Senior Principal Engineer

Aug 2023 – Sep 2024

This role stands out as one of the most fulfilling chapters in my career — where I was able to bring together two decades of passion, experience, and engineering rigor to transform a legacy product into a modern, scalable platform that empowered both customers and teams. The opportunity to lead from a standstill position to a fluid, continuously evolving organization, while ensuring speed, agility, and impeccable quality, made this journey deeply rewarding.

Major accomplishments:

  • Rendering Engine V2 Leadership: Led the complete rewrite of Zingtree’s eight-year-old Rendering Engine — serving 600+ customers — transitioning from a legacy PHP/Bootstrap stack to a modern, AI-enhanced microservices architecture built with Vite, Vue3, Pinia, and Golang.
  • Accelerated Delivery: Took the project from proof of concept to Alpha release within 6 months and from Alpha to full General Availability in just 3 months, enabling a seamless migration of 100% of customers with zero friction.
  • Quality & Automation at Scale: Instituted engineering best practices including Test-Driven Development, CI/CD pipelines, and automated testing frameworks, culminating in 1200+ unit tests that supported multiple production releases per day.
  • Cultural Transformation: Fostered a culture of engineering excellence by championing testing rigor, clean code practices, and continuous improvements — setting new benchmarks for development standards across the organization.

Learnings & impact:

  • The most satisfying engineering work is one where technical craftsmanship directly translates into business continuity and customer trust.
  • Building products right requires not just solving technical problems, but nurturing teams, instilling discipline, and making quality a shared responsibility.
  • A modern architecture is only as good as the culture that supports it — and sustainable change happens when teams are empowered with purpose, process, and shared ownership.

This experience stands as a testament to how thoughtful engineering leadership can transform not just systems, but organizations — creating scalable, resilient solutions while empowering teams to thrive in a fast-paced, quality-driven environment.