Reza Karegaran

Lead all product engineering for AMN's Language Services business offering live In-person, audio, and video translation.

Led a digital transformation initiative within the capital finance division of a leading agriculture and farm equipment manufacturer, aligning technology with business strategy.
Established new product and engineering practices by engaging the leadership team, fostering a receptive environment for change and modernization.
Advanced organizational transparency, consistently communicating project milestones and deliverables to stakeholders, ensuring alignment and trust.
Led a robust training program in Agile methodologies, instilling best practices in product development and engineering that linked team activities with broader business objectives.
Mentored and guided teams in transitioning essential roles such as Scrum Masters and Product Managers, enhancing team capabilities and leadership skills.
Established and led a cross-functional digital product team, driving innovation and invention.

Lead engineering for all-new ecommerce offering to expand health category. Built out and scaled team, which grew team from zero to two engineering managers and 10 software engineers in less than 6 months. Launched research study MVP in record time.

Lead product engineering for Best Buy Health's (previously Great Call's) active aging offerings. Our teams create accessible technology that helps seniors live independently longer. Our Lively line of mobile devices and apps helps connect our customers with their loved ones and caregivers and provides peace of mind with direct access to our world-class 24x7x365 Urgent Response services.

Notable Achievements

• Shipped the Lively Mobile+, a mobile personal emergency responder.
• Shipped the Lively Flip 2, an accessible-first designed Android-based flip phone.
• Shipped the Lively Smart 3, an accessible-first designed Android-based smartphone in record time; our most highly reviewed product (4+ stars/5).
• Supported launch of a first-to-market offering on Apple Watch: Lively On Apple Watch.
• Supported relaunch of Lively and Link iOS and Android apps.
  Championed the adoption of OKRs and helped mature our product management practices.

My teams built and maintained the software and infrastructure that supports AutoAnything.com. Those systems serve millions of unique visitors per month and tens of thousands of transactions per month.

As the CTO, I was directly accountable for software engineering, product management, and experience design. I was responsible for providing the vision, direction, and guidance for our engineering teams, including envisioning new products, building support for products, helping my team see the bigger picture to more efficiently solve problems, and developing people to support professional growth.

My teams lead organizational planning and road mapping exercises to align stakeholders and business partners around strategic objectives. In addition, I strive to foster a culture of continuous improvement by embracing contemporary engineering practices and a progressive results-oriented mindset.

Notable Achievements

• Primarily responsible for rationalizing, modernizing (monolith to microservices to cloud-first), and securing all technology needed to operate AutoAnything.
• Increased the rate at which we can introduce changes to our technology ecosystem by investing in instrumentation, monitoring, and automation; heavy emphasis on cloud-first, reducing our on-premises footprint and burden on operations.
• Improved decision-making quality and velocity by enabling every employee to answer queries based on near real-time data by developing a series of data lakes utilizing Google BigQuery.
• Built excitement around how the work we're doing supports our vision and strategy by establishing an organization-wide agile planning process utilizing objectives and key results (OKRs).

As the director of engineering, I spearheaded the transition from a years-old monolithic legacy system to domain-driven microservices leveraging DevOps best practices by implementing build-and-deploy automation emphasizing continuous delivery.

Notable Achievements

• Developed and deployed a career development framework that emphasizes capabilities, contribution, and culture; what we call “The Three C's.”
• Designed and deployed a revamped interview process favoring structure and objectivity.
• Reorganized staff around “product-domain” teams, which improved focus and quality.
• Formed a platform services team to support the cultural change our team was driving with the DevOps movement.

Notable Achievements

• Improved stakeholder visibility and buy-in into feature backlog prioritization by launching updated processes and formalizing product roadmaps and associated artifacts. Developed a valuation and prioritization framework for feature development and established a regular cadence to review roadmaps, backlogs, and sprint commitments.
• Improved the ticketing and production support process by establishing service-level agreements and prioritizing tickets to increase the team's throughput and responsiveness. Also created a process to identify and incorporate feature gaps into product roadmaps to eliminate all manual repeatable production support. #automatethelowvaluethings
• Guided software engineering and IT operations groups on designing a new platform architecture utilizing microservices.
  Increased software release cadence by drafting and implementing a
• DevOps strategy to enable our teams to build high-quality and scalable processes to support continuous delivery.
  

Notable Achievements

• Developed a 12-month product roadmap to migrate legacy system to next-generation ecommerce platform.
• Architected next-generation ecommerce solution built on Magento Enterprise Platform.
  Architected and developed two-way replication mechanism built on .Net and C# to synchronize transactional data between next-generation website and legacy systems.
• Architected and beta-launched next-generation ecommerce website on Amazon Web Services.

Managed a globally distributed engineering team, who are responsible for the development of Moodys.com and CreditEdge, an industry-leading analytics software suite for analyzing and reporting on Expected Default Frequency (EDF) in addition to various other financial instruments.

Notable Achievements

• Architected and designed next-generation platform to support the modernization of CreditEdge (SaaS). Launched beta in under 12 months.
• Established incident management and response program to stabilize operations around SaaS data-delivery solution.

Lead architecture, development, and design (back-end and front-end) of AutoAnything ecommerce website utilizing ASP.Net MVC, C#, and Microsoft SQL Server. Provided operational support of business and consumer-facing software systems.

Oversaw various aspects of technology operations, including managing a software engineering team, defining policies and procedures, best practices, architectural vision, team building/leadership, and continued career development—managed two growing software engineering teams with a combined total of 9 engineers.

Notable Achievements
* Architected next-generation ecommerce platform. Developed distributed message-based service-
architecture to be resilient and highly available.
* Improved website performance by 40%, which led to increased customer satisfaction and
a boost in conversion rate.
* Aligned software engineering and business strategy to enable the enterprise to effectively leverage
engineering knowledge and expertise into new product development.
* Converted team into leveraging an efficient development methodology, utilizing SCRUM.
* Led technology department to successfully perform a broad spectrum of tasks, including application
development, support, R&D, and QA.

Notable Achievements

• Worked closely with technology and operations departments to document, design, and develop enterprise-wide software systems to manage day-to-day business operations.
• Managed, designed, and developed order management and fulfillment system to integrate with ecommerce website using ASP.Net, C#, and Microsoft SQL Server (systems process 10k+ orders, invoices, and shipments/day).
• Collaborated with technology and merchandising teams to develop product-data management tools for merchandising department.
• Developed data parsing applications to export product data to Amazon and other retail channels as a third-party merchant.