Ryan Lindsey

Experience

• Weedmaps

  Irvine, CA

  Mar 2016 — Present

  Senior Engineering Manager

  Feb 2021 — Present

  Own incident management for the entire engineering organization since 2024 and coach fellow engineering managers, while leading 8 engineers across 2 teams whose work spans the whole platform, the web applications and the native iOS and Android applications alike. Platform: AWS, Ruby on Rails, Node.js, GraphQL, React, Next.js, Swift, Kotlin, React Native, Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, Fastly, Snowflake.

  • Lead cross-functional teams of polyglot engineers shipping features across Android, iOS, and web, partnering with Product and Design from definition through release. The native applications run Swift and Kotlin, with React Native covering roughly half the production surface since 2025.
  • Designed and built a delivery-forecasting toolchain for engineering managers, beginning as a set of Claude Skills and migrating to an internal MCP server as adoption outgrew that packaging. Adopted by >80% of engineering managers and absorbed into the org-wide roadmapping and reporting process.
  • The incident process I own now runs on agentic investigation: incident commanders use agents and connected MCP servers over live telemetry, which has raised root-cause-analysis quality and sharply reduced the time to produce one.
  • That ownership covers the process itself, the communication strategy, service integrations with third-party systems of record including Salesforce, data reporting, and training, and it has covered the native mobile applications from the start alongside the web and back-end services. Data Engineering and InfoSec run their own incident processes on the same tooling. Accountable for the area's OKRs and report on them to the executive team monthly. Risky changes go through a change advisory board with documented rollback plans, and post-incident review is blameless with linked action items.
  • Measured the inherited process before changing it, and found response and resolution times were already at or better than industry standard, a reading corroborated independently by a vendor in the space. The real weakness was time to detect, so that became the focus: a service-level observability initiative run with DevOps and SRE now surfaces issues before customers report them, across both web and native applications.
  • Publish agentic tooling as Claude Skills in a shared repository open to every engineering manager, running on scheduled cloud routines, including a daily digest covering incident-response concerns.
  • Day-to-day software and product development runs through Snowflake's MCP servers, so querying the system of record is part of the agentic toolchain rather than a separate reporting step.
  • Took on an advertising technology platform to raise its engineering rigor: documented its critical paths, built a test coverage strategy integrated with CI and improved it over time, moved it to blue/green deployments for zero downtime with DevOps, and added bot mitigation and payload verification with InfoSec to protect metric integrity against junk traffic.
  • Built an off-marketplace e-commerce platform from nothing with a team, to meet marketplace regulatory requirements across the United States and Canada. Still in production and contributing to platform GMV.

  Case study: Replacing guessed delivery dates with calibrated forecasts

  Engineering Manager

  Sep 2017 — Feb 2021

  • Managed up to 19 engineers, from junior through staff level, across several cross-functional product delivery teams on a consumer platform used by millions of people every month.
  • From 2019 the teams reporting to me shipped across Android, iOS, and web rather than one surface at a time, with backend, front-end, iOS, and Android engineers on the same delivery teams. Coordinating one feature across three release surfaces, two of them gated by app review, is a different planning problem than shipping to the web alone.
  • Decoupled deployment from feature release, so the product and go-to-market teams could control launch timing independently of engineering deploys. This removed a standing coupling between shipping software and announcing it.
  • Introduced global edge caching across the primary web applications on both client and server, through a Fastly CDN integration and an API caching strategy keyed on surrogate keys, so caches invalidate by content association rather than by URL.
  • Tripled overall test coverage and reduced escape defects by making code quality standards something the teams practiced rather than something they were handed.
  • Led image processing pipeline work spanning millions of unique assets, improving engineering efficiency, vendor costs, and application performance. Improved inter-service communication for business-critical APIs with a publish-subscribe message queue pattern.
  • Sat several hundred interviews and grew the engineering team by dozens across multiple growth cycles. Promoted a dozen or more, a few onto the management track and the majority further along the technical one.
  • As one of the company's first engineering managers, helped shape its performance management program, iterated on it with HR for nearly a decade, and coached other managers on running it, one-to-ones, and situational management.
  • Founded and ran a public monthly engineering meetup that passed 250 members inside a year, and built a repeatable onboarding process for new engineers.

  Manager, Front End Engineering

  May 2016 — Sep 2017

  • The company's first engineering manager below the executive level. Before this team existed, every engineer reported to the same VP or CTO.
  • Chartered to develop front-end developers into front-end engineers, which is where the department's technical rigor and its cultural shift started.
  • Began the front-end re-architecture. Shipping a single roadmap feature meant changing three separate code bases to reach every user and device, a legacy of the pre-responsive mobile subdomain era. The work cut time to market and became the foundation for the company's later front-end architecture on React and Next.js, including a shared UI library built with the Design team.
  • Defined and delivered the front-end staffing roadmap, and rebuilt the front-end technical exercise with the talent team.

  Sr. Front End Engineer

  Mar 2016 — May 2016

  • Built and maintained features across the company's web applications, mentored other engineers, reviewed code, and provided technical input to Product. Moved into engineering management within three months.

• RED Digital Cinema

  Irvine, CA

  Oct 2011 — Feb 2016

  Sr. Front End Developer

  • Architected UI features for the company's e-commerce, marketing, and customer support websites, and drove adoption of a new UI component library and design language with the design and marketing departments.

• Innocean Worldwide

  Huntington Beach, CA

  Feb 2011 — Oct 2011

  Sr. Front End Developer

  • Led interactive development for Hyundai USA, including hyundaiusa.com, microsites, Facebook games, and a custom YouTube channel, working with the creative team from concept onward.

• Y&R Brands / Wunderman

  Irvine, CA

  Jun 2007 — Feb 2011

  Front End Developer

  • Delivered interactive work for Land Rover, Southwest Airlines, Toshiba, and Hilton, recognized with Lester Wunderman awards (2008, 2009) and a 38th Annual Creativity Award (2008).

• Freelance

  Orange County, CA

  Jan 2001 — Jun 2007

  Web design & development

  • Ran every part of the business: client relationships, project management, design, and development. Built marketing sites, online communities, and custom content management systems for local businesses, independent films, and bands.