Karim Shehadeh
Experience
- Helped to migrate our authentication and profile management to a best-in-breed combination of systems without impacting user experience or internal processes
- Established a new platform team that is responsible for key backend systems that power Under Armour’s technology foundations.
- Established ways of working, automated processed, a consistent SDLC and cross-team communication patterns to drive efficiency.
- Built a new front-end for our ecommerce platform using NextJS and TypeScript, using a GraphQL integration API which is backed by Salesforce Commerce Cloud among other backend services. Our new platform improves performance on our top of funnel pages from ~4 seconds to under one second.
- Improved integration with our CoreMedia Content Management System by moving to a headless approach which allows for the rendering of our storytelling modules in React and provides a separation of concerns between our CMS data and rendering code.
- Automated and simplified our data layer and tag governance systems by consolidating tools and taking advantage of existing APIs to ensure we are consistently taking inventory of our third-party integrations to help protect our customers’ privacy and security.
- Build and review technical design documents for large scale projects like Loyalty program integration, Order Management, Centralized Authentication, etc.
- Build proofs of concept for headless implementation of commerce site using Next.js as a frontend and Salesforce Commerce Cloud as a backend.
- Create tooling for monitoring and maintaining Salesforce Commerce Cloud including DataDog connector, AWS Lambda that monitors job status and slack-based app for managing sandboxes.
- Major projects include migration to a new routing engine, incidents on the map and the route line, signpost images, road shields plus iterative quality improvements.
- Responsibilities include roadmap planning, product strategy, architecture, internal tooling, people management including performance reviews.
- Lead the team responsible for Infrastructure since late 2019. Increased the number of touchpoints with Engineers 4x creating more opportunity for discussion and roadmap input. Moved the team from a “reactive” style of operation to a “proactive” one with a defined roadmap, a development cadence.
- Leading the team responsible for Engineering Advocacy at Under Armour. Introduced regular internal tech talks, informational newsletters and slack-based support system that increased support request intake x4 and reduced time to resolution by half.
- Led the development of a graph database and supporting software to aggregate product data from multiple internal sources to help with supply chain efficiencies, product line management predictions as well as product information dissemination across the company. Aggregated data from three different internal, proprietary, systems into one searchable store elevating raw data as well as calculated traits that have otherwise been hidden from or unavailable to internal users.
- Led the development team responsible for the Under Armour North America custom e-commerce platform that delivers close to three quarters of a billion dollars in revenue per year.
- Organized the migration of a monolithic E-Commerce platform from ColdFusion to a micro-service architecture with most services written in NodeJS and shared communication over a Kafka bus.
- Managed 13 full time employees directly and an engineering team of 60 (10 teams) indirectly at its height.
- Designed and led the implementation of an SDLC that facilitated the deployment of 10-20 releases to production per day, a consistent productivity cadence and aligned product and engineering teams much more closely than they ever had before.
- Delivered the successful UA ICON project ahead of schedule and under budget by assembling the right team and establishing the implementation strategy.
- Slashed capital expense by 30% by negotiating with consulting vendors to engage with fewer consultants in a more structured environment while delivering higher quality products in less time with more predictability.
- Hired over 60 full time engineers and consultants using an onboarding process that included recorded instruction, tech talks, highly curated system documentation and a mentoring system pairing new recruits with senior engineers.
- Led the development team responsible for the delivery and transition to a B2B solution which delivers 450 million dollars of revenue per year.
- Increased the productivity of mobile ad designers three-fold by building tools that made it simple to build complex ads with more reliability in less time.
- Defined and implemented an SDLC in close partnership with the Creative team and business partners to facilitate a two-week turnaround for feature and bug requests – often much faster. Applied Agile techniques custom fitted for the organization and increased transparency with partners.
- Directly managed 10 full-time engineers in two cities (Baltimore and Boston) responsible for an Ad Server and tooling that processed over a billion requests per day and was the platform delivering 80% of Millennial Media’s revenue at the time
- As a Sr. Software Engineer, I architected and developed a Video Ad Builder used to generate mobile video ads accepting a variety of criteria to build the final creative speeding up the time to create a single ad by 200%
- Dramatically increased scalability of our video surveillance products by implementing Op-Center which gave companies the ability to track dozens of DVRs from a central location.
- Modernized and added significant functionality to Verint’s windows-based video browsing tool allowing 16 cameras to be viewed at once in a number of visual configurations.
- Developed features for international CAD software, VectorWorks (formerly MiniCAD).
- Primary developer responsible for native implementation of Windows version. Migrated shared code from cross-platform UI library.
Sr. Manager, Platform2024-Present
Hands on management for a team of backend, frontend and full-stack engineers responsible for the foundational e-commerce services that power the Under Armour digital landscape including web and native applications as well as retail and back-office systems. Duties include architectural planning, improving maintainability, reliability and observability of our systems, stakeholder alignment, backlog management, nurturing career aspirations of teammates and organizational planning.
Sr. Manager, Web Frontend2022-2024
Hands on management of a full-stack web team responsible for the building and maintenance of multiple high traffic websites with a focus on usability, performance and stability. Duties include architectural planning, development of foundational components, stakeholder alignment, roadmap building, nurturing career aspirations of teammates and organizational planning. During my tenure in this role, I helped to rebuild our frontend platform on modern technology while significantly improving key metrics like LCP and TTFB.
Lead, Software Architect2021-2022
Technical supervision of major engineering projects across the E-Commerce organization.
Manager, Engineering2020-2021
Lead the team that builds all of Mapbox’s Navigation APIs including Directions, Matrix, Isochrone, Map-matching and Optimization.
Sr. Manager, Engineering2015-2020
Over five years, led several teams from e-commerce to infrastructure to Research and Development.
Sr. Manager, Engineering2011-2015
Built tooling for the development of rich media advertisements for mobile applications as well as the delivery of those advertisements to mobile devices.
Principal Engineer2004-2011
Built Windows-based application for managing video surveillance systems.
Sr. Engineer1997-2004
Built CAD software for the architecture industry.
Education
B.S. Math/Computer Science1997
St. Mary’s College of Maryland