Dustin Diaz

Los Angeles, CA

People-focused Engineering Leader and 3× entrepreneur with 21 years experience building happy, high-performing teams and awesome products.

History

Feb '23 - Present

Head of Engineering

Series A, Cloud-native SaaS PLM for disruptive hardware teams

  • Managing technical operations for 50-employee company, onboarding all new team members across Sales, CS, Marketing, and Engineering
  • Managing 25 distributed developers across four teams — Web, Platform, Integrations, & DevOps
  • Led new-hire, onboarding playbooks, and candidate guides leading to 400% growth in engineering
  • Hands on development of Platform micro-services, 3rd party integrations, RBAC systems, AI implementations, and architecture reviews.
  • Radically reduced shipping cycle times from 1.2 deploys per month to 1.0 deploys per day in six months
  • Adopted Agile methodologies, improving workflow efficiency and increased project completion by 50%.
  • Led the implementation of SOC 2 Type 2 compliance, strengthening platform security and driving a 25% increase in enterprise revenue
  • Created and implemented Engineering competency matrix, engineering values, and engineering career levels with accompanying pay bands
  • Fostered a culture of continuous learning and growth, initiating a mentoring and coaching program that enhanced team skills and collaboration
  • Led monthly Engineering all-hands, company Demos, and Business all-hands.
Technical Strategic Planning / RoadmapProject EngineeringEngineering ManagementLeadership DevelopmentCoaching, MentoringAgile MethodologiesTechnical Recruiting/Hiring
May '22 - Dec '22

Director of Engineering

Led teams. Developed org roadmap with applied OKR strategies. A people-first Engineering leader building team process and culture through strategic planning that aligned business vision/priorities with technology. Optimized developer productivity through the SPACE framework for high efficiency fostering a high-trust/low-blame culture, increasing weekly shipping cycle times by 1.5x, balancing delivery of fulfilling challenges and people happiness across mobile, web, data, qa, and fullstack teams.

Advised and partnered in management development through educational programs to grow Route's leaders, leveling up several engineers to leads, and leads to managers. Led performance reviews and calibration feedback cycles. Advised on understanding engineering productivity metrics that made impact to 50 engineers.

Technical Strategic PlanningProject EngineeringEngineering ManagementLeadership DevelopmentCoaching, MentoringAgile MethodologiesPeople Productivity Advisor
Torres & Diaz LLC
Apr '21 - May '22

It's Good

VP of Engineering

  • Led team from 0 to 1 in areas of platform architecture, APIs, and data warehousing/analytics to ship a production MVP.
  • Managed two distributed remote teams of 15 engineers
  • Set quarterly engineering budgets and KPI's
  • Established an end-to-end hiring process conducting an average of 5 screens per week
  • Provided meaningful coaching through mentorship and advisory techniques guiding engineers and team leads with fulfilling challenges to help scale the future development of the company.

AWS, Heroku • Node.js, Redis, Postgres • CI/CD, GitHub • Ashby, Greenhouse, LinkedIn • Mixpanel, Metabase, Data warehousing, Intercom • Google/Yelp APIs: Maps, Places, Distance Matrix, Photos • Cloud, CDN Storage • Linear, Product Board, Agile, scrum

Lightspeed

Director of Engineering

  • Managed team of 15 across engineering, product, design, and research, executing company vision with technology through OKR strategies.
  • Led end-to-end hiring efforts; from initial stages of recruiting, scheduling, conducting near daily phone screens, setting up full panel interview loops to the final negotiation stages and offer.
Strategic PlanningProject EngineeringArchitectureEntrepreneurshipTechnical Recruiting/HiringEngineering ManagementTechnical HiringRecruiting Agency ManagementCoaching, MentoringAgile MethodologiesLeadership Development
Dec '15 - Apr '21

Cofounder, CTO

  • Led company growth and development, including software engineering on web and mobile, product development, research, analytics, and marketing.
  • Closed $5M in seed funding from strategic allied angel partners, and grew the company to 40 employees across the globe.

CoFounder, Chief Executive Officer

Agent (now inactive) was a SaaS marketplace to book models, actors, and other industry talent attracting over 75,000 active independent creators and 3,000 clients within the U.S. that aimed to cut out middlemen (talent agencies), providing PCI compliant payment solutions and invoicing, portfolio media hosting, booking/scheduling tools, algorithmic job matching, AI talent searching, casting management, and advanced top of industry clout analytics.

