Email: dylant at hey dot com | Website: Bits By Me | LinkedIn: Dylan Thomas

I am a highly experienced technical leader and builder of remote teams. I balance open communication and team harmony with a strong focus on customer value. Nothing makes me happier than getting things shipped to customers with an appropriately high quality bar.

Work Experience

Woolpert

Remote

Cloud Solutions Director

Jan 2019 to Present

Leadership with EQ. Defined brand new roles and ways of working within a traditional corporate environment. Psychological safety, a culture of learning, and goals based on reality rather than hope.
Scaling teams. Hired a team of 12 engineers (and counting) as both team leads and individual contributors. Established a repeatable hiring process with core and technical skill components and a high bar. Established an org chart that can scale.
Technical delivery. Closed and delivered consulting engineering work worth $450,000. Established pre-award R&D goals, work estimation, co-authored the technical proposal, and led agile project delivery.
Product. Formed and led the team that defined, built, and sold our first SaaS product. As product leader I defined the SLOs and SLAs, directed the engineering team daily, and directed all aspects of go to market.
Acquisitions. Technical reviewer for acquisitions, providing valued input on GO/NOGO decisions related to technical risk, technical staff, and product roadmap feasibility.
Open source. Led the effort to release our first open source solution, GeoAwareness. Writing and promoting open data standards in an industry that is not known for openess.

Google

Mountain View, California and Remote

Head of Partner Engineers, Android Automotive — 2014-2018

Leadership. Founding team member 2014, global lead from 2015. I built and led a global hybrid remote team of 15+ technical staff. We got Android Auto embedded and shipping with 75+ industry partners in 130+ head unit variants in the first 24 months.
Global technology partnerships. Fully accountable for the first global Android automotive engineering partnerships with most OEMs and their entire Tier 1 supply chains. Influencing platform and hardware/software roadmaps across an industry.
Scaling technical delivery. Formulated the reproducible certification process applicable to all partners and internal teams, thus scaling certification throughput. This ultimately led me to start a 3rd Party Labs (“3PL”) outsourced certification program to dramatically increase the reach of the product.
Technical thought leadership. The auto industry has a strong driver safety focus, leading to numerous one-off conversations with Android UX and PM. I codified those nascent discussions into an unambiguous, holistic spec using clear RFC2119-style language.
Technical clarity. Led and contributed to an effort to clarify the Android Auto protocol-level integration spec resulting in: an improved test suite to cover all MUST cases; greater clarity for all engineers integrating Android Auto into their head units.
Corporate citizenship. Sat on TPM hiring committee reviewing 50+ candidate packages for hire/no hire decisions, and personally interviewed 70+ technical and non-technical candidates.

Google Maps Program Manager — 2012-2014

Program Leadership. Founder of Geo Customer Success Services; I provided leadership for the practice, including program management and project execution. On a day-to-day basis I served as a technical advisor and advocate for strategic Google Maps OEMs, touching 27% of Geo revenue and key name brands.
2013 Enterprise Operations Chief of Staff. As a successful program manager I was selected for one of four global spots on the OCS leadership rotation in Singapore. Covered six countries in six weeks with great international business exposure alongside Google’s regional leadership team.

Other Experience

Stay at home Dad — 2018-2019 (Denver, Colorado)

Took 5 wonderful months away from corporate life to settle the family into Denver after a move from San Francisco.
Did a lot of school-related activities, and finally got both of them confidently riding bikes.
Learned to cook better, and about the benefit of mise en place a.k.a. prep!

Microsoft — 2010-2012 (Mountain View, California)

Senior Program Manager on Bing. Defined and executed the plan by leading large (20+) teams across Eng and QA.
I defined, scoped, and planned feature releases, and ran stand-up meetings.
Prototyped, owned the product backlog, and was accountable for final delivery on user-facing features on MSN.com.

Woolpert — 2004–2010 (Denver and Seattle remote)

As Consulting Software Engineer I provided technical leadership and coaching to 20 software engineers and system analysts.
Delivered core business objects and persistence tier for $8M suite of applications and data at a major U.S. airport.
As Project Manager I opened a new remote office in Seattle, Washington; I pitched, won, and delivered technical contracts in the $20K-$250K range.

Skills

Management: Balanced Leadership, Remote Leadership, Growing teams, Agile Delivery, Technical Partnerships

Technical: mostly Python, Google Cloud with Go, Ruby on Rails, Terraform, PostgreSQL, bash as needed.

Education

University of North Carolina: 1993-1996; Masters of Arts in Geography; Charlotte, North Carolina
University of Reading: 1989-1991; Bachelor of Science in Geography; Reading, United Kingdom

Other

U.S. and U.K. citizen