Blake Walters
Hi. I'm Blake!
I am an executive product engineering leader with a customer-first approach to leadership, guiding teams, leaders, and engineers to solve our customers’ toughest challenges with autonomy and velocity. My leadership philosophy centers on empowering talent to drive innovation and deliver high-impact solutions.
Currently, I serve as the VP of Engineering at Prefect, where I lead talented engineering teams responsible for the critical data workflows of thousands of businesses worldwide. Based remotely in Longmont, CO, I am passionate about fostering a culture of ownership, collaboration, and technical excellence.
Outside of work, I’m a dedicated husband and dad, a car nut and Formula 1 enthusiast, and a lifelong gamer.
Experience
VP, Engineering, Prefect
More to come…
Senior Director, Engineering, CircleCI
Director, Engineering, CircleCI
Senior Engineering Manager, CircleCI
During my tenure at CircleCI, I held roles as Senior Engineering Manager, Director, and Senior Director of Engineering, guiding the company through a period of hyper-growth. My key responsibilities and achievements included:
- Leadership and Strategic Initiatives: Led dozens of successful product and engineering initiatives, including a complete UI redesign and re-platforming, integration with GitLab, and the development of new products such as CircleCI’s Insights data product. Drove significant improvements in reliability, security, and the modernization of CircleCI’s business intelligence data stack.
- Domain Leadership: Established and led multiple domains within product engineering, including core application engineering, growth engineering, business intelligence and analytics, data and AI/ML product engineering, and developer experience.
- Organizational Scaling: Scaled the engineering organization from 50 to 250 personnel, including engineers, managers, and support staff. Implemented processes for discovery, planning, and OKRs to ensure alignment and success at both team and division levels.
- Acquisition and Integration: Managed the acquisition and integration of PoniCode in early 2022, leading to the successful launch of CircleCI’s VSCode Extension, which currently has over 80,000 downloads.
- Team Oversight: Directed up to eight engineering teams within CircleCI’s R&D organization, managing around 80 personnel, including engineering directors, managers, individual contributors, and technical leaders.
Software Engineering Manager, InVisionApp
Led a team of full-stack engineers delivering collaboration and conversation tools across the InVisionApp product suite. Provided technical and product leadership, guided agile development practices, and fostered cross-team collaboration. Responsible for mentorship, hiring, and cultivating a high-performing engineering culture.
Software Engineer, HashiCorp
Employee #11 at HashiCorp and lead front-end engineer for core products including Terraform Enterprise, Vault Enterprise, Nomad, and Consul. Drove the design and implementation of front-end applications supporting both enterprise and open-source customers, guiding the front-end development team to build robust, user-centric interfaces.
Additional Experience
- Software Engineer, Big Cartel
- Senior Software Engineer, Viget Labs
- Staff Engineer, Crispin Porter + Bogusky
- Web Developer, Delta Systems Group
Core Competencies
Executive Leadership:
- Strategic vision and leadership for engineering organizations
- Scaling engineering teams from startup to enterprise
- Driving innovation through customer-centric product development
- Building high-performing, autonomous, and collaborative teams
- Leadership in hyper-growth environments and post-acquisition integration
Product & Engineering Strategy:
- Product engineering and product management for complex software platforms
- Growth engineering, data engineering, and AI/ML product development
- Building and executing product roadmaps aligned with business goals
- Creating and measuring OKRs to drive team and organizational success
- Cross-functional leadership bridging engineering, product, and executive teams
Operational Excellence:
- Agile development practices and iterative product delivery
- Building production-ready, reliable, and secure software systems
- Automating cloud infrastructure with CI/CD pipelines
- Microservices architecture and cloud-native development
- Implementing performance and reliability improvements at scale
People & Culture:
- Talent acquisition, hiring, and team scaling
- Fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion within engineering organizations
- Mentorship and career development for engineering leaders
- Performance management and conducting impactful reviews
- Building collaborative environments that encourage innovation
Technology Leadership:
- Front-end and back-end architecture for large-scale web applications
- Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and DevOps practices
- Data pipeline engineering and business intelligence integrations
- Building developer tooling and improving developer experience
- Extensive hands-on experience with modern engineering practices and frameworks
Education
University of Missouri - Columbia
Earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and a minor in mathematics.