Based in Phoenix, AZ 🌵
tristanzimmerman.com
Background and Expertise
Career Timeline
Cobalt Technical Co-Founder/Head Of Engineering
- Cobalt
Fourth hire and technical lead for all projects. Built and directed multiple engineering teams that created the Cobalt platform while helping our junior Head of Product develop a modern product management system. Personally rewrote the entire API and React app, using Remix and TypeScript, when the company pivoted from a ground up consumer product development platform to an "Alibaba of the Americas" model.
- Hired and lead multiple product and engineering teams while taking on front end and backend engineering tasks myself.
- Collaborated with out Head of Product on wire frame and UI design and helped write specification docs for features and user flows.
- Managed cybersecurity for the application and infrastructure including finding and reviewing cybersecurity insurance plans to find appropriate coverage for the companies needs.
- Supported partnerships with Brit+Co's Selfmade Entrepreneur program for woman, building and adding features to give them special tools and access to in app credits to launch their businesses.
- Kept our AWS costs extremely low using AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, and API Gateway and applying for and obtaining AWS credits to extend our funding runway.
- Wrote ETL pipelines for data during multiple product pivots to integrate legacy data and keep the user experience from being interrupted.
Launch Forth VP of Platform and Web Development
- Launch Forth
Ran a complete product team that built and scaled a 150k+ member community-based, product development platform including two separate white-label instances for two different GE subsidiaries to speed up and diversify their product development process. Oversaw UI development for onboard information and advertisement system and mobile app for the Local Motors Olli autonomous shuttle system.
- Hired engineers, full time and contract. Kept in touch with our fully remote team to preserve their time from distractions and ensured any roadblocks were removed from work. Implemented a new employee review process including an anonymous management review process so the team I lead could give me candid feedback on my leadership.
- Managed and Implemented a CDP and CRM pipeline between our application and Salesforce using Segment.io and a salesforce specialized contracting team. Wrote and updated SQL queries as Helpers within Salesforce to transform user data into the correct format allowing our Product Manager and our marketing team to use Salesforce to it's fullest capacity.
- Mentored engineers who went on to successful careers in software development and engineering leadership at Braze and Slalom.
- Wrote tasks, stories, and epics in Jira generating reports on velocity and reporting to our CEO about progress, timelines, and costs.
- Collaborated with a separate engineering team handling onboard device data and infrastructure for the Olli shuttle system. Restructured our application tasks so that one of our senior engineers could bring their IOT experience to the table without being overloaded with the expectations of two different teams.
Launch Forth Product Owner
- Launch Forth
Responsible for all product planning including feature request organization and evaluation while still being embedded with the platform engineering team. Migrated the team to Jira and an Agile development system. Managed wire frame and design work communicating everything to stakeholders and engineering while reporting on work and velocity.
- Migrated task management and product management from a mix of Github Issues and Trello to Jira and Confluence and implemented an Agile software development system.
- Organized all tasks, user stories, and epics in Jira keeping detailed feature request and specification documents in Confluence that were available to all stakeholders, design, and the engineering team for maximum transparency.
- Personally created wire frames and created and modified designs where necessary.
- Studied feature requests to better understand the specific problem the stakeholder wished to address, finding solutions with engineering, design, and stakeholders. Found compromises between feature size, complexity, and delivery time while preserving the solution for the stakeholders.
- Interviewed users to understand what their expectations were of the application, how they were using it, and what they thought could make the experience better.
Local Motors Director of Marketing Technology
- Local Motors
Lead Engineer for the Local Motors marketing department. Coordinated with the platform engineering team for needed app updates and directed two junior marketing engineers in building and maintaining marketing initiatives.
- Worked with marketing team members to plan out long term marketing needs, helping to source and setup services while integrating them into the Local Motors application where needed while keeping the work in lock step with he primary platform team.
- Directed two junior developers from the marketing team to increase velocity, breaking down tasks and helping them as they learned how to write code.
- Created and maintained several marketing sites, deploying them directly to AWS or setting up no-code/low-code tools to empower the marketing team to update content themselves.
