Software Development Manager / Agile Leader

Dean M. Valentine

**** * ****** *** *, Centennial, CO 80112 571-***-****

https://deans.page https://www.linkedin.com/in/dean-m-valentine/ ****@***.**** Professional Experience

Manager, Engineering

GRIN ● www.grin.co ● March 2022 – March 2023

Managed engineering pods for a pioneering creator management SaaS company. Duties Included:

● Responsible for on-time delivery of all projects

● Metrics tracking and improvement

● Owned bug backlog/SLAs and domain quality scores

● Managed and mentored 100% remote team

● Adherence to company operating system (initially EOS and then V2MOM)

● Responsible for career development for 8 ICs

● Presented sprint reviews to entire company

● Liaised with Product / Design / EngOps / Architecture teams

● Owned and improved agile processes

● Developed Product Requirement Documents / Engineering Estimates Accomplishments:

● Led the team to success on a number of projects, including:

Self Serve App

Notifications Improvements

Onboarding Improvements

All of which helped reduce customer churn, helped customers arrive at habit moment faster, and improved customer experience

Mentored junior and senior ICs

■ Led to multiple team members promotions

● Improved agile workflow, owned kaizens, and empowered leads to run sprint ceremonies

● Implemented asynchronous standups and meetings

GRIN is a remote company. This helped reduce engineers in-meeting time and reduced context switching, leading to more effective work time

● Empowered ICs to present their own work at reviews

This ensured that ICs received credit for their own work and made them familiar to the company as a whole

● Improved and maintained team metrics, including velocity accuracy and cycle time Director of Software Development

E Source ● www.esource.com ● May 2020 – September 2021 Managed web and tools development for this utility industry consultancy. Duties Included:

● Manage, mentor and inspire software development team Dean M. Valentine

● Develop new policies and processes

● Recruitment

Major Accomplishments:

● Improved Agile methodology

● Introduced modern tools, procedures, and best practices

● Steered the team through major institutional changes Senior Manager, Software Development

National Democratic Institute ● www.ndi.org ● November 2012 – May 2019 Performed multiple DevOps and management roles for an internationally recognized NGO. Duties Included:

● Day-to-day supervision of an Agile software development team using mostly open-source software

● Senior DevOps Engineer / Architect

● Drupal / CiviCRM

● Linux Systems Administration

● Managed tiered hosting environment in AWS

● Re-architected environment to utilize up-to-date technology and methodology

● Liaison with project managers and internal teams

● Liaison with the Engineering team to manage technical infrastructure and vendors

● Staff development and training

● Work with project teams to conceptualize, design and develop tools to support NDI’s democracy assistance programs around the world

● Create and maintain coding standards that focus on security

● Administered, provisioned, installed, configured, and maintained Linux servers

● CentOS, Ubuntu, EC2 Linux

● Collaborated with TechOps team to:

● Act as a Linux and Drupal SME and “tech support for the tech team”

● Troubleshoot and maintain technical infrastructure

● Troubleshoot and maintain MySQL and Postgres databases

● Patch management for Linux web servers / LAMP stacks and web apps Primary tools and technologies used in his position included:

● Customized Linux Apache MySQL PHP stack

● Nginx

● Drupal / Aegir / CiviCRM / Drush

● Amazon AWS

● (EC2, S3 / EBS, IAM, RDS / Aurora, Cloudwatch)

● Git

● Docker / Lando

● Linux

● Jira / Confluence / Bitbucket / Github

● Ansible

● Cloudflare

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Dean M. Valentine

● Hugo for static sites

Major Accomplishments:

● Growth of the Software Development team

● Led the successful software implementation of several major international election monitoring projects and multiple major website projects

● Introduced version control software and methodology

● Introduced Jira project management and agile tools to the tech team

● Introduced Jira ServiceDesk to the Help Desk to replace obsolete technology

● Championed a switch to agile methodology

● Promoted NIST password guidelines to eventual adoption

● Led the technical effort for NDI’s new website - https://www.ndi.org

● Played an integral part in NDI’s flagship SaaS democracy toolkit Demtools(launched by Gov. Howard Dean) - https://www.ndi.org/demtools

● Represented NDI at several industry conferences, including Amazon AWS Public Sector Summit, DrupalCon and Drupal GovCon

● Improved developer experience by implementing Git / Github / Lando / Docker

● Other major projects include:

● Integrated OKTA SSO with Drupal (and supplied documentation back to OKTA)

● Amazon AWS process improvements

● Vendor / contractor management

● Helped Engineering team firm up policies / procedures

● Assisted Engineering team with hiring

● Championed move to Cloudflare CDN / DDOS protection

● New employee portal

Chief Technology Officer

720 Strategies ● www.720strategies.com ● July 2011 – July 2012 Led the Technology Team for an award-winning DC PR firm. Technical Director

RepEquity / Virilion ● www.virilion.com ● April 2010 – June 2011 Managed the Technical Practice for this Digital Powerhouse. New Media Manager

Beach Associates / Altruist Media ● www.altruistmedia.com ● August 2003 – April 2010 Managed new media projects for this full-service media company. Freelance Web Developer / System Administrator / Technical Support Various Organizations ● 1999 – 2003

Performed various freelance projects for a number of companies and organizations Windows System Administrator

Cloudband.com, Ltd ● www.cloudband.com ● 1999 – 2001 3 / 4

Dean M. Valentine

I.T. Manager

Schiller International University, London Campus ● www.schiller.edu ● 1998 – 199 Education

MSc. Computer Science, with Merit

University of Westminster, London, England

BA (Hons.) Drama & Theater Arts (2:1)

Goldsmiths College, University of London, England

Memberships / Affiliations

Member, Drupal Association (https://www.drupal.org/association) Washington DC Alumni Ambassador for Goldsmiths College

(https://www.gold.ac.uk/alumni/volunteer/alumni-ambassadors/) 4 / 4

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