Micah Jaffe

{


+1 (650) 954-6050
linkedin.com/in/micahjaffe * github.com/zeade
Portland, OR 97213 • USA

20+ years in Silicon Valley – now based in Portland, OR – working in software development at Tophatter, Lending Club, Yahoo, Stanford & many startups. I'm a generalist, a soup to nuts development leader. Building software solutions in diverse industries such as e-commerce, financial services, social networks, mobile entertainment, behavioral ad targeting, security, recruiting, science publications and policy reform gives me a broad understanding of how to tackle any challenge.

I am looking for an engineering leadership position in a company that prizes its people and culture.

Technical background

Unix systems (Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD), Ruby (Rails, RSpec, JRuby), web development (JavaScript, React, Bootstrap, HTML/CSS, Node.js), mobile development (web & iOS), cloud services (AWS, Heroku), network programming/distributed computing, relational DBs & SQL (Postgres, MySQL), NoSQL (Redis, Neo4j, Mongo, Lucene), Java, C, C++ (STL), Python, Perl

Management style & experience

Start simple. Excellent managers are coaches at their core, don't micro-manage, have a holistic concern for employee well-being and possess many behaviors identified in Google's own org research. Seek the balanced, middle path – the right way is the one that acknowledges the spectrum of tradeoffs, finds agreement and executes efficiently.

8+ years managing and hiring engineering teams, part- or full-time workers, remote or local.

Hats worn: project / product management, devops, recruiting, marketing, growth, security, financial services compliance.

Process affinities: Agile, Lean and Kanban; OKRs or KPIs to establish baseline expectations; test-centric development with continuous iterations; Slack & video chat for staying present and up to date; git-flow & pull requests for code review.

Work history

Director of Engineering @ Tophatter, Inc.
Jun 2019 – Nov 2020 San Francisco, CA & Portland, OR

Tophatter is a fun, fresh e-commerce site that connects sellers to buyers via 90 second auctions. I joined to build the new Portland, OR engineering office for Tophatter, recruiting and hiring 5 engineers for that effort (25% of engineering). PM'd the development of buyer engagement features on web and native. In the COVID-19 era I guided the transition of the physical office to become fully remote. Technology stack: React, React Native, Ruby/Rails, MySQL; AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, CircleCI, etc.

Sr Engineering Manager @ Lending Club
Jul 2016 – May 2019 San Francisco, CA

Lending Club is the leader in online consumer lending with over $31b originated (Sep 2017). I managed small teams (10-15 people) responsible for maintaining and enhancing the backend borrower application process. Areas of focus: product expansion/growth, operational stability (SRE), platform optimization/performance, native mobile. Technologies primarily in Java, SQL, JavaScript, React & React Native; AWS, New Relic, Splunk.

VP of Engineering, CTO @ Vouch Financial
Jul 2014 – Feb 2016 San Francisco, CA

Vouch offered best-of-class loan products for an underserved population. Vouch's "secret sauce" was to use real world connections as an alternative signal for risk to assess credit-worthiness. Series A backed by Core Innovation Capital, IDG Ventures, First Round, Greylock, Stanford and AngelList. Part of StartX's fall 2014 batch of startups and after demo day was a top five pick by TechCrunch.

I started engineering, growing from 1 to 20+ engineers and multiple products on web and mobile. Published native mobile apps on iOS and Android for consumer loan applications and financial goal keeping. Server-side technologies in Ruby/Rails, Heroku and AWS.

CTO @ FairLoan Financial
Aug 2012 – Jul 2014 San Francisco, CA

FairLoan connected payroll providers on disparate platforms to provide a clear understanding of an employee's income history for credit decisioning. Started with co-founders, led engineering.

  • Built and launched consumer loan product with Pivotal Labs within 3 months of start. Pivoted to an income verification product for lenders in 2014.
  • Built vendor agnostic payroll integration platform for pushing and pulling data, including employment history and loan repayment via ACH.
Lead Engineer @ Hattery Labs (Acquired by Google Sep 2013)
Jan 2012 – Aug 2012 San Francisco, CA

Hattery Labs was an incubator, accelerator, and investment firm specializing in UI/UX design, engineering, marketing, and branding. I was the first engineering hire and led the growth of the firm's capabilities.

  • Built first Engine Advocacy site, with a web service/widget that ended up connecting thousands of voters to their legislators via phone directly to protest against anti-net neutrality legislation (SOPA and PIPA).
Developer @ Snapstick, Inc. (Acquired by Rovi June 2012)
Aug 2010 – Oct 2011 Cupertino, CA & Mumbai, India

Two years before Google's Chromecast, Snapstick was a hardware and software solution for broadcasting web content from smartphones to HDTVs. Snapstick demoed at Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2011 with great coverage from Engadget, TechCrunch, VentureBeat and PCMag naming us "Best of Show". Laptopmag.com called us one of top 10 mobile start-ups of 2011.

  • Joined as first mobile developer, employee #4. Architect of iPhone and iPad product, a web-based content discovery and on-TV playback control application. Technology: iOS, C, C++, Objective-C, Objective-C++, JavaScript, Virtual Network Computing (VNC) – all in one app.
Principal Software Engineer @ Affinity Circles, Inc. (Acquired by Climber.com Dec 2011)
Jul 2007 – May 2010 Mountain View, CA

Affinity Circles offered a private social network SaaS for universities and professional associations. Pivoted to recruiting search platform. I led product and engineering for recruiting service.

  • Full stack web developer. Highlight: search service on ~20m users on any combination of 20+ dimensions with unbounded, unique values (best: 15ms, worst: 150ms, median: 30ms). Technology: Java, Lucene (pre-dated Solr).
Sr Software Engineer @ Yahoo! Inc.
Aug 2001 – Jul 2007 Sunnyvale, CA

Data Mining (2001 to 2005) and My Yahoo (2005 to 2007).

  • Replaced 10+ year-old My Yahoo infrastructure with platform that was later used to replace Yahoo's front page.
  • Systems and content architect for AT&T and 2Wire partner products for DVR-on-web.
  • Designed and built distributed virtual filesystem for ~700 TB data warehouse across dynamically expandable disk volumes for analytics teams (2005).
  • Optimized major revenue generator in data analytics for targeted ad content with 500m daily user data set (2002).
Software Engineer @ Zack Systems
Jul 2000 – Jul 2001 San Mateo, CA

Web proxy platform that allowed dynamic, real-time modification of HTTP-based content.

Software Engineer @ HighWire
Jun 1997 – Jul 2000 Palo Alto, CA

A division of of Stanford University Libraries, at the time world's second largest free full-text science archives and leader in online publication of academic journals.

  • Lead developer of online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), Mar 2000.
  • Lead site developer of the British Medical Journal (BMJ), Jan 1998.
Co-Founder, Investor, Advisor, Consultant
2009 – 2015 Bay Area

Helped many efforts get off the ground, including:

  • Novel multi-factor (geospatial, biometric) authentication
  • Original content news and entertainment video network
  • Marketing data analytics based on big brand deal-tracking
  • iOS mobile development

Education

Stanford University, A.B. Psychology, June 1997.
  • Completed over 30 units of Computer Science courses, including courses in: C and C++ development, algorithms, general theory, databases, network programming, concurrency.
  • Focus in social psychology and human-computer interaction (HCI) as part of major.

Other interests

  • Contributor to engineering and product podcast, "Engsplaining".
  • Enthusiastic dad, bicycle commuter, video gamer.