Brightwheel

Director of Platform Engineering

Vertical SaaS provider for early child care. Lead visionary strategy & execution for platform and data software engineering teams (26 reports including 4 managers) responsible for cloud infrastructure, data engineering, and GTM tech stack, ensuring operational excellence and alignment with regulatory compliance.

START DATE:
May 16, 2022
END DATE:
February 10, 2026

Managed hiring processes for 4 engineers directly, including management roles, participated in loops for 8 hires

for direct reports, and conducted 12 interviews across the organization, contributing to team building and fostering

accountability.

Launched AI-native product features by innovating a service-oriented architecture with mono-repo design and a

data lake, enabling deployments outside the existing monolith and accelerating AI adoption through strategic

thinking and advanced data analytics.

Improved site reliability from 99.5% to 99.95% by reducing EBS failures on RDS through migration to Aurora,

implementing real-time observability dashboards and alarms with New Relic, and offloading non-mission critical

data operations from main databases, ensuring system reliability and enhancing data infrastructure.

Owned contract inventory management and end-to-end procurement for all vendors. Designed a custom

procurement process with Finance to manage $3M in annual SaaS vendor contracts, and adopted a 3rd party

negotiator (Vendr), resulting in $250k in annual savings and demonstrating strong vendor contract management

skills.

Managed a $6M budget for all vendor software & AWS spend. Negotiated vendor contracts and implemented cost-

saving initiatives, saving over $500k over three years. Negotiated the first AWS PPA, leading to an additional $900k

over a three-year period. Implemented AWS cost-saving programs achieving an additional $300k reduction in

annual AWS spend.

Launched a company-wide AI adoption initiative to accelerate innovation and reduce time spent by 75% for

Marketing, Recruiting, and Engineering, showcasing cross-functional leadership and strategic thinking.