Marc D. Brooks

Software Engineering Leader • Product Leadership • Cloud Development • AWS/GCP • SaaS

15+ years of progressive leadership experience in technical management and software development for large-scale consumer-facing products, seeking a role where I can leverage my skills to drive transformative solutions.

Seasoned leader using data-driven strategies to deliver technical solutions to complex, ambiguous problems for a wide audience of business partners and end-users.
Champion of high-impact process improvements, technology migrations, and change management, including standardizing development teams around Agile methodologies and cloud-native architectures.
Extensive experience building strong, high-value, cross-functional relationships with stakeholders and senior leadership, in fast-paced work environments, with accountability for high-visibility initiatives.
Experience leading on-site, remote, in-house and off-shore teams to deliver on time and within budget.
Strong attention to detail, with excellent technical, analytical, prioritization, and interpersonal communication skills.

Expertise

Skills:
Leadership, Talent Acquisition/Development/Retention, Vendor Management, Project Management, Requirements Gathering, Data Analytics/Reporting/Modeling, A/B testing, Business Intelligence, Content Strategy, End-to-End Product Management, Technical and Financial Strategy, Project and Team Retrospectives, Management, Coaching and Mentoring, Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), CI/CD, Test-Driven Development, Agile, Certified Scrum Master (CSM), Program Management, Accessibility, Systems Administration (Windows, macOS, *nix), Search Engine Optimization/Marketing, DEIB (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging), Geographic information systems (GIS)

Languages and Frameworks:
JavaScript, Python, Node, Express, React, Java, PHP, JSP, ASP, .NET, SQL, NoSQL, Django, Drupal, WordPress, HTML, CSS

Software and Tools:
Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Workspace, Atlassian (Jira, Confluence, OpsGenie), ChatGPT, Content Delivery Networks, Content Management Systems, Adobe CS, Microsoft (365, Exchange, GitHub), Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Git, SVN, CVS, Sublime, VSCode, Emacs, Jenkins, Semaphore, CRMs

Work History

VERITREE, Vancouver, BC

Technology Management Consultant and Agile Coach | 11/2023 – Present

Local startup veritree brings transparency and trust to nature-based climate solutions.
Contracted to identify and implement changes resulting in faster and more predictable delivery, and enabling organizational scale.

Guiding the product and engineering teams toward predictable delivery in an agile framework.
Establishing and codifying organizational and technical best practices.
Identifying resource gaps and allocation optimizations, and taking ownership of the hiring process.
Providing evidence-based recommendations to C-level leadership for further improvements.

THINKIFIC, Vancouver, BC

Engineering Manager | 9/2021 – 7/2023

Thinkific is an all-in-one platform to help users create, market & sell online courses.
Led multidisciplinary, remote teams of up to 10 contributors, driving top-priority, high-visibility initiatives with projected annual returns of over $10M.

Managed team of 5 full-time and 5 contract engineers doing mobile software development in Flutter.
Planned, scoped, and delivered a new pilot Communities product, leading a team of 8 software development engineers (SDEs) working in React and Ruby. Successfully brought the product to market, creating a new revenue stream.
Led Course Builder React migration, and various school management enhancements, with a team of 5 SDEs. Introduced new features and improved existing ones, making the core product more secure, supportable, extensible and scalable.
Executed transitions to a disciplined Scrum methodology, resulting in accelerated and more predictable deliveries.
Collaborated with cross-functional peers to establish quarterly and annual objectives and key results (OKRs).
Provided coaching and mentorship for managers and individual contributors at all levels, across the organization.

MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL, New York, NY

Associate Director, Software Engineering | 4/2018 – 9/2021

Lead Software Engineer | 12/2015 – 4/2018

Supervised teams of up to 10 multidisciplinary FTEs, responsible for security, reliability, performance, and regulatory compliance of 100M+ MAU applications for e-commerce, streaming, subscriptions, data analysis, marketing and outreach.

Shepherded 350+ web properties through the entire SLDC, from concept to scale and long-term support, for MLB, its teams and its partners, which included all associated leagues and teams, other national sports leagues (ex. NHL, WWE, PGA), media networks (ex. HBO, SportsNet), athletes, celebrities, and more.
Hired and managed consistently productive, engaged and exemplary teams of engineering, product management, product design, and testing, focused on Java and JS application development, cloud services configuration, and direct marketing.
Provided technical and foundational guidance and instruction to SDEs, SDETs, and PMs at all experience levels.
Facilitated creation and iterations of OKRs and management frameworks, for my team and across departments, resulting in increased velocity and predictability, and consistently exceeded KPI targets for project completions, traffic scaling and SLOs
Led department normalization on Scrum framework, optimized development/testing/deployment workflows, actively contributed to codebases, and responded to and resolved major incidents when on-call.

Senior Producer, Partner Solutions | 4/2012 – 12/2015

Marketing Producer | 9/2010 – 4/2012

Responsible for MLB and Houston Astros marketing, ticketing and other initiatives, then partners' web and mobile properties. Grew to be the senior member of a team of 4 developers, becoming responsible for individuals' growth and development, team process iteration, and cross-department communications.

Developed unique or enhanced interfaces and experiences for MLB and its partners' marketing, e-commerce, subscriptions, streaming, sweepstakes and multi-channel outreach, using Java/JavaScript stack and direct marketing tools.
Created multiple new properties adding 1M+ MAU, and improved existing ones to support over 50x traffic scale.
Guaranteed requirements were clearly defined and consistently exceeded, through innovation, leadership, mentorship, championing process improvement, and writing clean, extensible and reusable code.

CBS Television Distribution, New York, NY

Webmaster | 9/2007 – 9/2010

Responsible for the digital presence of Rachael Ray, management of 5 vendor teams of up to 4 engineers and designers each.

Selected hosting, development and design vendors, negotiated financial and technical contract terms and SOWs.
Led migration enabling scale of active community users from 5 to 10 figures, while reducing yearly operating costs by 25%.
Designed and led development and iteration on primary site, 70+ microsites, daily direct-marketing campaigns, and a novel segment production CRM tool, modernizing security, analytics, virtualization, database management and version control.
Webby Awards™ Official Honoree in three categories (including Best Practices), in recognition for visual design, interactivity, functionality and user experience.