Apr 2025 – Present
Team Lead, Customer Experience (CX)
Oct 2024 – Apr 2025
Staff Software Engineer
Milliman IntelliScript, Remote
SaaS products for life insurance underwriting and risk assessment, used by underwriters, clinicians, and insurance professionals.
Leadership
- Lead a 10-person team organized as two product teams, reporting to the Director of Engineering. Roughly doubled sprint throughput on one team over the past year as shared tooling matured and team practices tightened.
- Set team norms for daily coordination, developer-to-developer communication, and code review depth that raised the quality bar for everything the team ships.
- Shape front-end hiring across engineering: interview design, front-end contract, and full-stack candidates for multiple teams, and redesigned the front-end interview process to bring in senior engineers with strong front-end skills.
- Handle the full range of people management, including career coaching, supporting a team member's move to a team that better fit her goals, and managing a performance improvement plan through to a final decision.
- Founded and run a biweekly front-end Community of Practice (about 14 regular attendees) that reviews Sable and blueprint changes, gathers needs from product teams, and covers topics like AI tooling, observability, and design review.
- Run workshops for the CX team and the wider engineering org on AI tooling and how to use it well at low cost.
Architecture and engineering
- Grew Sable, the company's published React 19 and TypeScript design system, from about 25 to about 60 components used by 7 product applications. Took it from no automated testing, linting, or accessibility tooling to 100% unit test and Storybook coverage.
- Serve as front-end architect in an organization without a dedicated role. Wrote about 10 architecture decision records (ADRs), ratified with the system architect, and built them into Next.js, React SPA, and micro-frontend blueprints that set up Vite, MSW, TanStack Query, Zustand, and Datadog RUM. One new team credited the Next.js blueprint and Sable with saving weeks on its way to market.
- Migrated 3 applications from Webpack to Vite, cutting local dev server startup from about a minute to under 5 seconds.
- Built Sable's DataTable, a single component that handles custom sorting, custom cell rendering, nested sub-rows, and embedded data visualizations. Used in 4 applications, with 3 more migrating to it from AG Grid.
- Restructured the global layout and CSS of live production applications to support persistent navigation with independently scrolling content, using visual regression testing and UAT to avoid breaking anything. Shipped in 2 applications so far.
- Built the CX team's AI development toolkit: a spec-driven development workflow (5 agents), a pull request review workflow (8 agents, including a dedicated accessibility reviewer), and a QA skill that runs build, lint, and tests before review. Shared with the wider engineering org.
Speaking
- “User-Centered Design in Practice”, Milliman Technology Forum, Huntington Beach, CA