EntrepreneurshipManagementFullstack ArchitectureArtificial IntelligenceProject EngineeringOrg budgetingEnd to end hiringLeadershipResearch & Analytics
Mar '14 - Oct '15

Principal Engineer & Cofounder

Mix began as a co-op product between Garrett Camp (founder of Uber) myself, and a third cofounder. Together we collaborated to create something that mixed each of our interests and backgrounds (pun intended, of course). With my experience in developing social networks, and Garretts profound knowledge in content discovery (StumbleUpon), we created an idea that allows users to discover, collect, and share content with like-minded friends. Mix remains in the AppStore today with over 30,000 creators.

Fullstack EngineeringNode.jsPostgresMap ReduceEntrepreneurshipTechnical Recruiting
Jan '13 - Dec '13

Principal Frontend Engineer

Primary frontend strategist at the 500 employee company, upleveling the quality of the the petition website used by 50 million people globally by setting best-practice language authorship guides for JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. Led technical guidance on performance benchmarks, including reducing rendering speeds to sub 150ms and overall perceived latency by 2x according to qualitative studies by introducing optimistic UI techniques.

Migrated the web application from a Ruby on Rails monolith to a robust single page application API client utilizing Node.js/npm.

ArchitectureNode.jsReactTechnical RecruitingTechnology Lead
Oct '11 - Jan '13

Founding Full Stack Engineer

Fullstack EngineeringNode.jsWeb ApplicationAWS
Apr '09 - Oct '11

Frontend Tech Lead

  • Employee number 30
  • Created first official Twitter frontend widget platform for 3rd party developers
  • Built and launched embedable timeline widgets, which accounted for 30% of all search traffic
  • Lead Engineer on Twitter.com and its core JavaScript API
  • Developed tweet and follow buttons
  • Lead on Twitter.com 2010 redesign & rearchitecture. Shipping the following features: infinite scrolling, user autocomplete, hover cards, and more
Frontend EngineeringTechnology leadOpen SourceAPI's
Apr '07 - Apr '09

Design Engineer, Educator

My primary role at Google was to bridge the gap between UX and Engineering as Google's lead prototyper @ Gmail. I created exploratory rich UIs used for RITE studies and ported usable pieces into Google's main UI library (Closure).

I co-created a full day web development hands-on course called HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from the ground up through the Google Engineering Education program. Designed for newcomers (Product Managers or Designers) and experienced Software Engineers alike. Ultimately this course went on to become Google's most popular (by attendance) of all time within the Google Eng Education program.

Frontend EngineeringDevelopment EducatorUser Experience Prototyping
May '05 - Jan '07

Frontend Engineer

  • Developer advocate of the Yahoo User Interface Library.
  • Winner of purple star award for developing the Page Builder tool for Yahoo Site Builder, a multi-tenant SaaS product designed to assist small businesses in creating, designing, and launching their own websites.
  • Developed the domain sale, checkout experience, page builder, and content editor
Web DevelopmentUser Experience PrototypingHTML/CSS/JS
Athlete Web Services
Jun '03 - May '05

Fullstack Engineer

End to end development for professional NFL, NBA, MLB, and Olympic Athletes.

Web DevelopmentPHPMySQL

Education

Executive Coaching
Success by Design

Worked with a Certified NLP, EFT, and Success Coach in performance and leadership to level up management and mentorship skills through the "Lead to Scale Method" and transform blocks and blind spots, learning self-mastery to lead in business and teams more effectively.

CSU, Sacramento
BA Spanish, Minor Cultural Anthropology

Online Forum Editor and Opinion writer for the State Hornet University Newspaper. Developed online forums for CSUS Recreational Sports and small webpages for student athletes.

Scholarshiped student athlete.

Books

JavaScript Design Patterns

Foundational and applyable principles for implementing design patterns for the JavaScript programming language. Each chapter includes real-world examples of how each pattern is best used supplemented with expert advice on writing better code, as well as what to watch out for.

This is Strobist® Info

In 2009, I began a "365 project," the goal of which is to shoot and share one picture per day for a year. I shared both the final image and the behind-the-scenes setup shot for that image, allowing the viewer to see how the shot was arranged. I also included information about exposure, flash power, distance, and light modifiers. The project was a huge hit that attracted thousands of followers

Etcetera

Athlete
Runner

Ranked 13th in nation for 800m in 1998. Boston Qualifier and currently a 2:36 Masters Marathoner ranked 68th in Abbott age-group world rankings (2021).