Scott Conrad Johnson

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING LEADER

Senior Software Engineer - Entrepreneur

ad3p15@r.postjobfree.com 512-***-**** 89 Jefferson Rd, Franklin, MA, 02038

Objective

With over 30 years of results-driven leadership, I am an accomplished executive skilled in leading teams and companies, in architecting and developing software, and successfully releasing commercially successful products of high-quality. As a co-founder of three high-tech startups and in roles such as CEO, CTO, VP, and technical leader in various ventures, I have translated visionary ideas into impactful realities. My innovative and collaborative approach, coupled with a strategic mindset, leverages technical expertise and a broad market view to deliver significant value to customers. I excel in driving the creation of powerful technical solutions of high-quality swiftly by leading and mentoring agile, creative teams. I foster a culture that champions integrity, open communication, knowledge-sharing, software best practices, empowered team members, and entrepreneurial spirit. Currently, I am seeking a role as a Software Development Manager or Director of Software, to leverage my extensive experience in software and software leadership to add significant and measurable value in my next career.

Skills and Abilities

Leadership

Drove hiring of high-quality software engineers to grow the team to meet tight development timelines, aligned with business plans. Promoted my vision of a great development team, where each member strives to deliver excellence, steadfastly supports our customers, continuously grows as an engineer, has an intense desire to meet their commitments, and is free to explore creative solutions to challenges. All in a positive environment of collaboration, honest communication with integrity and information-sharing.

Technically mentored my teammates regularly and encouraged senior engineers to mentor those less experienced. Met personally with each of my team members periodically, to provide feedback on their performance, coach them on how to improve and grow in their careers. These meetings were also a time for each engineer to express what was working for them, and what was not within my team or in the company, and to provide me feedback.

All team members felt empowered to 'do the right thing', and felt safe to ask questions, to respectfully challenge their peers and I, and to take the initiative to address things they felt were critical, with or without consulting me first. This approach fosters strong teams of high-performing engineers, willing to take the initiative when called-for, often in high-pressure startups, with little attrition in my experience.

Strong proponent of knowledge-sharing and openness across all groups working together on the same product line. And of course, all members of each team.

Software Development process

Experienced Software Architect and Software engineer, comfortable with architecture reviews, code reviews, reviewing and analyzing codebases leveraging my wealth of experience with many programming languages, operating systems, and platforms from embedded systems to cloud-deployed SaaS, to ensure that modern best practices for software development, documentation, code analysis, test, and pertinent coding standards are followed.

Collaborated with product managers and other stakeholders to understand and work through the requirements for each project including functional requirements, performance requirements, standards compliance, and other constraints. And to develop a timeline of sprints that are aligned with business goals. Frequently assessed development progress, mitigating risk where possible, and adjusting code and/or architecture when necessary. Frequently briefed executives, other team leads, and test / QA groups on progress.

Established software architectures reviews, periodic code reviews as well as peer review of all code submitted to be checked-into the code base.

Supervised and drove the timely delivery of high-quality, tested, readable, and maintainable production code in all my leadership roles. Applying principles of CI/CD, automated builds, and with testing across the SDLC. Deploying each new release codebase to an independent Integration environment with automated build and testing, prior to releasing and deploying code to a live customer system (e.g., SaaS or PaaS).

Spearheaded a similar development process for many years; early on using a waterfall methodology, but over the past 10 years using the agile process. The same principles of CI/CD, automated builds and testing across the SDLC apply to embedded systems as well, but the implementation may look very different.

With the agile process, I participated in building massively scalable SaaS platforms (on AWS) as well as most recently managed a team of embedded software engineers, with a cloud-deployed service for gathering metrics and generating alerts

Drove the continuous improvement of development best practices, tools, and methodologies, and best practices to deliver high code quality and efficient development. Kept abreast of new and evolving tools and technologies that can help to streamline the development process, and /or improve code quality and a better, bug free, efficient product.

Communication and Interpersonal Skills

I am an open, authentic person, with a strong belief in the importance of integrity and honest communication between team members, whether a team of executives or a team of developers. I am an energetic leader with a passion for working with other people having a shared vision and purpose, to create high-quality products, steadfastly supporting the customers using those products, and building teams of motivated, productive people that I enjoy working with every day, mentoring them, continuously learning and growing together in our skills and careers, and always championing integrity, honoring our commitments, honest communication, excellence.

My extensive experience as a startup leader, in many roles from software developer to CEO, has given me an in-depth understanding of business, (markets, sales, product development, and customer service), and running a business. I also have extensive experience as a CTO, software architect, development leader, and developer.

These experiences together provide me with a unique perspective, and an ability to comfortably communicate with executives, directors, salespeople, product managers, development managers, tech leads and developers. I also am comfortable communicating with customers and potential customers. It is easy for me to see things from many different perspectives.

I am adept at working with product marketing professionals and customers to translate business needs into product requirements.

