Dustin Diaz

Empathetic, people-focused Engineering Leader with a passion for building high-performing teams and a track record of driving large-scale technical excellence while delivering successful global products.
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Los Angeles, CA

History

Route.com
Engineering Leader

As a mobile engineering leader at Route, I successfully developed and implemented an OKR-based roadmap for a consumer-focused organization, covering 8 engineering teams. My efforts resulted in a more efficient and productive team culture that aligned with the company's vision and priorities, leading to a 1.5x increase in weekly shipping cycles and balanced delivery across mobile, web, data, QA, and fullstack teams.

I also played a key role in the professional development of the employees across the company, providing guidance and support through educational programs to help grow Route's leaders. This included promoting several engineers to lead roles and leads to management positions. Additionally, I led performance reviews and provided calibration feedback, and advised on having a shared understanding of developer productivity through the use of SPACE and DORA metrics for a team of 50 engineers.

I also contributed to the leadership hiring playbook providing input on questions and exercises, collaborating with HR in helping shape the company's approach to identifying, evaluating, and onboarding new leaders, with the goal of finding the best fit for the organization's needs.

Technical Strategic PlanningProject EngineeringEngineering ManagementLeadership DevelopmentCoaching, MentoringAgile MethodologiesPeople Productivity Advisor
It’s Good
VP of Engineering

(contract) As Head of Engineering at It's Good, I lead the team from 0 to 1 in the areas of platform architecture, APIs, and data warehousing/analytics to ship an MVP. I managed 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, and 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.

Strategic PlanningProject EngineeringArchitectureEntrepreneurshipTechnical Recruiting/HiringEngineering ManagementLeadership Development
Lightspeed
Director of Engineering

As Director at Lightspeed HQ, I managed team of 60 across engineering, product, design, and research, executing company vision through OKR strategies.

I also spear-headed end-to-end hiring efforts; from initial stages of recruiting, schedulling, conducting near daily phone screens, setting up full panel interview loops, to the final negotiation stages and offer.

Furthering the hiring process I authored training guides for our candidates and created a mentorship program for our interviewers to become more effective at asking the right questions to hire the right people.

Project EngineeringTechnical HiringRecruiting Agency ManagementEngineering ManagementCoaching, MentoringAgile MethodologiesLeadership Development
Agent, Inc
CoFounder, CTO

Agent (now inactive) was a SASS 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.

I led all aspects of the company's growth and development, including software engineering on web and mobile, product development, research, marketing, sales, and finance.

I successfully raised $5M in seed funding from strategic allied angel partners, and grew the company to 40 employees across the globe.

EntrepreneurshipManagementFullstack ArchitectureProject EngineeringOrg budgetingEnd to end hiringLeadershipResearch & Analytics
Mix.com
1st 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 EngineeringEntrepreneurshipTechnical Recruiting
Change.org
Frontend Architect

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.

ArchitectureTechnical RecruitingTechnology Lead
Medium, Inc
Founding Full Stack Engineer

When I followed Ev Williams from Twitter over to the Obvious Corp, the idea of Medium didn't exist yet. So while ideations of potential directions percolated among the team, my initial focus was on building web platform tooling. Ultimately I co-created a Node MVC server framework from which Medium would eventually be built upon.

Six months prior to the Medium launch, my focus switched to becoming the sole creator of the frontend writing experience, "The Medium Editor," which went on to become a wildly favored writing experience according to many well known writers in the industry read by over 100M people world-wide.

Fullstack Engineering
Twitter, Inc
Frontend Lead Engineer

As an early employee (#30) at Twitter, my role was to create the first official Twitter frontend widget platform for 3rd party developers.

This initially included the embedable timeline widgets, which became responsible for the company seeing a 30% uptick in search traffic the following quarter after launch

Later I went on to co-create the Twitter JavaScript API (known as @Anywhere), a 1:1 mapping of API available within a browser effort led to other embedable components that I developed such as the tweet and follow buttons.

Because of this new tooling, in 2010 I joined a small task force team [war room style] to create a new twitter.com redsign and rearchitecture atop of our newly created JavaScript API. This also included new rich interfaces and experiences (not seen before on the twitter platform) such as embedable media, infinite scrolling, user autocomplete, even hover cards (^_^)/

Much of this work ultimately led to the inspiration and creation of many popular open sourced libraries such as Qwery (a CSS selector engine), Reqwest (http ajax client), Morpheus (high performance browser animator), script.js (dependency manager), and many more!

Frontend EngineeringTechnology leadOpen SourceAPI's
Google, Inc
Design Engineer, Educator

My principle role at Google was to work between the User Experience Team and Software Engineers as Google's lead prototyper and web developer within the Gmail org. This involved creating exploratory rich UIs used for RITE studies and then graduate the usable pieces into Google's main UI library (Closure).

Midway through my tenure at Google 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
Yahoo, Inc
Frontend Engineer

After launching a successful web development blog & podcast [now offline, thank goodness], I was hired at Yahoo as a Frontend Engineer within Y! Small Business.

Seeing the launch of Yahoo User Interface Library I became an advocate of its patterns pushing for its use across the web.

During my tenure, I was instrumental in the frontend development for a new product called Y Site Builder, a multi-tenant SASS product designed to assist small businesses in creating, designing, and launching their own websites. I soley created the domain sale and checkout experience, page builder, and content editor, which later was recognized with a Yahoo Purple Star, a highly prestigious internal award for exceptional product achievements.

Web DevelopmentUser Experience Prototyping
Athlete Web Services
Fullstack Engineer

First job out of college! Programming in PHP/MySQL, JavaScript, and CSS, implementing CSS-first accessible designs for professional athletes such as Packer's Brett Favre, Piston's Tayshaun Prince, and Olympic Marathoner Deena Kastor. What a time to be alive!

Web Development

Education

Executive Coaching
Success by Design

Actively working 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 my current blocks and blind spots, learning self-mastery so I can lead in business and my 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

JavaScript is a hugely popular language for adding dynamic functionality to web pages, and it is possible to use design patterns within JavaScript to further improve your code - they can improve efficiency, cut down on repetition, and provide useful frameworks to build code on top of. This book (the only one available covering JavaScript design patterns thoroughly) gives web developers all they know to start using design patterns in their JavaScripting, including several real world examples for them to learn from.

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 (2021).