Resume

Who am I?

My name is Jed Fonner and I'm an adaptable software development leader with 15+ years of experience in multiple roles, from startup environments to enterprise web and mobile SaaS development. I can seamlessly bridge the gap between business and technology. I'm adept at fostering a culture of innovation, engagement, collaboration, and continuous improvement across small and large groups. At Appian, I ran multiple incubator teams, led the Center of Excellence, and helped grow Appian’s Engineering department from 60 to 600+ engineers. My groups had extremely low attrition and I've led projects that have revolutionized the Appian product, increased revenue by >$100MM, and improved developer productivity. I'm now at Capital One in their Enterprise Data & Machine Learning area, managing a team of talented engineers building the Low Latency Data Store handling billions of records using a completely serverless, multi-tenant architecture.

Key Qualifications

• Successfully delivered multiple small incubator teams during Appian’s formative, dynamic startup years
• 15+ years of experience with software design and development, SaaS, business process management, enterprise architecture, AWS cloud-native deployment, and web/mobile design
• 12+ years of experience leading large and small agile projects and teams, including offshore development teams
• 7+ years leading groups greater than 50 engineers and managing multiple development teams
• Experienced with big data technologies, including DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, and AWS Glue

I also try to carve out some personal time for side projects which I use to keep up with the latest technologies. See below for some of my recent personal projects.

You can also learn more about me using the chatbot on the homepage or connect with me on LinkedIn or Gitlab.

Work History

Capital One (Mclean, VA)

Director, Software Engineering, Enterprise Data & Machine Learning (2024-present)

• Lead the Low Latency Data Store project, which is responsible for handling billions of records in a highly scalable, serverless, multi-tenant architecture
• Manage 5 teams of 30 engineers in a distributed, hybrid environment

Appian Corporation (Mclean, VA)

Vice President, Software Development, Engineering (2022-2024)

• Served as Head of Engineering for a strategic business unit of ~130 product managers, software developers, quality engineers, and UX engineers working on cross-functional and cross-platform teams across the US and India
• Advanced strategic initiatives to improve our ability to rapidly deliver important new features for the Appian SaaS cloud-native platform across web and mobile
• Drove strategic change to improve team efficiency and maintain high employee satisfaction, diversity and inclusion
• Created and ran programs to modularize the Appian J2EE monolith and assess team health across the department
• Worked closely with the Engineering EVP to implement new practices to support our growth past 650+ engineers

Senior Director, Software Development, Engineering (2018-2022)

• Led the creation of a new Group (~60 engineers) to build Appian’s Data Fabric- , a key competitive differentiator which led to dozens of new customers and over $50MM in new revenue
• Drove large-scale planning, technical decision making, and stakeholder management in order to deliver on schedule and exceed customer expectations, resulting in record feature adoption and customer success
• Designed teams and made critical technical implementation decisions regarding our high-throughput backend RDBMS data features which are deployed to AWS
• Served as a leader of the People Council and supported Appian’s growth from 300 to 650 engineers
• Led 3 teams to victory in our Engineering Hackathons

Director, Software Development, Engineering (2016-2018)

• Led a year-long program with 50 engineers to modernize Appian’s frontend capabilities, migrating our entire web architecture from GWT to React and Typescript, and drove $70MM in new revenue and accelerate our IPO
• Ran a year-long program with 30 mobile engineers to migrate our Android and iOS UI codebase to React Native, reducing costs for new mobile UI feature development by 60%
• Drove the departmental transition to the Spotify model of group organization and served as one the first “tribe leads”, helping the department quadruple in size from ~70 to ~300

Senior Manager, Software Development, Engineering (2015-2016)

• Managed 10-20 full-stack and mobile engineers using Java, Objective-C, Hibernate, CSS, and Javascript
• Served as the scrummaster for multiple development teams and mentored them on a blend of agile methodologies
• Created a department-wide continuing education program to improve knowledge sharing and cross-pollination of skills

Director, Center of Excellence, Professional Services (2013-2015)

• Led the Center of Excellence within Appian Customer Success, managing 6 Appian Architects
• Delivered key enablement programs to share best practices, cut costs and improve outcomes for our customers
• Acted as the key stakeholder in the PMO group and liaised with the Engineering group to better align product development and customer needs
• Presented multiple different sessions for over 150 attendees at Appian’s annual conference from 2012 - 2015

Principal Consultant/Appian Architect, Center of Excellence, Professional Services (2010-2013)

