Level up your engineering leadership.
Providing coaching and mentorship to engineering leaders – from senior software engineers looking to level-up their scope of impact, to startup CTOs facing the challenges of scaling their organizations.
Over two decades of shipping great software and helping others do the same.
- Originally from Scotland, Rod lives in San Francisco and is Director of Engineering for Infrastructure and Engineering Velocity at Splice . He also provides independent coaching and mentorship for engineering leaders.
- Before this, he led product engineering for Splice Sounds, ran the Smart TV Games engineering org at Volley, and was a Senior Engineering Manager at Discord and Dropbox. Past lives have been as Co-Founder & CTO of Sosh, VP of Software Engineering at Anova Culinary, and writing code at places like Slide, Bose, and — for 39 days — Google.
- His writing is featured on LeadDev.com and in O’Reilly’s 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts , and he’s spoken at conferences including LeadDev New York and Calibrate.
Where I’ve led
Director of Engineering, Infrastructure & Engineering Velocity
Splice
Leading three teams — Engineering Velocity, Data Engineering, and Site Reliability Engineering — 15 engineers and two managers, reporting to the CTO. Founded the Engineering Velocity team from scratch to fix developer friction company-wide.
Director of Engineering, TV Games
Volley Games
Led over half the company's engineering effort — five product teams, four engineering managers, 25 engineers — building voice-powered games for Roku and Fire TV.
Senior Engineering Manager, Monetization
Discord
Group lead for four teams (21 engineers) shipping new in-app features for Nitro, Discord's premium subscription.
Senior Engineering Manager
Dropbox
Led teams of web, desktop and mobile engineers building Dropbox Paper and Dropbox Spaces, and created IGNITE, Dropbox's apprenticeship program for engineers from non-traditional backgrounds.
What People are Saying About Me?
I’ve been meeting with Rod for a few months now and he’s had insightful guidance on our big-picture strategic initiatives as well as the smaller-scale, sometimes interpersonal, tactical issues that come up in a leadership role.
I’ve spent so much time just focusing on mastering product development I didn’t have a good system for thinking about engineering leadership or for considering my options. With Rod’s coaching I was able to level up my leadership skills and get better at showing coworkers those skills. Most importantly, Rod helped me develop a way to think about the different paths in engineering leadership and to work through my doubts about considering management as a viable path.
Rod has really helped me take my career to the next level. I always look forward to learning something new in our sessions.
Recent Writing
I’ve been a Featured Contributor to LeadDev since 2020. Here are my recent articles for them.
