Wednesday 29th Mar4:00 PM
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Kent currently leads the engineering effectiveness organization (70+) at Yelp, supporting all engineers (>900). Additionally, he leads a group that is focused on reducing bias in the interviewing pipeline for ICs. He was previously involved in helping young women learn more about the tech industry and giving them a head start with the #builtbygirls program and is an active member of the AWE mentorship program at Yelp. Prior to Yelp he served as a US Army officer for four years in various leadership positions from management to director roles.
About me
Key stats
Seniority
12 Years
Hierarchy
Manager of Managers
Industry
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Experience
Director, Engineering Effectiveness
Yelp
Sep 2019 - current
Engineering Effectiveness (EE) is comprised of two groups (Client and Backend Platform) and nine teams: Core Services, Core Android, Core iOS, Webcore, Developer Insights & Automation, Continuous Integration & Delivery, Design Systems, Core Java, and the Client Data Platform. Our mission is to speed up development workflows in a reliable, enjoyable way for the Business Owners and Consumers groups. We do this by providing direct support and building centralized products for platforms (Web, Backend, iOS, Android) and domains (Design Systems, Client Data, Continuous Integration and Delivery, Developer Insights & Automation). EE was formed to solve long term problems for feature teams so that they can continue to deliver features quickly and reliably. We do this by understanding our customers’ needs and, as a group, we support our customers in common ways: -We identify best practices and form opinionated solutions that encourage those practices -We recognize when there are opportunities to centralize work and we create a “paved path” to provide best-in-class, scalable support. -We recognize that building solutions to long term problems is complex and we aim to ship value early and often -We help teams identify and understand what is keeping them from delivering quickly and safely -We capture data for engineering processes that enable data-informed engineering strategy
Engineering Manager, Core Web
Yelp
Nov 2016 - Sep 2019
Engineering manager for the core web team at Yelp (10-12 engineers). Our team promotes engineering effectiveness for Full Stack Developers, Designers, and Product Managers across all product teams at Yelp. This includes maintaining and evolving the Styleguide, building JS and Python infrastructure that is commonly used across all web platforms, architecting web service infrastructure, maintaining i18n infrastructure, and building developer tools.
Software Engineer
Yelp
May 2014 - Dec 2016
Leader
US Army
May 2008 - Jun 2012
Various leadership positions from Manager to Director Roles in Air Defense.
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