About Me
I'm Andrew Harrison, a software engineer and engineering manager in Seattle, WA.
During the last fifteen years, I've worked for a variety of companies as a full-stack developer with a front-end focus. More recently, my role has encompassed managing other software engineers, leading development projects, and collaborating on product evolution decisions — all while keeping up day-to-day involvement in the codebase.
Between work and personal experimentation, I have experience with Python, Ruby, Node.js, and several other languages, not to mention a variety of popular frameworks. This breadth of exposure has helped me excel at translating patterns for performant, reliable, and maintainable software across languages and frameworks. I'm highly proficient with Git, comfortable with a variety of code and project management tools, and moderately experienced with managing cloud resources (primarily in Google Cloud).
In addition to my technical abilities I'm known for my exceptional communication skills, diligent attention to detail, and willingness to be a teacher or leader. I maintain a deep commitment to professional growth, constantly reading up on advances and issues in software as well as engaging in hands-on experimentation.
I highly prioritize roles in organizations whose output directly contributes to social good, including charitable foundations, NGOs, and for-profit companies working to advance the state of human health, education, food and energy sustainability, community development, and civic activism.
Although I am open to in-office work in Seattle and/or occasional work travel, I strongly prefer remote work and have a demonstrated history of success in distributed teams. I'm also a strong proponent of asynchronous workflows, a fairly aggressive practitioner of Inbox Zero, and a devout believer in documented decisions.
Work History
Ecolab 
April 2023 — present
- Owned the entirety of the Hazel Analytics side of post-acquisition technical integration, collaborating with 30+ Ecolab personnel to migrate productivity suites, satisfy security and compliance objectives, integrate the team's Google Cloud infrastructure with Ecolab's Azure AD user management, and more.
- Supported technical workstreams with the ultimate aim of unifying white-labeled and non-white-labeled versions of the Hazel Analytics platform, which served to consolidate the product branding and customer base and to retire approximately 40% of Google Cloud infrastructure.
- Continued management of a software engineering team, while also facilitating projects for data sharing and product innovation which crossed multiple teams.
Hazel Analytics May 2018 — April 2023
- Served as Chief Technology Officer of a small startup with no VC funding, collaborating closely with the Chief Executive Officer and answering to our board members.
- Served as the direct manager for all engineers (half of company), responsible for hiring, terminating, and mentoring.
- Oversaw day-to-day engineering operations, largely grounded in processes of my own definition.
- Proposed, planned, and executed a full rewrite of the company's flagship product, while simultaneously prioritizing stabilization of business-critical overnight ETL and number-crunching processes.
- Championed and delivered on major technical maintenance projects — including an upgrade from Python 2 to Python 3, an upgrade from Ubuntu 16 to Ubuntu 22, and a migration from self-managed PostgreSQL 9.7 to cloud-managed PostgreSQL 12 — while balancing business-led projects for new feature development.
- Proposed, researched, and wrote the majority of a whitepaper on health department data reporting practices (later reprised as an industry-facing online video presentation), promoting the company's thought leadership to potential customers and regulatory stakeholders.
- Introduced supporting tools to modernize product support and business analytics, such as Amplitude, Datadog, and PagerDuty.
- Proposed and organized a long-term project to transform key data intake and management systems, applying principles from entity resolution.
- Collaborated frequently with all roles outside of engineering, and served as interim product manager and designer when those roles were not otherwise filled.
- Handled additional tech-related matters — IT troubleshooting, hardware purchases, coordinating third-party security audits, etc. — in a catch-all capacity.
- Owned the working relationship with the company's primary business partner, and participated in a variety of on-site customer engagements as needed.
- Owned the technical portions of the due diligence process which resulted in the company's acquisition by its primary business partner.
Socrata April 2015 — April 2018
- Maintained and enhanced a white-labeled platform for organizing, visualizing, and sharing data, serving government customers.
- Served as lead engineer for several projects, including feature deprecations and rewrites.
- Authored the company's first written release process, enabling the primary customer-facing service to be released weekly instead of only a few times per year.
- Led a working group to address cross-team pain points within the platform engineering division.
- Mentored junior engineers and supported a team during manager absence.
Moveline November 2013 — November 2014
- Maintained and enhanced a customer-facing site, an admin interface, an internal API layer, and auxiliary tooling (constituting the bulk of the stack at Moveline).
- Developed a system to streamline the import of paid leads into the customer database and automated related aspects of the sales workflow.
- Introduced live metrics tracking for the API layer in order to facilitate the diagnosis of service issues.
- Fulfilled roles related to internal team administration, training, and recruiting.
Seeker Solutions April 2012 — November 2013
- Designed and implemented the company's first toolset for text classification.
- Designed and spearheaded the development of a common infrastructure for secure web applications covering transport layer security, encrypted data storage, authentication and authorization mechanisms, and mitigations against common vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and cross-site request forgery.
- Supported the development of a health informatics application built atop the aforementioned infrastructure, intended to be deployed to a small cadre of partner institutions.
MyEdu June 2009 — August 2011
- Developed components of an online education platform for college students, including a custom social network, grade history visualizations, and a (prototype) recommender system.
- Wrote custom scripts to parse university websites and gather course schedule data.
- Led initiatives to update legacy code and improve documentation.
Tradelogic Software March 2008 — January 2009
- Developed components for a comprehensive custom sales solution for a partner company.
- Maintained existing e-commerce websites.
- Began development of a multi-company personnel and finance management system from scratch.
Related Interests
In addition to my day job, I have also previously volunteered with Ada Developers Academy, a non-profit that provides tuition-free career training in software development to women and non-binary people.
Education
Rice University August 2003 — May 2007
During university I earned a B.A. in Linguistics, with an emphasis in bilingualism and secondary language acquisition.
My career in coding owes a lot to the Intro to Computer Science course that I took, oddly enough, for fun. I enjoyed the first semester of the course so much that I volunteered as a teaching assistant for it while taking the second half in the following semester. I don't doubt that my linguistics courses have helped me write better code, though — ask me how!
Contact
The best way to reach me is by email at andrew.m.harrison@gmail.com.
References available upon request. No recruiters, please.
