Aaron Suggs
[email protected]
· he / him / they
· LinkedIn
· GitHub
· Blog
· Chapel Hill, NC
Experience
Senior Engineering Manager at Instructure (April 2023–present)
- Manager-of-managers leading 3-5 teams owning Canvas LMS, with over 5 million DAUs and $300 million+ annual revenue.
- Led an initiative to redefine the IC career ladder and leveling guide for 300 engineers. Result: improved engagement scores on promotion fairness and career growth.
Senior Staff Engineer at Lattice (June–Dec 2022)
Worked on scaling and sustaining socio-technical systems with org-wide impact. Specifically, I:
- Designed and built the event bus system to enable us to decompose a monolithic service.
- Founded Engineering Standards Guild in Nov 2022. In its first month, it defined, promoted, and trained SWEs on consistent practices for error handling, structured logging, & code reviews.
Principal Engineer / Director of Engineering at Glossier (March 2018–Dec 2021)
- Implemented new team capabilities, including: continuous delivery, feature flags, a production readiness review, a security bug bounty program, a robust Incident Response process with blameless learning reviews, and infrastructure-as-code.
- Founded our Operational Excellence cross-functional team to better deliver high availability, low latency, and high quality product features. Result: in the first 6 months, we hit our quarterly 99.95% availability target, reduced site latency by ~25%, and saved several hours of work per engineer each week by fixing 100+ long-standing bugs.
- Conducted ~250 interviews with candidates, mostly on system design and hiring manager screens.
- Guided our SOA roadmap, migrating from a Ruby on Rails/Postgres monolith to small, well-bounded services (usually TypeScript, AWS Lambda, and DynamoDB).
- Managed 9-month frontend migration from Rails-rendered HTML to statically-generated React-based pages to improve time-to-first-byte latency and availability.
- DRI and program manager on the Tech team for Glossier's Black Friday Sale and Peak Holiday readiness. Result: 100% site availability, all services remained within SLOs, and we met ambitious sales targets during our highest traffic days.
- Worked with exec leaders to define and hire roles outside engineering, like Director of IT and Head of Security.
- Held roles as both individual contributor, and manager-of-managers with a team of 18 developers.
Director of Engineering at Kickstarter (2011–2018)
Previously Engineering Manager and Operations Engineer
- Managed Operations, Platform, and Payments Engineering teams
- Served as interim executive leadership for 9 months during VPE search. Managed team of 22, including 2 Eng Managers.
- Created GitHub for Poets program to make development inclusive and accessible. Result: hundreds of code commits from non-engineers; inspired 6+ engineering careers and 1 startup.
- Learned how to coach and mentor engineers and managers
- Overhauled performance evaluations, career ladder, interview, and onboarding processes
- Responsible for multi-million dollar annual engineering services budget and vendor relationships
Prior experience
- Senior DevOps Engineer at Medidata (2010–2011)
- Senior Engineer at Zenbe (2007–2010, acquired by Facebook)
- Developer at Mint Digital (2006–2007)
- Site Admin at arXiv.org (2004–2006)
Selected teaching, writing, and OSS contributions
Education
University of Chicago, B.A. in Mathematics 2004