References

I’ve had the opportunity to work with some amazing colleagues on the projects I’ve led and couldn’t have done what I have without them. There’s no question that it’s a team effort. I’ve had great support from various leaders and have worked through specific ideas with engineers, technical project and product managers, and so many others across a wide variety of teams to make sure that we’re catching all of the details and edge cases that need to be handled and are setting ourselves up well for future growth. Below is what some of them have to say about working together.

Alloy References
Charles Hearn - Chief Technical Officer - Alloy
Parilee Wang - Chief Product Officer - Alloy
David Blackman - Staff Engineer - Alloy
Rick Banister - Senior Product Design Director - Alloy
Kelsey Grover - Senior Solutions Engineer II - Alloy
Caroline O’Brien - Senior Solutions Architect II - Alloy
Jay Pollack - Senior Product Manager I - Alloy
Alex Parayannilam - Senior Software Engineer I - Alloy
Steven Anderson - Senior Software Engineer I - Alloy

Blue Apron References
Andrew Hogue - Former VP of Engineering - Blue Apron
Mahir Kalra - Former Software Engineer - Blue Apron
Tom Wilson - Consumer Platform Tech Lead - Blue Apron
Jo Rausen - Former Director, Technical Program Management - Blue Apron
Kevin Bongart - Former Senior Engineering Manager - Blue Apron
Nikki Wiles - Former Director, Technical Program Management - Blue Apron
Amy McDonald - Director, Finance - Blue Apron
Becca Nordeen - Customer Experience Operations, Senior Manager - Blue Apron

Capsule References
Will O’Meara - Senior Software Engineer - Capsule
Vivek Bhagwat - Former Engineering Manager - Capsule
Fernando Ramirez - Senior Software Engineer - Capsule
Hannah Tchon, PharmD, BCPS - Director of Pharmacy Services - Capsule

We hired Renee at a moment of inflection in our company when we were going from a single-product company (that we had been iterating on for 7 years) to building our second product. Many successful and well-known companies never figure out how to hack this - the inertia of having a single successful product often creates a lot of architectural and process-level debt that is hard to cut through. Those companies probably never had someone like Renee on staff! She was able to come in and understand the existing architecture (both technical and theoretical) and create step-by-step plans to overcome our own limitations. We have never had someone close to that level of “architect” at Alloy before, and it was an amazingly fortuitous circumstance that we happened to meet Renee at the time that we were struggling with these problems.

I would highly recommend Renee for any position working on tough architecture problems, wrangling thorny processes, or documenting things that may be thought to be “undocumentable.” She thrives in an environment with other strong engineers to help implement her vision collaboratively as well as working directly with leadership stakeholders so she can solve problems at the company or process-level, not just the technical-level. If anyone reading this in the future would like to talk about working with Renee, I am more than happy to serve as a reference.

Renee joined Alloy at a pivotal time - when we were scaling our second product and needed to reimagine core systems and create new concepts to fully realize the potential of Alloy as a holistic solution. Renee engaged deeply with our product and design teams to fully understand the challenges and opportunities that we faced and delved deeply into our code base to understand what we had as a foundation to work with. She turned that very deep understanding into a plan for how to take what we had, add in both new infrastructure and new concepts, and not only solve the current challenges but also set ourselves up for many challenges that we hadn't yet earned our way into. She also was able to break that vision down into deliverable, independently valuable bits which enabled us to launch customers and deliver value to them incrementally while also building towards the future. I found Renee's deep understanding, opinionated thought leadership, and tight cross functional collaboration to be critical to leading both our longer term vision and our tactical plan. I personally deeply appreciated her partnership and drive to engage with the customer use cases in addition to the infrastructure and code base and found that our collaboration leveled up my thinking!

Renee is the strongest technical communicator I have ever worked with.  She dives deep into complex problems full of tradeoffs and produces top notch architectural documentation.  Her plans blend a balance of business mindfulness, green field idealism, and utilitarian practicality.  I’ve never met someone who dives so deeply into the problem space, starting from the deepest questions of “what are we even trying to do as a company?” and emerging with a concrete plan of “here’s what’s missing and what we need to invest in next.”

She’s also a great thought partner, not just in terms of creating ideas but in terms of compromise and synthesis.  Her Impact here has already been huge, and we will continue to build against her vision and documentation for months if not years.

At Alloy Renee came in wearing a cape to help us scale up and modernize a processing-intensive financial transaction monitoring system. We were struggling with throughput as well as profit margin on processing very large streams of data. As the architect, Renee quickly got up to speed on the legacy system and led a cross-functional group through a revamp to process hundreds of thousands of transactions in parallel by leveraging Redshift. 

