Hello! ☕️

Throughouth my career, I’ve worked with many different technologies, but it’s all centered around building end-to-end web applications. Currently, I am a Lead Software Engineer and have a track record leading numerous large-scale projects from proof of concept to final delivery. I have led these projects in both technical and project management capacities. On the technical front, I spearhead the software architecture and design of these projects taking into consideration both functional and nonfunctional requirements of the system. I actively play a technical mentorship role by increasing the knowledge and scope of the engineers on my team, but also more broadly across the organization. On the project management front, I drive many of the classic agile ceremonies and play an active role in regular planning and prioritization meetings representing the engineering team.

In my free time I enjoy working on side projects. My latest one is meetproppy.ai (still a work in progress!).

Education

  • Georgia Tech, Spring 2021 - M.S. of Computer Science, focus in Machine Learning
  • Virginia Tech, Spring 2016 - B.S. of Computer Science

Experience

Regal.io | Lead Software Engineer

Self-service IVR

Led the development of a no-code interactive voice response workflow builder. This was a large (quarter long project) and highly visible project for the company. I was the tech lead for this and led 4 other engineers on it. This project was completely greenfield to the company and initially there were a lot of unknowns.

Despite the magnitude of the project and technical hurdles we had to clear, we were successful in launching the product on schedule. Reflecting back on this, here’s what went right:

  • Acknowledging unknowns and kicking off spikes as early as possible.
  • Using spikes to do real proofs of concept and only start forecasting a project plan afterwards. I personally did the proof of concept for this project and it gave enough insight to forecast about a month out. I addressed key assumptions head on and built prior art that was more useful than external docs.
  • Identifying key areas of the product that others can own. Projects of this size have to be team efforts, which means the team needs to share in the ownership, so simply identifying and encouraging each team member to own a separate part of the code can go a long way. Read more here!
Custom Contact Lists

This was a smaller (but highly requested!) project that I lead of 3 engineers, but the timeline from when we obtained ownership of the project to when we got it to customers (2 sprints) was small. Read more here!

Custom Tasks

The project was enhancing the journey builder to allow our customers to bring more manual and agent workflows into the application. This was a medium-sized project, but it required leading a team of 3 engineers to complete.

Particular challenges with this project were:

  • my own infamiliarity with this part of the product
  • the team’s infamiliarity with this part of the product
  • coming up with a plan given ⬆️

Overcoming these challenges required me to quickly ramp up via a proof of concept and teaching the rest of the team through architecture diagrams and knowledge sharing. In the end it launched! Read more here!

Segment Builder

This was a large scale project where I was the lead engineer of 5 other engineers. This was a particularly challenging project for a variety of reasons:

  • Bringing in new technology to the company that no one had experience using
  • Trying to reason around nuances in our platform
  • The implementation itself was technically challenging and required in-depth knowledge of our entire platform

It was a formative experience for myself personally, and I still apply learnings from this project to projects today. Despite the challenges, it launched! Read about it here!

Journey Builder

I had joined the company part way through the delivery of the journey builder. I eventually took on the role of tech lead later on, and lead several projects related to general enhancements and maintenance of the journey builder.

  • Scheduled Journeys which enabled customers to schedule periodic blasts towards segments of customers. This required many scaling improvements to the existing system.
  • Unified Profile Migration which required changing a key underlying data model in our system with no downtime.
Salesforce OAuth + Event Streaming

This project was one I took on early on at Regal. Despite being the only engineer on the project, I found it to be challenging due to the scope. During this project, I leaned on some past experience of mine (having been an engineer at Salesforce). I had to quickly ramp up on OAuth in general, but in the end the feature launched! See the dev docs here

Salesforce – Arlington, VA (remote) | Lead Member of Technical Staff

  • Led the Spiking and Pre-Spiking of Epics in consultation with the Product Team to shape the product roadmap for upcoming releases.
  • Identified key technical requirements and proposed architectures, data models, and solutions.
  • Worked closely with the scrum master and Product Management to prioritize release items based on estimations.
  • Facilitated technical and product discussions across multiple teams to ensure organizational alignment.
  • Led the delivery of complex, customer-facing features at the epic level.
  • Coordinated with product stakeholders including Product Management, Engineering Management, Architects, and Engineers to ensure project success.
  • Developed software features in Java, Javascript, and CSS/HTML for the Salesforce web application.

Salesforce – San Francisco, CA | Senior Member of Technical Staff

  • Delivered complex features at the epic level, collaborating with product management, engineering management, and other key stakeholders.
  • Conducted Spike sessions, estimated efforts, and broke down requirements into user stories with clear deliverables.

Technologies

  • Databases: Opensearch, Postgres, Redis, Dynamodb, Snowflake
  • Streams and Queues: Dynamodb Streams, Kinesis Streams, SQS, BullMQ
  • Backend: Typescript + NestJS + AWS ECS, Python + Lambda + API Gateway + Step Functions, Java
  • Frontend: Typescript + React, HTML + CSS, Lightning Web Components
  • Platforms: Salesforce, Twilio, AWS, Snowflake
  • Machine Learning: PyTorch, SciKit Learn, OpenAI
  • Tools: Terraform

Contact Information

Location: Alexandria, VA, 22314
Email: hudson.worden@gmail.com
Phone: (703) 915-5107
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/hudson-worden