Justin Roman

Engineering Leader

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    Professional Experience


    Justworks

    New York, NY

    Engineering Manager, Payroll & Tax Unit

    Feb 2023 – Present

    • Manage 5-10 engineers (hybrid and offshore) with a focus on weekly 1-1s and career growth
    • Standardized Jira ticket types and workflows for my new team
    • Took over as technical liaison for a contracted project; set technical standards (complete with code samples), reviewed/approved SOWs
    • Standardized bug reporting and feature request intake process for our operations team, complete with automation to assign the appropriate team
    • Built custom Slack workflows team- and organization-wide
    • Hands-on coding to learn the technology stack and the domain
    Technologies: Ruby on Rails, React, MySQL, Docker, AWS

    LeafLink

    New York, NY

    Director of Engineering, Logistics

    Feb 2022 – Jan 2023

    • Oversaw the entire Logistics domain (3 EMs, 1 Staff, and 24 ICs), which focused on storage, fulfillment, transportation, and compliance services at LeafLink
    • Directly managed the day-to-day operations of the Logistics Experience pod while overseeing two other pods: Operations Tech and Traceability (compliance)
    • Oversaw the evaluation process of a potential vendor partnership
    • Launched our Logistics tech offering to four new markets (CO, IL, MA, PA)
    • Revamped our Logistics domain Information Architecture to streamline new team member onboarding
    • Project-managed cross-departmental initiatives (e.g., Django upgrades, third-party dependency upgrades, migration squashing)
    • Worked closely with a Product counterpart to pilot and implement a new Scrum process

    Senior Engineering Manager, Logistics

    Feb 2021 – Feb 2022

    • Contributed to the healthy growth of the Logistics domain from 5 members to 24+ cross-functional members, including Product, Product Design, Engineering, Engineering Management, DevOps, and QA
    • Directly managed six individuals (two EMs, four ICs) plus nine offshore engineers. Focus on weekly 1-1s, career growth conversations, and personal OKRs
    • Coached/mentored fellow EMs and ICs to help facilitate their personal/professional growth
    • Focused on department growth plans and upward mobility opportunities for individuals to fill those gaps
    • Built cross-functional partnerships via regular 1-1s (e.g., Director of Product, Logistics; Logistics Managers; VP of Logistics)
    • Helped identify the long-term product and technical goals of the domain, identifying the work necessary to reach said goals
    • Planned for future infrastructure, tooling, resourcing, hardware, and training/education needs, working with team members to identify budgetary asks/needs
    • Defined the near-term and long-term future domain/pod structure, collaborating with stakeholders to forecast, plan, and implement future domain structure based on business goals

    Engineering Manager

    Oct 2019 – Feb 2021

    • Acted as the technical lead for two cross-functional engineering pods (Enterprise SaaS Tools and API+Integrations)
    • Managed 10+ engineers (onshore, remote, and offshore) with a focus on weekly 1-1s, career growth, and personal OKRs
    • Focused heavily on hiring across all teams, from ICs to management
    • Revamped the interview process to more accurately and objectively assess candidates
    • Remained hands-on in feature development and bug fixing
    • Optimized scrum processes to promote better development efficiency
    • Streamlined our local development environment by rolling out a standardized setup (utilizing Docker Compose) to all developers
    Technologies: Docker, Bash, Python (Django), HTML, CSS, JavaScript (Vue.js, jQuery), AWS

    SoulCycle

    New York, NY

    Engineering Manager/Senior Engineering Manager

    Jan 2018 – Oct 2019

    • Held regularly scheduled 1-1s with peers and direct reports to discuss day-to-day concerns, address any blockers, and focus on career pathing
    • Provided technical guidance by mentoring engineers via pair programming, code reviews, and technical design conversations
    • Helped drive informed department-wide technical and architectural decisions
    • Aided in building the team by authoring/updating job descriptions/open roles, performing resume/phone screens, and conducting onsite interviews
    • Documented a standardized interview process and designed technical coding challenges for multiple backend and frontend languages/frameworks
    • Promoted the growth of direct reports by helping create and attain career goals
    • Enhanced the local development environment and contributed to our production microservice architecture with hands-on coding
    • Managed the design, development, and release of a user authentication microservice for use by our newly overhauled e-commerce platform
    • Introduced better application insights with a semantically versioned StatsD library for use across all of our Node.js microservices
    • Defined the documentation standard and migrated microservices from API Blueprint to OpenAPI Spec
    • Proposed and implemented process enhancements to aid in increased team velocity
    • Led team ceremonies such as stand-ups, sprint planning, iteration reviews, and retrospectives
    Technologies: Node.js (Express, Sinon.JS, Mocha, Chai.js), PHP (Directus, PHPUnit), HTML, CSS, JavaScript (jQuery), Docker, Bash, GCP, Pub/Sub, Kubernetes, Datadog, Firebase

    Schoology

    New York, NY

    Lead Software Engineer

    Nov 2016 – Dec 2017

    • Simultaneously managed multiple projects while planning upcoming initiatives
    • Planned the team’s upcoming work and maintained the backlog
    • Ensured the utmost code quality by introducing automated modern coding standards (including a self-authored package imported via GitHub)
    • Led the initiative for upgrading PHP from 5.6 to 7.0 without any regressions
    • Migrated the job queue code from a set of untestable global functions to testable OOP classes with 100% test coverage and no regressions
    • Led/reviewed architectural designs
    • Acted as a consultant for critical software decisions throughout the organization
    • Accurately reported team and project statuses regularly to upper management
    • Mentored and coached intern, junior, mid-level, and senior-level engineers
    • Interviewed potential candidates to help grow the organization
    • Helped maintain and expand the test automation framework

