Blake Walters
Hi. I'm Blake!
My career as I know it started way back in 1995. I designed and built my first website that year. It was awful. A local music group paid $50 for a site full of frames, tables, and font tags that ignited a passion and would lead to an entire career. Along the way, I've built websites, web applications, and engineering organizations for small businesses, global brands, and high-growth startups.
Currently, my focus is on product engineering leadership. I'm proud to lead a division of talented engineering teams that are building and shipping products and platforms for customers around the world. I aim to build highly effective engineering organizations, empower teams and individuals to operate independently and help them ship impactful features to users quickly and reliably.
Today, I'm a Senior Director of Engineering for the CI/CD Engine Division at CircleCI, working remotely out of my home in Longmont, CO. Outside of work, I'm a husband and a dad, a devoted Formula 1 fan, and a lifelong gamer.
Experience
Senior Director, Engineering, CircleCI
Director, Engineering, CircleCI
Senior Engineering Manager, CircleCI
In my time at CircleCI, I've served as a senior engineering manager, director, and senior director of engineering, focusing primarily on guiding our startup through a period of hyper-growth toward IPO. Responsibilities and accomplishments included:
- Managed and directed dozens of successful product and engineering initiatives with highlights including a fully redesigned and re-platformed UI, our integration with GitLab, the development of CircleCI's Insights data product, and the modernization of the organization's business intelligence data stack.
- Established and lead multiple domains throughout product engineering at CircleCI, including growth engineering, business intelligence and analytics engineering, data and AI/ML product engineering, developer experience, and core product engineering.
- Helped scale the overall engineering organization from 50 to 250 engineers, engineering managers, and engineering support personnel.
- Established organization-wide processes for discovery, planning, and OKRs to guide and measure success at the division and team levels.
- Performed due diligence, onboarding, G&A integration, and product oversight for the acquisition of PoniCode in early 2022, which lead to a successful launch of CircleCI's VSCode Extension with more than 15,000 downloads in its first quarter.
Today, I oversee six engineering teams within CircleCI's R&D department, totaling around 60 personnel including engineering managers, individual contributors, and technical leaders.
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Software Engineer, HashiCorp
HashiCorp employee #11. Lead front-end engineer across HashiCorp's suite of products - Terraform Enterprise, Vault Enterprise, Nomad, and Consul. Primarily responsible for driving the design and implementation of applications built by the front-end development team and used to support Hashicorp's products for both enterprise and open-source customers.
Additional Experience
- Software Engineer, Big Cartel
- Senior Developer, Viget Labs
- Staff Engineer, Crispin Porter + Bogusky
- Web Developer, Delta Systems Group
Education
University of Missouri - Columbia
Received a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science with a focus in web application development.
Skills
Product engineering and product management, growth engineering, data engineering, agile development practices, microservices, cloud infrastructure automation, continuous integration and deployment, production readiness and operations, team building, mentorship, performance reviews, setting and tracking business and product goals, cross-team and stakeholder collaboration, hiring, interviewing, and onboarding.
Specific technical skills include Javascript, Ruby, GoLang, and MySQL as well as a spectrum of development frameworks both server- and client-side.