She also led the creation of a system for storing infinite custom attributes that greatly enriched the decision-making capabilities of Alloy. It gave a product that historically made ‘just-in-time’ decisions the ability to do powerful look-back analysis on past values and identify anomalies and trends. The system was required for a specific purpose, but was so powerful and flexible that it unlocked a number of new product capabilities—from streaming our billing process to offering new risk mitigation capabilities. Her foresight in developing flexible architectures has paid dividends in her time here.

Renee has also been one of my favorite intellectual sparring partners. As Design Director I have to push for the best possible user experience and Renee has to maintain the integrity, efficiency, and viability of the system. We always managed to find common ground and I learned so much from her that helped me imagine the best possible solution within the boundaries of what is feasible.

I highly recommend Renee for any organization looking for a talented and experienced Software Architect. Throughout my time working with Renee, I have been consistently impressed by her exceptional communication skills, meticulous approach to technical work, and strong work ethic.

Renee possesses a remarkable ability to effectively communicate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. Her clear and concise communication style fosters collaboration and ensures that all team members are on the same page, leading to successful project outcomes. Renee is also an excellent listener, always taking the time to understand the needs and requirements of various stakeholders before providing valuable insights and solutions.

Not only is Renee a great communicator, but she is also incredibly mindful and detailed in her approach to problem-solving. She consistently demonstrates a deep understanding of the bigger picture and is able to identify potential roadblocks and challenges early on. This proactive mindset allows her to effectively mitigate risks and ensure smooth project execution.

Overall, Renee has had a significant impact on our organization through her contributions to key complex technical projects with multiple complex stakeholders. Her exceptional ability to solve and seamlessly communicate solutions to complicated problems makes her an invaluable asset to any company. I have no doubt that Renee will continue to excel in her career and be a value multiplier wherever she goes.

Renee is brilliant – her ability to quickly pick up on complex concepts and intimately understand them is unmatched. She is incredibly thorough in her approach to tough problems, and does an excellent job engaging cross-functionally with various teams for discovery.

I had the privilege of working with Renee on several projects at Alloy. She came prepared to every meeting with beautiful, stellar documentation about what she was working on to quickly get us up to speed. Renee was proactively inquisitive and always very receptive to feedback – she never shied away from digging into an edge case (although oftentimes she’d already have an elegant solution in mind before they even came up!). Her eagerness to better understand Alloy’s customer use cases and improve our product had a monumental impact on my team. Her architecture work unlocked new features which completely redefined what we can accomplish and laid the groundwork for dozens of iterations to come.

Renee is a remarkable engineer, but an even more remarkable leader, teacher and innovator. Her impact at Alloy has been immeasurable, and she will be dearly missed!

I had the pleasure of working closely with Renee at Alloy on several initiatives that crossed company domains spanning dozens of people. She has a unique ability to take a complicated business problem and distill it down into actionable, componentized pieces that lay out not only how to deliver value in the near term, but provide a long-term framework to build towards. Renee was able to exhaustively understand how various systems across Alloy worked, and use this to align stakeholders across the entire organization.

If I were looking to set my product up for technical success, not only in the moment but on a long-term horizon, reaching out to Renee would be a key part of any plan.

Renee seamlessly navigates complex business and engineering requirements while building scalable and resilient solutions. Each decision she makes is informed by countless stakeholders' opinions; she cultivates relationships across departments to form a deep understanding of the organization's needs. Her collaboration and communication skills set a new precedent at Alloy-- from analytical conversations to meticulous documentation, her work is thorough and impactful. Since her arrival, the quality of our architecture planning and execution has vastly improved.

I'm forever grateful for having the opportunity to collaborate with Renee on several large customer-facing projects. Her mentorship has been invaluable to me and other engineers, and she has influenced our engineering organization's mindset to be more business and product-minded in our approach. Any growing startup could greatly benefit from having someone like Renee to lead and mentor engineers!

I worked closely with Renee on one of the most complex projects I’ve encountered. Renee architected an impressive solution, which I was able to implement seamlessly thanks to her dedication to clean documentation and to a high level of detail. Renee was always there to answer questions and discuss details, which I found helpful. She is easy to talk to and I appreciate her great ability to converse, which is often rare among software engineers, and which made working with her a great pleasure.

Complex problems don't necessarily need complex solutions, and Renee is one of the best I've worked with in finding those solutions. She brings a unique combination of deep engineering expertise, long-term thinking, and organizational know-how to every project she tackles. She has a long track record of breaking down complex problems into manageable chunks that teams can actually execute on. At Blue Apron, she worked through several of our thorniest supply chain and logistics problems that involved stakeholders from nearly every department. Renee was able to use her engineering intuition to find common ground among that diverse set of stakeholders with competing interests, developing a long-term project plan that delivered on time and in full – almost unheard of for software and business process of this complexity.

