KAREN GILLISON

● Managed 9 projects and budgets of $2.1M for the freight rail industry and their customers.
● Led and organized 3 in-house software teams and 2 offshore teams of 18 Software and QA Engineers to consistently deliver value with high quality releases of new features and enhancements.
● Turned around a stalled project so that it is now on track to deliver on time and within budget this December.
● Built relationships with Product partners, guiding them to define scope and priorities while understanding tradeoffs so that we build work that maximizes the value of our budget.
● Facilitated working sessions to move from monolithic to service-based architecture.
● Introduced retrospectives, realizing immediate process and communication improvements.
● Interviewed and onboarded 2 new Senior Software Engineers and wrote an onboarding plan template to standardize setup, share relevant project information and help new team members get up to speed quickly.
● Conducted one-on-ones with team members, held career conversations and wrote mid-year reviews.

Led a cross-functional team of 20 people, including Software Engineers, Product, Ux/Design, Data and Analytics,
and Quality Assurance in the group buying space, generating $95M of annual revenue.
● Directed the build-out of Online Stores a cloud-based, autoscaling, e-commerce platform, delivering features
including profit generation and tracking; analytics dashboards; and self-serve onboarding.
● Launched consolidation of 3 group buying products into a unified Community Platform to improve operational
efficiency by 65% at completion. Integrated all 3 with NetSuite Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).
● Championed and launched a new knowledge management system tackling siloed expertise. Initial results show
reduced duplication and increased efficiency, tracking towards achieving $1M in annual savings.
● Grew careers by recruiting, interviewing, hiring, building skills, expertise, and confidence. Built high-performing,
and cohesive teams.
● Strategically formed and led an ad hoc Maintenance Team, successfully directing the execution of 39 critical
upgrades across 20 systems within the E-Commerce department and improving our security posture.
● Led a study with fellow Engineering Managers, Principal Engineers and Directors on Team Topologies / Conway's Law to improve team utilization on cross-cutting initiatives which resulted in higher project success for the initiatives, enhanced knowledge transfer for the owning teams, and reduced employee turnover.
● Elevated individual contributors into management through targeted mentoring.
● Planned hackathons with ~100 participants to foster innovation and improve team connectedness.
● Built alignment across the diverse team through focus on OKRs, regular communication and shared tracking.

● Conducted retrospectives to help the team adopt process improvements and resolve long standing issues.
● Tracked, triaged and prioritized issues and risks to ensure successful project delivery.

Starting as a Software Engineer before moving into management, built a cloud based, multi-tenant claims
processing system for large scale mass tort settlements, including the Volkswagen Diesel Emissions Settlement, which processed 650,000 claims and paid out over $10 billion.

● Led a team of 40 people including Software Developers, Quality Assurance Engineers, Devops Engineers and Data Analysts in the successful design and delivery of multiple systems to manage complex conflict resolution.

● Interviewed operations team members and stakeholders to gather their needs. Documented user stories and acceptance criteria. Prioritized features to deliver the most value. Facilitated agile processes.
● Held special Kaizen meetings to work through difficult team issues.
● Built custom case and claim data collection flow, backed by rich auditing, data versioning and pre-processing
engine to provide insufficient data warnings. Implemented complex workflow with multiple escalation and quality
control paths. Implemented a severity-rating rubric to assign claim severity based on multiple factors.

● Designed an at-a-glance monitoring app to track the status of multiple settlements, including custom per settlement metrics, general security patches and updates needed.

● Managed 12 employees and subcontractors. Planned iterative project cycles, coordinated resources, budgets and schedules to deliver high quality software that meets clients' needs.

● Met with prospective and active clients to determine needs, plan technological direction and flesh out product
ideas. Worked with clients to set priorities that maximize value delivered. Negotiated with and managed vendors
and third-party service providers. Extensive client interaction.
● Designed and built applications, including multi-tenant, SaaS applications, high availability (HA) linux, subscription payment processing, workflows, reports, data import, social networking, database level encryption, v oucherredemption, mobile apps, Twitter (X) integrations, content management systems, YouTube integrations,
geographic search, dynamically generated survey tools, and fillable PDF forms using RoR, Mysql, and Objective-C.

Tracked critical path and burn rates, delivering projects on-time. Extensive customer interaction, eliciting requirements, collaborating to determine priority/schedule fit. Delivered software, training and support. Designed and developed multiple features for large J2EE project. Task lead for several features. Demonstrated process improvement leadership in implementing a peer review process and facilitating project retrospectives. Technical Achievement Award 2001 & 2006.

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science

Bachelor of Science in Psychology