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 world-class 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 and Head 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, an avid amateur photographer, a serious car nut, and spend what little free time I have left playing as many video games as possible.
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 ushering our startup through a period of hyper-growth toward IPO. Responsibilities and accomplishments included:
- Established and lead multiple domains throughout product engineering at CircleCI, overseeing as many as eight teams and over 70 personnel concurrently.
- Domains included growth engineering, business intelligence and analytics engineering, data and AI/ML product engineering, and developer experience. Currently overseeing CircleCI's core application group.
- Helped scale the overall engineering organization from 50 to 250 engineers, engineering managers, and engineering support personnel.
- Designed and participated in more than 500 interviews for engineers, managers, and directors as well as for cross-functional roles such as product management, engineering operations, and visual design.
- Helped establish organization-wide processes for OKRs to guide and measure success at the team and domain levels.
- Performed due dilligence, onboarding, G&A integration, and product oversight for the acquisition of PoniCode in early 2022
- Helped establish and am currently overseeing R&D Labs - an incubation division within CircleCI for recent acquisitions, new product lines, and experimental work.
Today, I oversee six engineering teams within CircleCI's R&D department, totaling around 70 personnel including engineering managers, individual contributors, and technical leaders.
Software Engineering Manager, InVisionApp
Engineering manager for a dedicated, high-performing team of full-stack engineers building collaboration and conversation tools across the InVisionApp suite of products. Responsible for technical and product leadership, mentorship, hiring, agile development practices, and cross-team collaboration.
Software Engineer, HashiCorp
Lead front-end engineer across HashiCorp's suite of products - Terraform Enterprise, Vault Enterprise, Nomad, and Consul. Primarily responsible for driving design and implementation of Ember.js 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
- Sr. Front-End Developer, Viget Labs
- Sr. User Interface Architect, 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 as well as a minor in Mathematics.
Skills
Product management and product engineering, growth engineering, data engineering, agile development practices, microservices, cloud infrastructure automation, continuous deployment, production readiness and operations, team building, mentorship, performance reviews, setting and tracking business and product goals, cross-team and stakeholder collaboration.
Specific technical skills include HTML, CSS, Javascript, Node, Ruby, GoLang, and MySQL as well as a spectrum of development frameworks both server- and client-side.