Renee thinks big picture. Her tenure at Blue Apron saw her serve as our Software Architect where she spearheaded BA's re-architecture of its Consumer and Warehouse Management Systems. As Blue Apron scaled dramatically over its first few years grossing nearly 1B in annual revenue, our engineering team found that our software suite had grown into a monolithic system that was incapable of iterating fast due to dependency and scaling issues. The re-architecture Renee led was a cross-organization, year-long effort designed to separate consumer and fulfillment concerns with stakeholders from 12+ different teams throughout engineering and operations.

Renee effectively led these efforts on both a technical and project management level. On the technical level, she worked closely with engineering leads across a variety of teams to clearly define and document new micro-services along with their APIs. She increased engineering robustness and addressed scaling concerns by introducing Kafka as our new PubSub async communication event bus in this new microservice world. Working with our technical project manager, Renee led our weekly meetings with stakeholders from different teams through engineering, data analytics, logistics & operations, and customer service. She and the project manager worked tirelessly with PMs and tech leads alike to define timelines, scope projects, handle dependencies and adjust features requirements as necessary. Through all of this, Renee served as the primary point of contact for all architecture-related questions and effectively enabled cross-team communication.

Her plan to roll out this new architecture was done methodically and incrementally without disrupting BA's core business model - shipping boxes to customers daily. Renee was strategic about deploying changes to our live fulfillment operations and was always thinking 3-6 months ahead. She has an eye for connecting the dots across systems and for spotting issues early in the planning phase. Under her direction, engineering leads were able to focus on shipping features effectively without needing to go back and redesign their systems.

Renee is a joy to work with and is extremely passionate about solving large, challenging engineering problems. She has a glowing career and brings a wealth of experience to the table. Renee's efforts ultimately allowed Blue Apron to not only cut operational costs and ship boxes more effectively but has also allowed BA to iterate faster and expand its current offering to customers.

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Renee is nothing short of incredible. She is one of the clearest thinkers it has ever been my privilege to work with. Her ability to break down complex systems into manageable pieces with clearly defined boundaries between them is awe inspiring. On top of that, she is able to write technical documentation with stunning clarity. Renee's documents are the gold standard I hold up as the pinnacle of what technical writing can be. Her work designing and clarifying systems has been the key to unblocking major new functionality at Blue Apron - and continues to pay enormous dividends. And as an added bonus, she's amazingly easy to work with. She's unfalteringly calm, collected, and a genuine pleasure to interact with. Any team would be lucky to have Renee helping them out!

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Renee's work to architect how Consumer and WMS communicated order information back and forth was an exercise in tackling a large, complex problem by breaking it into manageable pieces. This made the daunting prospect of untangling years' worth of decisions that kept adding complexity on top of a rigid solution not designed to extend to the new products and features of the future into an achievable goal. She performed an in-depth analysis of current system behavior, combing through the code and talking with engineers across the organization to understand how things worked, and why. She documented her findings as she went, which was incredibly valuable -- it finally put down on paper the tribal knowledge that previously came and left with individual contributors, helped us to understand the current state of the codebase and articulate how we wanted to change it to be more flexible for the future, and enabled us to scale the project and the larger engineering organization quickly by providing new team members valuable reference materials. Renee then guided the team to design a solution that was flexible and expandable for the future, but simple enough to implement without solving for every unknown, which could have extended the timeline considerably. This was especially important in an organization that was eager to experiment but that struggled to plan more than 1-2 quarters in advance, demanding that we continue to ship short-term wins while simultaneously building for an unknown future. Ultimately, this flexibility in design enabled us to pivot with the business and deliver tangible, customer-facing wins along the way towards future-proofing our technology infrastructure, despite short- and medium-term priorities that changed on a regular basis.

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At Blue Apron, Renée led the architecture of the fulfillment platform and the design of the many projects leveraging this platform to reach company-wide goals of diversification, higher margins and stronger operations. 

By collaborating with a dozen teams across the organization, Renée has defined a path to and supported the execution of decoupling legacy applications while introducing powerful and flexible asynchronous communication between customer-facing and fulfillment systems. 

Combined, these milestones unlocked new potential for Blue Apron, increasing our offer and sales channels while considerably decreasing fulfillment times.

It is safe to say that Renée had a transformative impact on how Blue Apron leverages technology to reach sustainability.

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I had the pleasure of working with Renee on multiple large-scale projects at Blue Apron. I've always been impressed by her ability to take on a totally new domain, quickly get up to speed, and organize and standardize information across all teams. On our master data project, she was able to work with multiple engineering and operations teams (including 3rd-party contractors) to uncover the work that needed to be done and build consensus on the right path forward This was no small feat as the domain was huge and critical to Blue Apron's business, and there were many stakeholders involved with very different opinions about the way things should work. Renee created comprehensive documentation, drove alignment, and designed architecture to fit the company's needs. But that wasn't the end of her involvement! She stayed active and engaged in the project during implementation, continuing to tackle hard questions and ensure the team was moving in the right direction as the solution was built out. We were very lucky to have her to guide us through complex, business-critical projects at Blue Apron, and I know she'd be a great asset to any project with lots of moving parts that need to be wrangled!

