Principal Software Engineer - Reclaim.ai by Dropbox
Intelligent calendar automation for busy professionals
https://reclaim.ai/

Primarily focused on software engineering; help with product management & design as needed. Reclaim.ai was acquired by Dropbox in August 2024.

• Guide and contribute to a major revision of the product and architecture for agent-oriented calendar assistance and automation, including agent harness, core abstractions and data model, and UX optimized for human-in-the-loop decisions
• Improve core prioritization and scheduling algorithms
• Mentor and guide other engineers in their work, including architecture, UX and user-centered thinking, product quality, and code quality
• Various platform improvements such as introducing use of Postgres partition tables and Temporal
• Two patent applications pending

Explored observability startup ideas

I left Hasura to explore several product ideas for observability solutions. The premises of the explorations were:

• OpenTelemetry has reached a point of maturity that it should be central in most organizations observability strategies
• Developer attention is valuable and limited so provide a UX that is portable across backends (I believe this is possible given OpenTelemetry as a basis)
• Open source ingest, query, and storage solutions have reached a point that organizations producing significant telemetry can achieve better outcomes (developer experience, flexibility, performance, cost) than with incumbent vendors
• There is general dissatisfaction with the fragmented landscape of tools
• The prices for observability tools are too high

I built several prototypes and talked with many people about their needs as users and buyers of observability solutions. Ultimately I didn’t find a wedge into the market that I liked for a startup. The prototypes and ideas focused in these areas:

• Widely distributed storage of telemetry while maintaining great query ergonomics (rather than shipping it to a central location) (not open source)
• UI that fully embraces OpenTelemetry semantics and blends the telemetry types in useful ways (not open source)
• Yet another dashboard system, but intended to be portable for developers and vendor-neutral. A few more details are available at https://github.com/gunrein/westdash.

During this time I also built and published Wallowa as a side project using DuckDB, Rust, TypeScript. Source code is available at https://github.com/gunrein/wallowa.

CTO - Hasura
Open source-core startup focused on automatically creating APIs from databases
https://www.hasura.io/

At Hasura I helped clarify the product and technical strategies while I led the growth and maturation of engineering, product management, and product design into a ~100 person organization.

• Made architectural improvements in all areas of the product and services in support of improving end-user developer experience
• Push the transition to expand past the original codebase implemented in Haskell to take advantage of Rust (runtime performance) and Java (library ecosystem for database drivers)
• Hired strong leaders for engineering and product management; invested in developer experience, product quality, faster lead time and release cadence (from twice per year to every two weeks), architecture improvements, documentation team, and product analytics
• Reorganized Engineering, PM, and Design to increase connection to users, increase team satisfaction, reduce context switching, increase focus, increase ownership, and reduce lead time
• Collaborated with the executive team on business strategy, product strategy, pricing, and packaging; increased transparency through weekly, monthly, and quarterly updates
• Improved processes, tools, and documentation to foster a psychologically safe learning environment that captured knowledge regularly; DORA metrics, incident response, first formal reviews, structure and checklists for improvements, releases, and launches
• Prototyped syntax for new way to express models and relationships

Conservationist - Buncombe Hollow Forest
Restoring native species to suppress invasives and improve beaver habitat and fish passage in this small conservation forest.

Limited Partner - Oregon Venture Fund
https://oregonventurefund.com/
Participated in diligence and investment in multiple companies.

Group VP of Engineering, Group VP of Product - New Relic
Monitoring and observability solution
https://www.newrelic.com/

Progressively took on more responsibility starting in product management then moved into engineering as the company grew from ~350 to ~2200 people. The largest engineering group I was responsible for was between 140 and 150 people.

• At various times led engineering and/or product management for the APM, Infrastructure, Browser, Synthetics, Logging, Serverless, and parts of the platform (not all at once)
• Advocated for and sponsored New Relic's participation in OpenTelemetry and led the engineering group who published New Relic's proprietary agents as open source (some were source available before)
• Coached and mentored leaders; helped grow organizations and teams; fostered the culture
• Helped establish product management as a function

Director of Product - Cedexis
DNS-based adaptive global load balancer using RUM for intelligence
https://www.cedexis.com/

Responsible for product management and design for the RUM (real user monitoring) and DNS-based adaptive global load balancer products.

• Collaborated with the CEO and co-founder on product direction
• Worked closely with the VP of Engineering, engineering team, and designers on requirements and designs; programmed small parts of browser UI
• Worked with sales engineers to understand challenges and opportunities in the field
• Engaged customers around user needs, buyer needs, designs, and the roadmap

Product Manager - Jama Software
Requirements management for complex products and projects
https://www.jamasoftware.com/

A brief tenure focused on product management for the company's requirements management product.

• Organized and led the company's first CAB (customer advisory board) meeting
• Collaborated with the CEO and co-founder on product direction
• Worked closely with the VP of Engineering, engineering team, and designers on requirements and designs
• Engaged customers, sales engineers, and sales reps around user needs, buyer needs, designs, and the roadmap

Senior Product Manager, Engineering Manager, Support Engineer - Jive Software
Enterprise collaboration tools
https://www.jivesoftware.com/

Joined when the company was bootstrapped and < 10 people; grew to about ~350 people.

• Started, led, and managed the customer engineering team which was brought in when there were particularly challenging technical issues with customer deployments
• Product managed Jive's XMPP-based IM server and client as well as the flagship Clearspace product
• Established the support department as the first support engineer focused on scaling and troubleshooting the Java-based server and interfaces to various relational DBs (usually Postgres, Oracle, or DB2)