Melanie Mitsch
Summary
I am a collaborative leader, excelling in cross-team and multi-level communication, regularly seeking input on projects and striving for best-in-class outcomes as measured by customers and stakeholders. I am able to prioritize and remain focused on necessary outcomes, influencing others to take ownership of work and attaining necessary buy-in at critical times from cross-functional teams. I have demonstrated leadership and technical competency and led teams through various stages of continuous improvement and change management.
Overview
26
26
years of professional experience
Work History
Director, Software Engineering
Workday, Inc
04.2024 - Current
- Trained and guided team members to maintain high productivity and performance metrics.
- Observed each employee's individual strengths and initiated mentoring program to improve areas of weakness.
- Reported issues to higher management with great detail.
- Spearheaded innovative approaches to resource allocation and strategic planning.
- Lead, mentor, and manage your team through the successful delivery of valuable customer software.
- Stay current with emerging technologies and industry trends to drive innovation and strengthen TDD and BDD processes.
- Collaborate closely with Product Management by providing technical guidance on software design.
- Guide your team on best practices, coding standards, and design principles.
- Conduct performance reviews, set goals, and support professional development for team members.
- Measure, inspect, and drive decisions using data.
- Design, test, code, and instrument new solutions.
- Support live applications, promote proactive monitoring, rapid incident response and troubleshooting, and continuous improvement.
- Analyze existing systems and processes to identify bottlenecks and opportunities for improvements.
- Understand how your domain fits into and contributes to the overall company and drive any needed changes to increase productivity.
- Partner with cross functional teams to influence priority, expectations, and timelines within your domain.
- Lead the engineering teams in fully automating continuous code integration and code deployment process on Azure
- Long term Focus on instrumentation and team efficiency and performance measurables
- Drive the long term vision and the strategy to achieve the vision for the technology organization
- Interact and communicate effectively with peer groups, non-technical organizations, and middle management.
- Drive collaboration across technology teams to foster innovation and follow guidelines around re-usability of frameworks and governance of architecture patterns
- Partner with the 3rd party vendors and service providers to ensure best in class service model.
- Drive innovation in the organization with transformative technologies like Generative AI and use of Agentic AI frameworks like Autogen or Langchain.
- Drive the design and architecture of the systems and applications to be always available, performant and highly secure.
Senior Manager, Application Development Engineering
Workday, Inc.
12.2021 - 04.2024
- Manage team of Software Engineers
- Evaluated hiring, firing, and promotions requests.
- Managed large-scale projects and introduced new systems, tools, and processes to achieve challenging objectives.
Senior Manager, Learning Solutions Architects
Workday, Inc.
01.2020 - 12.2021
- Manage team of Program Managers
Senior Manager, Development Education
Workday, Inc.
01.2017 - 01.2020
- Managed team of Program Managers, Instructional Designers and In Class Trainers
Senior Program Manager, Development Education
Workday, Inc.
08.2015 - 01.2017
- Established framework for where Product and Technology Learning & Enablement organization is today
- Understand skills development priorities across product development teams through needs analysis surveys and “roadshow” engagements with leaders and workmates
- Prioritize strategic goals of development organizations for learning enablement opportunities by defining and maintaining organizational roadmap
- Communicate progress of new offerings to organizational stakeholders
- Measure success of deliverables using NPS, effectiveness scores and other measurable learning outcomes
- Partner with other Learning and Enablement Organizations to strengthen and compliment offerings from each other’s teams
- Solicit, evaluate and maintain relationships with 3rd party technical training vendors
- Scale build-out and rollout of large education initiatives to even larger audiences, for example, Onboarding program used by 80% of all new developers
- Improve team output by focusing on “learner experience”, considering needs of audience, needs of development team, and modern learning practices
- Increase scope of team’s deliveries, resulting in career development opportunities and more educational offerings to Development audiences
- Encourage a “Culture of Learning” amongst the Product and Development team
- Enable usage of Workday Learning by Product Development teams in support of showcasing company’s software capabilities
Senior Manager, Release Management and QA
Advent Software
06.2015 - 03.2015
- Direct and Program Manager to globally distributed QA Managers, QA Engineers, Developers and Release Managers
- Improved Release Process for new cloud-based software through close alignment and regular communication with Development teams and Executive Management
- Utilized Agile artifacts to show risks, areas for improvement and success over time
- Brought visibility to successes and failures of “under the radar” enterprise product QA Teams
- Engineered metric reports for QA Managers to better anticipate risks
- Reduced isolation of QA Teams across multiple development projects to a single team, connecting for knowledge and tool sharing
- Stabilized QA Team suffering from low quality of testing and low output leading to bottleneck in release process
- Managed QA, Alpha, Beta and GA processes for all major and minor releases in a 4 year period resulting in turning an 'always late' reputation to an on-time quarterly release cycle
- Managed software engineers through weekly rotating “Fire Marshal” process to handle critical field issues
- Maintained metrics on the process, engineering ways to reduce quantity of field issues and reduce time to resolution
- Supplied communication to senior management about field issues, escalating the most critical to ensure they knew what was happening with customers
- Created onboarding programs for new developers and QA
- Extended company’s load test framework to create a more comprehensive agenda
- Refactored legacy code for a more concise, extendable and performant system
- Developed client-side UI components in C#, including highly used “Search”
- Programmed server-side components in Java, including email engine
Manager, Product Development
Advent Software
06.2005 - 03.2015
Software Engineer
Advent Software
06.2005 - 03.2015
Software Engineer
Quintero-Smith, Inc
07.1999 - 06.2005
- Programmed company’s logic-based, Windows software package, using C
- Maintained proprietary database for company’s patented software
- Increased company clientele by demonstrating company’s software potential at trade shows
- Researched and facilitated ideas for new industries in which company can expand
- Extended company’s internal software program to better serve changing needs
Education
B.S. - Computer Science in Engineering
University of Notre Dame
Elevate program, selected to be one of 10 high performing participates in pilot group with access to BetterUp as means receiving career coaching and whole person improvement
Workday
LEAD program, selected to be one of 16 to participate in Advent’s pilot “LEAD” program, “Leadership Exploration and Development” program for accelerated leadership
Advent Software
received 200 hours of yoga teacher training to become a yoga instructor
O2 Yoga Teacher Training Program
Skills
- Actor guidance
- People management
- Performance management
- Financial management
Timeline
Director, Software Engineering
Workday, Inc
04.2024 - Current
Senior Manager, Application Development Engineering
Workday, Inc.
12.2021 - 04.2024
Senior Manager, Learning Solutions Architects
Workday, Inc.
01.2020 - 12.2021
Senior Manager, Development Education
Workday, Inc.
01.2017 - 01.2020
Senior Program Manager, Development Education
Workday, Inc.
08.2015 - 01.2017
Senior Manager, Release Management and QA
Advent Software
06.2015 - 03.2015
Manager, Product Development
Advent Software
06.2005 - 03.2015
Software Engineer
Advent Software
06.2005 - 03.2015
Software Engineer
Quintero-Smith, Inc
07.1999 - 06.2005
Elevate program, selected to be one of 10 high performing participates in pilot group with access to BetterUp as means receiving career coaching and whole person improvement
Workday
LEAD program, selected to be one of 16 to participate in Advent’s pilot “LEAD” program, “Leadership Exploration and Development” program for accelerated leadership
Advent Software
received 200 hours of yoga teacher training to become a yoga instructor
O2 Yoga Teacher Training Program
B.S. - Computer Science in Engineering
University of Notre Dame
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