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Renee is able to learn and understand complex, end-to-end processes, allowing her to see the “big picture” and drive change to the organization. Renee is thorough, thoughtful, quick to learn, and forward thinking. As a Finance professional, I often have different priorities and concerns than those in other positions across the organization that I have to explain my point of view to. Working with Renee was a pleasure, as she not only understood where I was coming from, but was able to identify additional thoughts and areas of concern that I had not yet expressed. This allowed me to trust that the project was in good hands, and would be completed in a way that would fulfill my needs. 

I know Renee was able to do this not only with me, but with stakeholders from all different backgrounds and departments in order to thoroughly collect, organize, and advise on large scale business process changes. Her ability to understand the perspectives of a diverse group of stakeholders and organize and prioritize them all, coupled with her detailed documentation work and ability to think beyond the next step made her an invaluable business partner that was able to drive true change to the organization.

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Renee is a customer-forward strategist who always works to consider the big picture. She managed multiple projects and launches at Blue Apron, and she always impressed! Renee recognizes that the perspectives of many stakeholders need to be considered when mapping requirements and ensured that communication loops were in place. As a customer of her work, I always felt that I had the right amount of context, technical insight and high-level conversation to understand the scope and impact of upcoming launches. I'm thankful I had the chance to work with a professional such as Renee and hope I will again in the future.

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I'd been at Capsule for ~1yr when Renee began helping us document and improve some of our processes.  All the basics were taken care of quickly: beautiful new ERD, nice state flow diagrams, documentation where there had been none, etc.  Unfortunately, there were some data models and state machines that were so convoluted that Renee couldn't really document their existing state.  Renee was able to get past the code, talk to the stakeholders in the real world that actually used this broken data model, and she came back with clear recommendations for how to reconcile reality with our broken code.  When Renee left we had clear deploy steps to fix the issues with that state machine.  She was also able to get several engineers and product managers up to speed to help ensure the fixes were implemented in her absence.

Not to detract from Renee's other work, but this last part, the deploy steps, are really Renee's greatest achievement while at Capsule as well as the biggest contribution to the team.  It took a stunning amount of thoroughness and clarity to wrangle a problem nobody at Capsule had been able to figure out before.  The problems with this state machine cannot be exaggerated.  Renee was able to convince several people who'd basically given up on it that in one well scoped project it could be fixed in a quarter.

If you need some improved documentation Renee can certainly help out.  If you need some highly complicated cross organizational workflows fixed, then Renee can really make some radical changes for the better.

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Renee came to Capsule 3 years after I started and immediately became the resident expert in the "total stack" of the company - this includes everything from the various requests and flow of an order being placed in the backend to the individual workflows of every single role in the pharmacy. She accomplished this with beautiful, comprehensive, clear documentation spanning every single manual operation and function call.

While building the most useful document that became the driving force behind product and operational decisions, she built relationships with people in various parts of the organization to help socialize some of her fantastic ideas on how to fix some of the problematic operations of the day. This helped the entire engineering organization at Capsule propose more efficient solutions for how to build systems to simplify core pharmacy workflows. Whether your engineering organization anticipates complexity and wants to ensure a clear roadmap or has found their way into that complexity, I can't recommend Renee highly enough as an invaluable resource.

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I had the pleasure to work with Renee on multiple occasions at Capsule. She analyzed our software architecture and followed the workflows of our data models, then documented her findings in great detail, which is proving to be invaluable for a company that is growing. Throughout the process, she provided clear, concise feedback on ways to improve our software tools; whether the improvements could be made through building new tools or adjusting the data models, she gave us plenty of options and the different tradeoffs we made by choosing one over the other. Renee was also a huge help through architecture design meetings and provided insightful technical feedback on proposed architectures. She was quick to call out edge cases that the proposed solution could miss, and ways in which we could adjust the architecture to catch those edge cases. On the other side, Renee worked with different departments to identify critical workflows and how the existing software solutions helped or hurt the process, or how a new software solution could be used to significantly improve the process. Ultimately, the business as a whole benefited from her thorough investigation - whether it was from a technical perspective on improving the codebase, or from an operational perspective on improving workflows.

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Renee was an incredible asset to Capsule. She was able to thoroughly analyze our software architecture and provided invaluable feedback and process improvement suggestions. She was given a challenging project to accurately document our current complicated workflow processes. Our operations team has definitely benefited from her ability to take such complex workflow and allowing us to see its current state as well as where meaningful changes could be implemented. Capsule was extremely lucky to have Renee grace us with her presence.

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