Software Architecture and Development Skills

Programming Languages / Standards

C/C++, Assembly, Go, Ruby, Python, and Shell Scripting

Security Coding Standards and Best Practices

Mission and Safety Critical Coding Standards and Best Practices

Hardware & System Architectures

Embedded System Coding in C/C++ on embedded Linux

Familiar with MCU Architectures, Dev Environments, and Embedded stacks (e.g., TCP/IP)

Experienced with hardware-level debugging and board bring-up using electrical test tools like scopes, meters, and power supplies, as well as In-circuit Emulators and logic analyzers.

Experienced with communication interfaces on embedded systems such as RS-485 and CAN

Operating Systems and Platforms

Linux, OS Kernels

Previous Experience writing kernel - level drivers for networking adapters

In-depth experience with networking protocol stacks

RTOSs

Experienced with virtualization technologies including Docker and Kubernetes

Experienced with backend development in a scalable cloud environment (SaaS)

Previous experience with AWS and IBM SoftLayer clouds

Development Tools and Processes

Proficient with most modern development tools for source control, configuration management, and bug tracking. (Git, Gitlab, Jira)

Experienced user of static code analysis tools, code reviews and analysis, and code optimization along several dimensions.

Experienced with both waterfall and agile methodologies

Professional experience

Hyliion Vice President of Software – 2018-2021

I was invited to join this 2-year-old Truck Electrification startup, which had recently moved from Pennsylvania to Texas, by the CEO and the Chairman of the board of Directors.

Managed a team of embedded system software developers, technicians and modeling and simulation engineers, and drove hiring of high-quality embedded software engineers and technicians to meet the tight development timelines as dictated by business goals. Guided and mentored all team members to strive to deliver excellence, steadfastly support our customers, continuously grow as an engineer, maintain an intense desire to meet their commitments, and feel free to explore creative solutions to challenges.

My team grew to 8 embedded software engineers, 2 hardware technicians, and 2 simulation engineers, I strove to maintain a positive environment of collaboration, honest communication with integrity and information-sharing. I managed the development process using agile methodology. This resulted in a dramatic increase in collaboration between team members, and lead to the teams' ability to break a streak of missed deadlines to a long streak of successful sprints that were delivered on time, with near 0 attrition in my nearly 3 years of employment as VP of Software.

Analyzed coding practices, documentation quality, test strategies, build tools, CI/CD tools, deployment tools, configuration management tools, bug tracking tools, I presented the results to the executive team, the product management team, and the sales team, along with a proposal for a plan and timeline for updating the tools and processes in line with business goals.

Collaborated with product managers all stakeholders to understand and work through the requirements for each project including functional specifications, performance requirements, necessary standards compliance, and ultimately a timeline of sprints, that were aligned with business goals. At Hyliion, this required working closely with the hardware engineering team and the UX team to align cross-team deliverables and dependencies.

Frequently assessed development progress, mitigating risk where possible, and adjusting code and/or architecture when necessary. Kept the executives (Sales, Product Management, Hardware Engineering, Service, and top executives) informed on progress.

Drove the use of mission-critical coding standards for C (MISRA and CERT C), the use of secure coding standards and best practices, and implementation of related testing into the build stream. Established and maintained a steady rhythm of meetings between the Software and Hardware teams throughout the development cycle to document that we addressed pertinent safety standards using the DFMEA process, ("Design Failure Mode and Effect Analysis").

Drove and accomplished the real-time graphical presentation of more detailed metrics and errors reported by deployed Hyliion-equipped trucks. These tools were made available to everyone, but were primarily used by the embedded Software team, the Hardware team, the Service team, product managers, and executive staff. Providing these tools to all teams fostered collaboration between all team members, further cultivating an open culture with knowledge sharing across all teams, strengthening cross-group collaboration.

This initiative had a significant impact on company culture as the engineering teams had previously become siloed. This led to my invitation to the hardware team, service team, and product management teams to participate in the embedded software agile process. This resulted in far better communication across all teams, and a 25% decrease of the time for cross-team issue diagnoses and resolution!

Oracle Consulting Member of Technical Staff – 2015-2018

I joined Oracle when StackEngine was acquired.

Implemented functional test code in JMeter.

Implemented regression test code and scripts and incorporated them into the build stream.

Managed the Open-Source libraries used in the codebase of our group.

Drove security best coding practices and monitored the National vulnerability database for reports related to our groups’ codebase.

StackEngine Technical Staff Member – 2014-2015

Leveraged my experience developing and testing Go code in a cloud environment for this Kubernetes – based Docker container orchestration product.

Responsible for coding, documenting, integrating, debugging, and submitting Golang code into the development stream

StackEngine was acquired by Oracle in 2015.

CopperEgg Co-founder and CEO – 2010-2014

Co-founded and Led this VC-backed company.

Brainstormed and conceptualized the architecture and business plan for CopperEgg, a SaaS-based server monitoring product.

Hired and mentored all initial employees, including Sales, Marketing, and Engineering

Lead all Venture-Capital pitch meetings.

Continuously stayed in contact with the company's investors.

Participated in coding of the service back-end using Ruby and C.

Co-managed the cost-of-service delivery on AWS

Facilitated the acquisition of the company by Idera in 2014

Education

Cleveland Clinic Foundation, Internal Medicine Residency

Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, Doctor of Medicine

Case Western Reserve University, Bachelor of Arts in Biology & Psychology, Summa Cum Laude

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