    Senior Software Engineer

    Nov 2014 – Nov 2016

    • Introduced OOP, modern PHP code structure, and class autoloading
    • Implemented Composer and imported the Laravel framework into the legacy Drupal 6 framework
    • Built and incorporated a proper unit test framework (PHPUnit) and mock object library (Mockery) to promote test automation across the organization
    • Coded and launched an MVP feature to gain our largest contract at the time
    • Aided in the technical design of our new microservice architecture
    • Led the development of our first microservice project by building the Portfolio feature microservice backend from the ground up
    Technologies: PHP (Drupal, Laravel, PHPUnit, Mockery), MySQL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript (jQuery, React), MongoDB, Docker

    PeerStream, Inc. (formerly SNAP Interactive, Inc.)

    New York, NY

    Senior Software Engineer/Team Lead

    May 2013 – Oct 2014

    • Utilized A/B framework and Splunk to build, analyze, and celebrate/iterate/obliterate new features
    • Created full-fledged Events feature for New York and London singles
    • Built and tested a new user funnel leading to a 25-30% increase in user confirmations
    • Performed duties as a team lead focused on growth, user funnel, payments, and anti-spam
    • Deployed robust features covered by unit, integration, and API tests
    Technologies: PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript (jQuery), Splunk, Ruby (Selenium)

    Vochee.com/Vochee LLC

    Kenilworth, NJ

    Founder

    Jan 2012 – Feb 2014

    • Built a web application from the ground up (frontend, backend, and infrastructure)
    • Managed Amazon cloud-based servers and services, including EC2 and CloudFront
    • Created and maintained a custom-built image server for cropping/rotating/serving images via a web API
    • Integrated PayPal Adaptive Payments and Adaptive Accounts with a custom-built PayPal SDK
    • Handled all business aspects of the company (SSL certificates, LLC, banking, social networking)
    Technologies: PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript (jQuery), AWS, EC2, Nginx

    CollegeHumor (CH Media/Connected Ventures/IAC)

    New York, NY

    Senior Web Developer

    Jul 2010 – May 2013

    • Developed core components and extensions of a proprietary MVC framework
    • Built robust and flexible features shared by five sites (Collegehumor.com, Dorkly.com, SportsPickle.com, Jest.com, CHMedia.com) totaling 120+ million page views per month
    • Utilized OOP concepts in the development of new and upgraded features/enhancements
    • Assumed manager role/day-to-day tasks when the Director of Backend Technology was on leave
    • Built (from the ground up) and maintained the company website (CH Media)
    • Significant feature ownership: Form Validation, Toplists, Video Encoding, Email/SMS, Image Rendering
    • Integrated PayPal Instant Payment Notification (IPN) API to allow access to exclusive content
    • Onboarded new employees, introducing them to the framework
    Technologies: PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript (jQuery)

    EarthCam Inc.

    Hackensack, NJ

    Web Developer/Programmer

    Aug 2009 – Jul 2010

    • Designed and implemented content management tools utilized by editorial/design teams
    • Implemented software for automatic configuration and quality control of the products
    • Coordinated with the sales team to generate new and marketable features for the flagship product
    • Built a POST client in C embedded directly on the camera systems for file uploading
    Technologies: PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript (jQuery), C

    Education


    Temple University

    Philadelphia, PA

    Bachelor of Science in Computer Science

    Dec 2008

    • Summa Cum Laude, Distinction in Major, Multiple Dean’s List Honoree
    • 3.85 GPA

    Personal Projects


    • Personal OKR Tracker – Node.js, PostgreSQL, Vue.js, Docker, Bash
    • localenv – Bash (GitHub)
    • PHP Coding Standards – PHP (GitHub)
    • War Game – PHP (GitHub)
    • Library DVD Management System – PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript
    • Sudoku Solver – Java, C#

    Technical Experience


    Proficient with:

    PHP (Laravel, Drupal, Directus, Kohana, CodeIgniter, Custom Frameworks, Composer, PHPUnit, Mockery), Node.js (Express, NPM, Yarn, Sinon.JS, Mocha, Chai.js, Jest), Python (Django, web.py), Git, Bitbucket, GitHub, GitHub Actions, AWS, GCP, Docker (Compose), Kubernetes, Pub/Sub, HTML (Blade, Twig, Smarty, Handlebars), CSS, JavaScript (jQuery, Angular, Vue.js, React), Linux (Alpine, Ubuntu), SQL (MySQL, PostgreSQL), NoSQL (MongoDB), Datadog, APM (AppDynamics, New Relic), Sumo Logic, Splunk, JSON, YAML, XML, Regex, A/B Testing, Apache, Nginx, Caching (Redis, Memcached), Agile, Scrum

    Experience with:

    Ruby on Rails, Selenium, C, Java (Android), C#, Auth0, Firebase, Solr, Lucene, Beanstalkd, Log.io, Varnish (VCL), Zencoder Video Transcoding, PayPal, Gimp, SVN