Laiela Ahmad
Baltimore,MD
Summary
Software Engineering Manager with over 8 year record of technical leadership experience in areas such as web experiences and platform level development. Focused on satisfying stakeholders needs through robust, innovative and forward-thinking solutions. Demonstrated success as operational leader, articulate communicator and practiced influencer. Collaborates across functions to outline and achieve project targets. Skilled in building solid business solutions based on methodologies and engineering principles. Complex problem-solver skilled in developing proposals, integrating technologies, and managing projects.
Overview
9
9
years of professional experience
1
1
Certification
Work History
Software Engineering Manager
Nike Inc,
Beaverton, OR
08.2022 - Current
- Delivered complex software projects from concept to production, with a focus on scalability, reliability, and performance with multiple dependencies across teams
- Retained, mentored and hired engineers and technical leaders with a track record of building productive, world-class engineering teams
- Participate in resolving technical debt, code reviews, architectural discussions, and technical documentation
- Responsible for shaping the end to end vision, technical strategy, roadmap and for delivering solutions that scale with the needs of our engineering teams
- Ownership of top level OKRs based off Annual Operating Priorities and supporter of critical dependencies for other OKRS to ensure we are meeting annual targets for the organization
Software Technology Engineering Manager
T. Rowe Price
Baltimore, MD
01.2021 - 08.2022
- Direct manager of 30 software engineers and three agile teams that are all focused on technology efforts across all business units within the organization with over $2M dollar budget
- Responsible for being the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Application Owner of 15 applications (SaaS based and custom development) that are over $750K value
- Bringing best-in-class market and industry insights to platform and product strategy
- Direct vendor management by monitoring and reporting on the performance of vendors to ensure delivery in line with contractual obligations and performance metrics; contract negotiations
- Produce metrics reported to all levels of management to facilitate decision making, including funding; increased funding year over year since leading the teams
- Lead the creation of an end to end product/platform vision and multi-year roadmap multiple platforms in partnership with Engineering teams and stakeholders
Software Technology Project Manager
T. Rowe Price
Owings Mills, MD
01.2020 - 01.2021
- Partner with stakeholders to understand business needs to create development roadmap that meets those current and future enterprise level features
- Work with development teams to understand technical integrations, debt, and maintenance; Ensure this work is reflected is understood by business partners and prioritized on the roadmap
- Negotiated conflicting priorities and change requests at an enterprise level through influence, positive connections, and technical ability to understand and accept risks
- Lead teams in all scrum ceremonies, managing risks, dependencies, and/or impediments to allow development teams to focus and deliver on priorities set by Product Owners
- Initiated and lead sprint demos with business stakeholders/sponsors which drastically improved collaboration and scope negotiations
Senior Technical Solutions Analyst
T. Rowe Price
Owings Mills, MD
07.2019 - 01.2020
- Lead group of technical analysts to focus on continuous improvement of systems and applications through the design and implementation phases
- Performed quarterly reviews of industry/organizational level changes to platforms and integrations to analyze system level impacts
- Reviewed implementation plans for production deployments to validate features being delivered are up to technical standards and signed off by stakeholders
- Worked with business and engineering partners to prioritize backlog to ensure product is producing new features with low technical debt
- Translated non-technical requirements into user stories and tasks for development team to work on
Technical Solutions Analyst
T. Rowe Price
Owings Mills, MD
06.2016 - 07.2018
- Worked directly with stakeholders to capture details of business to feature requirements, understand use cases and define test needs
- Negotiated with stakeholders to ensure that requested features were prioritized with must-haves vs nice-to-haves for incremental delivery
- Performed system testing based off of requirements and created defects with development team prior to UAT (both technical and non-technical)
- Coordinated UAT with business stakeholders and communicated defects back to development team for review and fixing
- Participated in production deployment calls and validated under time constraints to ensure features were live and met stakeholders requirements
Education
Bachelor of Science - Computer And Information Systems
University of Maryland - Baltimore County
Baltimore, MD12.2015
Skills
- Enterprise level coordination
- Performance and scalability optimization
- Technical ownership of platforms/systems
- Resource management
- Agile work processes
- Product management
- Data-driven thinker
- Skilled communicator
- Decision-making
- Relationship building
- Leadership
- Conflict resolution
- Training & development
- Strong technical skillset
Certification
- Certified Amazon Web Services Cloud Practitioner
- Certified Scrum Master
- Certified Advanced Scrum Master
- Certified Kanban with Scrum
Accomplishments
- Featured in an article at the organizational level at T. Rowe Price for journey to a Senior Technology Manager while significantly impacting efficiently and improving operations
- Featured in T. Rowe Price "Day in the Life of" Campaign as a trailblazer in the Technology space
- Represent T. Rowe Price as a "success story" for recruiting early talent and building a pipeline that allows young talent to lead own path to success
- Invited to speak at multiple university level classes to talk about women in the technology space and how to break through any unconscious biases
Timeline
Software Engineering Manager
Nike Inc,
08.2022 - Current
Software Technology Engineering Manager
T. Rowe Price
01.2021 - 08.2022
Software Technology Project Manager
T. Rowe Price
01.2020 - 01.2021
Senior Technical Solutions Analyst
T. Rowe Price
07.2019 - 01.2020
Technical Solutions Analyst
T. Rowe Price
06.2016 - 07.2018
Bachelor of Science - Computer And Information Systems
University of Maryland - Baltimore County