From Managing Teams to Empowering Developers

I joined JPMorgan Chase to lead an engineering team building enterprise-wide technology portfolio management tools. The platform helps manage projects, products, and portfolios across all business units—serving thousands of users throughout the organization. But what started as a traditional engineering leadership role evolved into something more. I became fascinated by how AI tools could transform our development process. I started experimenting with GitHub Copilot, creating frameworks, optimizing context configurations, and measuring real productivity gains. Then I started teaching. Presentations to the Design Council. Workshops for the GenAI community. One-on-one mentoring sessions. Watching teams go from skeptical to achieving 40% time savings was incredible. That's when I knew this was my calling.

Sunrun taught me that my favorite part of management wasn't just shipping features—it was growing people and teams. I joined when the team was just 4 people and grew it to 20 members over two years. The real lesson? Great tools and processes amplify great teams. I implemented a micro-frontend architecture that increased feature delivery speed by 30%. I launched a career growth framework that boosted promotions by 30% and retention by 15%. But the wins that energized me most were watching junior engineers grow into technical leaders. This is where I learned that building the right systems—whether technical architecture or career frameworks—has outsized impact on team productivity and happiness.

Six years at Digital.ai gave me the foundation for everything I do now. I led teams across the US, Europe, and India, building design systems and micro-frontends that served 50+ developers across 6 products. This is where I fell in love with developer experience as a product. I wasn't just building features for end users—I was building tools, component libraries, and architectures that made other developers' lives better. Watching design inconsistencies drop by 60% because of a shared component library? That was the spark. I also learned that great architecture isn't about the latest tech—it's about solving real problems. Our Webpack Module Federation implementation boosted development efficiency by 25%, not because it was trendy, but because it solved the specific problem of team autonomy in a micro-frontend world.

This is where I learned to code under pressure and mentor under fire. As a Lead Technical Consultant, I wasn't just writing code—I was reviewing it, teaching it, and fixing it when things went wrong (which was often, because financial systems are unforgiving). The biggest lesson? Code reviews are teaching moments. When I started treating code reviews as mentorship opportunities instead of gatekeeping, defect rates dropped 35% and junior consultants' performance improved 25%. That early experience shaped how I think about technical leadership: it's not about being the smartest person in the room, it's about making everyone in the room smarter.