Ian J. MacIntosh

Owner

May 2019 – Present

• Led a client’s off-shore team to reliable productivity, transforming them from an underestimated team into a model of effective collaboration. We achieved this by implementing Scrum from the ground up. Eventually the team became self-managing, running their own Daily Scrums (without the boring “Three Questions”) and delivering incremental value with every sprint
• Scaled up a client’s engineering team fast. I did this by creating a partnership between my client and a trusted coding boot camp. I built a hiring funnel to fit the client’s needs and wrote key points and a timeline to share with applicants for total transparency. Hiring became a lot more fun, and the client hired even more engineers than planned
• Cut a client’s rate of new bugs in half. Together, we restructured their Scrum teams to include quality engineers, empowering them to make great saves instead of being treated like code janitors reporting messes. Focus shifted to delivered value instead of how many tickets or story points the team could finish in a sprint
• Stabilized an application using automated testing. My client had a complex app with no integration testing, so functionality quietly broke all the time. After I helped their engineers install Cypress and write their first tests, they started catching regressions immediately. Later, we added Cypress Cloud and an automated pull request integration to catch problems even more easily

Software Architect

Apr 2018 – May 2019

• Guided five different teams of 3-10 engineers to become more stable and autonomous. I coached team leads at weekly 1:1’s and provided practical advice, but I found the biggest improvements by listening closely to understand their challenges, then being their vocal advocate when they needed support at a higher level
• Facilitated technically difficult updates by working with remote and co-located teams that depended on each other’s timing to deliver updates without service interruption
• Mentored and coached junior and senior engineers with friendly hands-on help when they needed it. I also empowered engineers to grow their professional skills independently by designing and implementing a career development program built on peer collaboration

Apr 2015 – Apr 2018

• Provided technical guidance and coordination with other teams looking to interface with the marketing website, by advocating for simple solutions everyone could immediately understand
• Coached engineers who were stuck on problems; my favorites were (and still are) unusual issues with Git and HTTP request analysis
• Implemented team-wide standards for code reviews and editor setups, so each developer could use the tools they loved while meeting shared goals and quality expectations
• Standardized a contribution model based on popular open source community concepts so pull requests had clear ownership, and commit history was both easier to read and more informative
• After helping Constant Contact with a broad variety of challenges across multiple platforms, I was promoted to Software Architect to guide front-end development for the marketing sites of other brands in our parent company’s portfolio

Oct 2009 – Apr 2015

• Rebuilt the marketing website to be "mobile-first," introducing responsive design to the company
• Presented responsive design at internal conferences. I also wrote an article about it for the company's tech blog
• After demonstrating technical leadership and commitment to advancing the company’s engineering culture, I was promoted to Principal Software Engineer

Senior UX Dev Contractor

Jun 2008 – Oct 2009

Senior Web Developer

May 2007 – Oct 2009

Professional Scrum Master II

July 2023

Professional Scrum Master I

June 2023

Bachelor of Arts, Sociology

2007