Blake Walters
Hi. I'm Blake!
I’m a product engineering leader with a customer-first, outcome-driven approach. Experienced in scaling engineering teams, I’ve successfully led organizations through hyper-growth, technology and platform transitions, and high-velocity execution by driving strategic alignment between product development and business goals. I’m passionate about fostering cultures of autonomy, accountability, and technical excellence.
Core Competencies
Executive Leadership
- Strategic vision for scaling technology organizations from startup to enterprise
- High-impact team building, mentorship, and cross-functional alignment
- Post-acquisition integration and investor/board-level communication
Engineering & Product Strategy
- Customer-centric product development across core engineering, platform, growth, and data domains
- Agile process design, roadmap planning, and executional rigor
- Bridging product, design, and engineering with business objectives
Operational Excellence
- Production readiness and reliability at scale
- CI/CD automation, infrastructure cost optimization, DevOps practices
- Cloud-native architecture, microservices, security, and compliance
Technology Leadership
- Full-stack application design and architecture
- Data engineering, AI/ML product integration, and business intelligence
- Developer experience and tooling for high-velocity teams
Experience
Vice President, Engineering - Prefect
Led engineering through a phase of foundational transformation, shifting focus from growth-stage scaling to sustainable profitability and technical excellence.
- Directed an organization of more than 30 ICs, managers, and directors across product and platform engineering, sales engineering, and technical support
- Transitioned engineering organization from ad hoc development to a disciplined delivery model with strong accountability and predictability
- Turned around product reliability, from multiple outages per week to 99.9%+ uptime while reducing infrastructure costs via architectural modernization and technical rigor
- Led the implementation and launch of Prefect’s PLG self-serve offering that generated $1M+ in ARR (7% of total ARR) within 6 months
- Served as executive manager for Prefect’s Customer Managed product - an enterprise-focused, high margin offering of Prefect’s Cloud platform, accounting for 15% of total annual revenue
- Maintained high compliance and operational standards, achieving an unqualified SOC 2 Type II report
Senior Director, Engineering - CircleCI
Scaled CircleCI’s engineering organization from 50 to 250+ team members during a hyper-growth phase and turbulent, post-pandemic market.
- Built and led domains across AI/ML, product growth, data and analytics, developer experience, and core application product lines
- Directed as many as 8 engineering teams with more than 80 reports including directors, managers, and engineers
- Transformed the data engineering team from 3 engineers to a 40-person organization spanning data platform, data product, AI/ML, and analytics engineering
- Led the replatforming from a legacy, custom written data warehouse to a modern data stack (Snowflake, Airflow, dbt, Looker), significantly improving data confidence and reducing time to analysis from days to hours
- Owned initiatives including a full UI re-platform and redesign, full GitLab integration, and the launch of the Insights data product expanding CircleCI into the AI/ML space with features like flaky test detection and self-healing pipelines
- Led platform security, reliability, and observability improvements that were critical to CircleCI’s recovery from a major security incident
- Oversaw the acquisition and integration of the startup PoniCode - directly leading to the launch of CircleCI’s VSCode extension with nearly 100,000 downloads
Engineering Manager - InVisionApp
- Led a 5-engineer growth team, running continuous experiments on signup activation and in-product engagement
- Managed the Conversations team - a full-stack product engineering team that owned the commenting interface and infrastructure powering collaboration across the full InVision suite
Senior Software Engineer - HashiCorp
Employee #11 and lead product engineer across HashiCorp’s core suite — Terraform, Vault, Nomad, and Consul. Led end-user and enterprise SaaS development, laying the technical foundations of what became HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP) and establishing engineering practices that scaled with the org.
Earlier Roles
- Senior Software Engineer - Big Cartel
- Senior Software Engineer - Viget Labs
- Staff Interactive Engineer - Crispin Porter + Bogusky
Education
University of Missouri - Columbia
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, Minor in Mathematics