERA (VIA OMNITRACS ACQUISITION OF SMARTDRIVE)
06.2021 - 04.2022
Senior Director, Operations
OMNITRACS (ACQUIRER OF SMARTDRIVE)
08.2020 - 09.2021
Director, Software Engineering
SMARTDRIVE SYSTEMS
01.2019 - 10.2020
Director of Software Engineering; Scrum Master; Technical Lead
FICO
10.2014 - 01.2019
MBA Coursework - undefined
Regis University
B.S. - Computer Information Science
Regis University
Leadership Highlights
- Revenue and product growth. Expanded FICO Application Fraud Manager revenue from approximately 1M to 15M over three years by leading product direction and shipping high value features for on prem and cloud customers.
- Org scaling. Built and led multi team organizations of 50 to 140+ engineers and leaders across onshore and offshore models while improving velocity, quality, and cost transparency.
- Cloud efficiency. Cut AWS spend by 50 percent in a prior role through instance right sizing, snapshot governance, and disciplined environment management.
- Change leadership. Led toolchain migrations that improved delivery flow and collaboration, including Rally to Jira and SVN to Git.