Aaron Suggs
[email protected]
· LinkedIn
· GitHub
· Blog
· Chapel Hill, NC
Hands-on engineering leader focused on scaling products and teams from zero. 15+ years across early-stage and high-growth startups, founding teams and delivering foundational systems. Operates as an IC or people manager as needed, with a systems-thinking focus to build scalable teams and architectures. Enjoys coaching, exploiting bottlenecks, finding leverage. Looking to build and scale new products.
Experience
Senior Engineering Manager at Instructure (April 2023–present)
- Sept 2024–present: founded the team to build the Canvas Career product. Grew the team to 19 engineers in 3 squads—including iOS, Android, and backend engineers—each with an EM/Tech Lead, Product Manager, and Designer. Canvas Career achieved General Availability in Jan 2026, and is on track to meet ambitious revenue milestones. Drove GTM strategy with Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success leaders to target new market segments.
- April 2023–Aug 2024: manager-of-managers leading ~30 engineers responsible for many parts of Canvas LMS, serving over 5 million DAUs and $400 million annual revenue—requiring high-reliability, scalable foundational architecture across mobile (iOS/Android) and backend surfaces.
- My teams led adoption of AI-assisted coding practices, particularly with Claude Code and agentic workflows. We delivered AI-focused product features built on AWS Bedrock such as Learner Assist, Skills Extractor, and AI-powered content generation for instructors; and dramatically improved developer productivity and code quality across the SDLC with AI-assisted code generation, documentation, testing, and review practices.
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 decomposition of a monolithic service—core platform infrastructure.
- 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)
- Founded our Operational Excellence cross-functional team to deliver high availability, low latency, and reliability as foundational platform capabilities. 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.
- Implemented foundational DevEx systems adopted org-wide: continuous delivery, feature flags (enabling product experimentation at scale), a production readiness review, a robust Incident Response process with blameless learning reviews, and infrastructure-as-code.
- Led our SOA roadmap, migrating from a Ruby on Rails/Postgres monolith to small, well-bounded services (usually TypeScript, AWS Lambda, and DynamoDB), improving scalability and long-term reliability across the platform.
- Managed frontend migration from Rails-rendered HTML to statically-generated React-based pages to improve time-to-first-byte latency and availability across client surfaces.
- 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.
- Conducted ~250 interviews with candidates, mostly on system design and hiring manager screens.
- 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. 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.
- Overhauled performance evaluations, career ladder, interview, and onboarding processes
- Responsible for multi-million-dollar annual engineering services budget and vendor relationships
Selected Leadership & Industry contributions
Education
University of Chicago, B.A. in Mathematics, 2004