- Directed the setup and customization of several Shopify sites to allow for direct to consumer product sales, directing junior marketing developers to increase velocity.
- Handled and directed any marketing updates to the app such as content updates, brand changes, and integration of analytics tools.
- Continued to pick up engineering tasks for the platform working on new features, fixing bugs, or updating existing features.
Local Motors Senior Front End Developer
- Local Motors
Built features for the client side AngularJS application, making updates to the Django based API when needed, adding endpoints or updating controllers and models. Regularly wrote tests in Python for any new additions I made.
- Discovered and fixed a series of Django models with crisscrossed relationships causing the homepage of the app to load several seconds faster.
- Built a Slack bot to allow site users working in specific Local Motors Slack channels to read and respond to comments in the app directly from Slack.
- Built a standalone Angular application for the marketing team to allow for simple polling and voting at marketing booths. Collected data into a simple PostgreSQL database for later review and reporting.
- Brought basic UI elements into line with branding and designs to move away from some of the Material UI base that had been originally used.
Pinball Strategy Director of Technology
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Primary developer at a small marketing and strategy agency focused on working with startups to help them grow their visibility and user bases.
- Hired and managed contract developers when we required additional bandwidth, reviewing code, and giving the final say when the work was completed.
- Built and managed client sites using Wordpress and other third party marketing platforms.
- Built a custom Angular app for the Arizona Commerce Authority to run a March Madness style tournament with bracketing and user voting for local startups to win funding and a support package from the ACA.
- Rebuilt the Arizona Humane Society website on Wordpress, integrating it with a fairly archaic animal inventory system that required page scraping from a third party and an ETL pipeline to add or remove entries to the database. We also got to visit their shelters regularly petting roughly one million animals.
Additional work history
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Developed marketing sites using a custom, PHP based in-house CMS. Built gamified marketing applications for the likes of Expedia, Hyatt, Shutterfly, Virgin Airlines, and Deloitte using various combinations of Backbone, AngularJS, and Bootstrap.
- Built a Javascript application for the "Expedia Rewards Around the World in 100 Days" game. The game allowed Expedia users to use their earned Expedia travel points to take an avatar on a virtual trip around the world, asking trivia questions and show information about each location.
- Built a simple, Backbone based bingo game for Deloitte employees allowing them to complete onboarding and work tasks to win prizes. Used by thousands of Deloitte employees as part of a campaign to improve employee retention.
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Built and maintained a dozen different Wordpress sites for multiple continuing education events including marketing and registration. Setup multiple e-commerce sites using Joomla and Magento each handling a different business aspect of the foundations publishing arm Handled purchasing and maintenance of all IT needs for the building and employees.
- Used hand-spun PHP frameworks with MySQL database integrations, as well as Wordpress, Joomla, and Magento. Handled selection of hosting platforms and all deployment needs.
- Integrated third-party services to allow customers to register for foundation conferences that were attended by thousands of mental healthcare professionals seeking continuing education credits. Tracked analytics and generated regular reports for the Foundation director.
- Handled purchasing of computers and networking equipment, including network accessible storage. Setup new security standards to make sure no equipment could be easily accessed and that the network was secure.
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Produced, edited, and managed content for 101.5 KZON‘s website, and frequently supported sister stations KOOL 94.5 and KMLE 107.9. Did production design and development for two major station re-brandings and product relaunches including wholesale rebuilding of the KZON website. Designed static and animated print and digital advertisements, created and sent email blasts, edited and posted videos, and built specialized landing sites for on-air campaigns.
Skills & Qualifications
Languages and Tools
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ReactJS
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TypeScript
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NodeJS
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Remix
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Tailwind
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Python
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Django
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Architect
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AWS
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PostgreSQL
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MongoDB
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Github
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Docker
Creative
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Sketch
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Figma
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Photoshop
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Illustrator
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Whimsical
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Miro
Organizational
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Jira
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Confluence
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Notion
Certificates
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AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner