Resume

Engineering Manager with 14 years across EdTech, FinTech, and HealthTech. Recently led delivery of production AI infrastructure including hybrid search on OpenSearch and an MCP server exposing agent-callable tools to ChatGPT. Stays close to the code through PR reviews and technical decisions. Manages a distributed team of engineers across the Americas and Eastern Europe. Drives AI-assisted development practices at the org level.

Rochester, NY · linkedin.com/in/jeffreybaird · github.com/jeffreybaird

Experience

Skillshare

Aug 2023 – May 2026 · Remote

Engineering Manager — Aug 2023 – May 2026

• Lead a distributed team of engineers across the US, Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica, Brazil, Ukraine, and Bulgaria. Partner cross-functionally with product, design, and data to deliver against roadmap priorities.
• Stay close to the code through active PR reviews and technical decisions.
• Improved team delivery cadence from a few deploys per week as a team to multiple deploys per day per engineer by lowering work-in-progress, expanding pairing, and unblocking the individual contributor path.
• First team as EM was a cross-functional team of seven engineers (2 native mobile, 4 web full-stack, 1 data scientist) shipping new product initiatives during the platform’s expansion.
• Develop each engineer through regular 1:1s, tailored stretch assignments, and candid performance feedback while holding a high bar for quality and delivery.
• Led a six-month overhaul of the platform’s information architecture across three competing stakeholder groups (teacher success, student experience, marketing/SEO). Integrated the new taxonomy with the SageMaker personalization engine and built an AI-assisted migration tool to recategorize the catalog. After launch, average time to first class completion dropped and recommendation usage increased.
• Led delivery of a production AI retrieval platform combining hybrid search on OpenSearch (BM25, dense vector, and neural sparse retrieval against AWS Bedrock embeddings) and a TypeScript MCP server exposing the search as agent-callable tools to ChatGPT.
• Developing AI-assisted development best practices for the engineering organization. Built an automated daily management reporting pipeline (n8n + Claude) synthesizing Jira, GitHub, Slack, and Google Docs into end-of-day reports.

Engineering Lead — Dec 2022 – Jul 2023

• Technical lead for the same cross-functional team I would later manage as EM.
• Led technical delivery of cohort-based learning, a new product initiative built as a standalone service (NestJS, Next.js, Prisma).
• Architected and shipped a Learning Paths feature as an independent service, enabling curated course progressions.

Senior Software Engineer — Jan 2019 – Nov 2022

• Led the implementation of Apollo Federation, unifying a fragmented service ecosystem of Node.js apps, a PHP monolith, and Lambdas into a federated GraphQL layer that gave frontend developers a single coherent API to build against.
• Delivered core platform features across a Node.js/Next.js/React stack and in a PHP monolith.
• Drove code quality improvements and mentored junior and mid-level engineers through pairing and code reviews.

Roostify

Jul 2016 – Jan 2019 · Remote

Software Development Engineer

• Lead engineer on the JPMorgan Chase mortgage application integration. Built a Go service translating between Roostify’s REST API and Chase’s SOAP API to meet their compliance requirements.
• Redesigned the underlying data model for the Rails monolith, enabling enterprise-grade customization and improved reliability.
• Built custom APIs and secure data transmission processes for enterprise banking clients, satisfying high-bar security requirements and reducing their time-to-close.

Dexcom

Sep 2013 – May 2016 · Portland, OR

Engineer II

• Helped deliver Dexcom Clarity, the cloud-based platform for Dexcom’s continuous glucose monitor, in a regulated healthcare environment under FDA oversight.
• Implemented CI/CD pipelines and automated deployments across staging and production environments, and built a monitoring suite processing over 1M events per month.
• Helped lead the effort to make Dexcom the only company on AWS with Authority to Operate at FISMA High.

The Flatiron School

Jun 2013 – Aug 2013 · New York, NY

Ruby Instructor

• Trained and mentored a cohort of 32 new Ruby developers, designing coding exercises and curriculum.

Medivo, Inc.

Jul 2012 – Jun 2013 · New York, NY

Developer

• Maintained a production Rails application and designed an API for print vendors; reduced developer onboarding from two days to 30 minutes using GitHub’s Boxen. Contributed to scaling via service-oriented architecture; spoke at Ruby Hoedown and ran Code Retreat NYC.

Earlier career — founded two startups: Kngroo (TechStars Network incubator) and Vabbler.com.

Skills

AI and ML engineering — MCP (Model Context Protocol), RAG, vector search, semantic retrieval, BM25, hybrid retrieval, AWS Bedrock, OpenAI Apps SDK, embedding models, agent-callable tools, AI-assisted development, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Devin

Languages and frameworks — Elixir, Phoenix, Ecto, Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, TypeScript, JavaScript, Node.js, NestJS, React, PHP, HTML, CSS, Sass/SCSS, Tailwind CSS, GraphQL, Apollo Federation, REST, Python, Go, Vue, Next.js, Bash

Data and infrastructure — PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL, Prisma, OpenSearch, Redis, DynamoDB, MongoDB, CloudFlare, AWS (ECS, SQS, SNS, Lambda, CloudFront, S3, IAM, RDS), GCP, DigitalOcean, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Helm, Nginx, CI/CD, GitHub Actions, GitLab, CircleCI

Practices and tools — Agile, Kanban, TDD, pair programming, A/B experimentation, RFC / tech design process, incident response, postmortems, service-oriented architecture, OAuth, OIDC, SAML, PCI, HIPAA, Grafana, Datadog, Sentry

Leadership — team management, distributed teams, performance reviews, PIPs, 1:1s, coaching and mentoring, hiring pipelines and interview design, onboarding, capacity planning, roadmap planning, sprint facilitation, retrospectives, cross-functional collaboration, cross-team dependency management, stakeholder communication

Education

University of South Florida — B.S. in Entrepreneurship, minor in International Economics. Tampa, FL.

United States Merchant Marine Academy — studied logistics and intermodal transportation (transferred). Kings Point, NY.