Aaron Suggs

[email protected] · he / him · LinkedIn · GitHub · Blog · Chapel Hill, NC

I'm seeking an engineering leadership role to build sustainable teams and products that improve society and culture.

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 to safely test in production, a production readiness checklist, 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 last 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 2019 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 various roles as needed: 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.
• Sourced VPE and several engineers through my network
• 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 interviews, articles, and OSS contributions

• StaffEng interview
• Guiding principles for build vs. buy decisions — LeadDev
• How to Champion Investments to Improve Documentation — DX Fieldnotes
• Redefining Productivity panelist with Paul Ford, Ryn Daniels, and Katie Womersley — Increment / Stripe Events
• Engineering Manager Workshop - Glossier’s Into the Tech blog
• Creator of rack-attack: ruby middleware for throttling abusive requests (used by Tesla and GitLab)
• Contributor to the AWS CDK, AWS SDK for Ruby, and Rubygems.org infrastructure

Education

University of Chicago, B.A. in Mathematics 2004