Hi! I'm

Rob Wood

Entrepreneurial IT Consultant, Business Value Maximizer, Software Engineering Manager, Senior Principal Software Engineer, Senior Principal Product Engineer, Lead DevOps Engineer, Lead Platform Engineer, Senior System Architect
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Learn About Me

20 Years Experience

An engineering leader with proven strategic vision, passionate about developer experience and inspiring engineers, Rob thrives on solving high-stakes problems. His continually evolving skill set, pathfinding, and leadership empowers teams to craft innovative solutions for the challenges of tomorrow.

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Analysis & Problem Solving

100%

Coding

95%

Devops & Infra

90%

Coaching & Leadership

85%

Strategy & Roadmaps

85%

Communication & Knowledge Sharing

85%

Amazon Web Services Ansible Apache Apple Astro Bash BitBucket Bootstrap C CodeIgniter Composer CPP CSharp CSS3 Cypress Docker Dot Net Eleventy Ember ESLint Express Figma Gcc GCP Gimp Git GitHub Google GCP Grunt Gulp HTML5 Java JavaScript Jekyll Jenkins Jest Jira JQuery JSON Laravel Linux Lit Lodash MariaDB MarkDown Microsoft SQL Server MongoDB MS-DOS MySQL Nginx NodeJS NPM OAuth Oracle Packer Perl Photoshop PHP PNPM PostgreSQL Postman Puppeteer Python Qwik R Rails React Redis Regex Rollup Ruby SalesForce SASS Spring SQLLite SSH StackOverflow Subversion Svelte Symfony TailwindCSS Tomcat Travis TypeScript Ubuntu Vagrant VisualBasic Vite VSCode VueJS WebFlow WebPack WordPress XML YAML Yarn Yii Zend

What I do

Leading Teams to Elegant Solutions & Operational Excellence for Over 2 Decades.

IT Consulting

Providing insightful analysis, planning, and execution so your business can leverage cutting edge technology to leap ahead of your competitors.

Web Development

Architecting, designing, developing, and deploying highly automated, self healing/scaling systems ensuring your applications 99.99% availability.

Infrastructure Architecture

Cloud, on-premises, or hybrid; architecting, installing, upgrading, debugging, or maintaining - your systems will be stable, secure, efficient, and economical.

Application development

Desktop, mobile, or web, your business processes will be coded into the most practical and effective systems modern technology can provide.

My Resume

Experience

Nov 2019 - Present

Sr. Group Leader / Lead Developer

Marketing for Change Co. Alexandria, VA (Remote)

Independently mastered all IT systems in weeks, resulting in rapid promotion to leadership roles. Spearheaded initiatives as a developer experience (DX) engineer, DevOps/platform engineer, product engineer, and engineering manager, revitalizing morale and realizing a vision of operational excellence.

• Revolutionized developer experience, proving the need and benefit of eliminating pain points, for a 4x increase in productivity, and an immeasurable increase in DX/morale.

• Secured a $3M contract for independently developing an SaaS platform, simultaneously creating a multi-tenant clone that tripled legacy client count as an established recurring revenue stream.

• Boosted development velocity by 1000% by modernizing legacy dev environments, enabling seamless containerization and CI/CD practices.

• Reduced operational complexity by 90%, by clarifying deployment paths, reducing the number of tools used, and instituting DevOps & CI/CD.

• Achieved 60% reduction in cloud costs and 75% improvement security and reliability by transitioning to a multi-account AWS Organization, separating concerns and reducing issue blast radius.

May 2018 - Jul 2019

Principal Product Engineer

Netflix Los Gatos, CA (Contract/Remote)

Led a cross-functional team to design and build a greenfield supplier onboarding application, introducing innovative features and streamlining processes.

• Accelerated supplier onboarding by 60%, reducing system issues by 99% through a new and improved React-based UI and Java Spring Boot API.

• Enhanced production stability and long-term system reliability by aligning the legacy system with Netflix’s standardized “Paved Path” tooling.

Dec 2017 - Apr 2018

Principal Data Engineer

Sunrun Houghton, MI (Contract/Remote)

Resolved critical issues in data ingestion and dashboarding for a nationwide solar panel fleet, ensuring scalable and maintainable solutions.

• Boosted data ingestion speed by 500% and enhanced stability by 75% through optimized SQL queries and best practices.

• Modernized the ETL system, ensuring seamless observability and maintainability through updated BI protocols.

Sep 2015 - Dec 2017

Sole Proprietor

virtual Style, Escanaba, MI (Freelance/Remote)

Delivered end-to-end development solutions tailored to diverse client needs, leveraging innovative approaches to overcome unique challenges.

July 2012 - Aug 2015

Lead Developer

Our Town America, Pinellas Park, FL

Enhanced franchisee engagement and operational efficiency via strategic development initiatives.

• Increased franchisee ZIP/mailer sales by 40% with a self-service targeting GUI for mailers using Google Maps.

• Drove a 35% increase in sales and a 65% reduction in staff hours spent through operational automation improvements.

My Portfolio

Select Projects

Blogs

Latest Articles

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The FullStack vs. Specialization Fallacy

Examining the Dubious Logic of a Classic Developer Debate

Skills & Tools

Bits & Pieces Blog

Jan 9, 2025

So, with my first attempt at an article here, I think it’ll be amusing to stir up a classical divide, get some folks all worked up over nothing and point out just how silly the “full stack vs specialization” debate really is.

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Coming Soon

Another Blog Article

Category

Bits & Pieces Blog

Jan 8, 2025

Blogging about tech and continual learning from the front lines of the industry. Current events and topics, new and innovative ideas, follies and foibles.

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