• Switched tracks to help launch the Appian Center of Excellence and provide expert architectural vision and guidance to a variety of high profile government and commercial customers
• Wrote multiple articles and whitepapers to convey best practices for delivering process applications with Appian
• Developed Java-based tools to accelerate customers’ ability to go to market quickly and reduce costs
• Instituted department-wide code-reviews and drove the adoption of Scrum methodology across the organization

Engineering Manager, Engineering (2005-2010)

• Responsible for a team of 10 full-stack developers during Appian’s early startup days
• Managed the development and deployment of Appian’s BPM software to a distributed, on-demand SaaS environment based on Amazon AWS - a first for our industry
• Led the team which first created Appian’s cloud-native infrastructure
• Spearheaded the adoption of test-driven development methodologies and introduced Scrum as the primary development methodology within the Engineering department to improve productivity

Personal Projects

Lorem Quotesum

In building apps at home or at work, I often need filler text for testing or mockup purposes. Normally I’d reach for some lorem ipsum text, but I got tired of how boring that is. So I built Lorem Quotesum. It lets you easily pick your favorite funny movies and TV shows and it will generate easy-to-copy quotes that you can use as your own dummy/placeholder text. It provides multiple options for rich text rendering and output as text, html or markdown. Check out my post to learn more.

Audiobook Locker

I finally found a use case that could only be solved by a desktop application. Historically I’ve only built web/mobile apps. But I’ve been frustrated by the lack of a good application to manage audio books. Calibre exists for ebooks, but I couldn’t find anything for audio books. So I had to build it myself. Check out my post or jump to the Gitlab Repo to download the code yourself.

Simple Weekly Meal Planner

Meal planning is one of the least enjoyable parts of being an adult. As usual, when faced with a frustration, I looked to see what existing tools could solve my dilemma, and finding no suitable ones, I built my own. The Simple Weekly Meal Planner is a straightforward web app that I built to help me plan our family’s weekly meals. This was a great opportunity for me to learn a new front-end framework so I built it with Svelte and Sveltekit. It’s hosted on Firebase and it’s free for anyone to use. Read more about it on my post and check it out at simpleweeklymealplanner.com.

Shared Slides Clicker Chrome Extension

At Appian, we often deliver group presentations where we trade off presenting slides from a shared deck. In the past, one person would start presenting the slides on their laptop and then hand the laptop to the next person to continue driving when it was their turn.

Once we all started working from home because of COVID-19, we obviously could no longer hand the laptop to the next person. So the other presenters would end up saying “next slide please” after every slide whenever they needed the initial presenter to advance to the next slide.

This started to drive me crazy, so I created a Chrome extension to allow multiple presenters to remotely drive a single slides presentation. Read more in my post or checkout the extension homepage.

Firebase-powered serverless Chatbot

Five years ago, I thought it would be fun to add a chatbot to my website. I had been playing with Chatbot integrations at work (it helped me and my Hackathon team win our annual competition), and I realized it could be a fun way to add some interactivity to my personal site. My first version leveraged the Api.ai client-side SDK. When Api.ai became Dialogflow, they got rid of their client-side SDK so I had to re-write my chatbot using Firebase Cloud (aka serverless) Functions. Read more about it on my blog post.

Appian Browser Extension

Matthew Goldberg and I created a browser extension for Appian. Read more [in my post](/projects/2019-12-02-Appian-Browser-Extension) or install it on your browser (Chrome and Firefox).

MattermostOnFire

I created a Mattermost Interactive Buttons integration in JavaScript using Firebase Cloud Functions and Firebase Realtime Database. Read more in my post or go clone the Github repo. Mattermost sent me a sweet thank-you coffee mug for my efforts.

Firebase-Functions-Jest

I published a Github repo which demonstrates how to replace the Firebase Cloud Functions quickstart tests written in Mocha with new tests written in Jest. It also adds Jest tests for the quickstarts that didn’t have tests. Read more in my post or go clone the Github repo.

MyTeamsPRs

A webapp I built which allows you to view your teams’ Github pull requests and manage their code reviews. Built using React, Redux, and Firebase. It used to live at MyTeamsPRs.com but I recently retired it due to lack of usage.

Patents

• 20040030697 System and method for online feedback - The present invention relates to a feedback system for adding feedback functionality to an online content management system without altering the stored online content. The feedback system includes a feedback submission module for providing the content system with information enabling a browser displaying hypertext received from the content management system to select text for specific commenting, providing a feedback form when a portion of the hypertext is highlighted, and storing the selected text along with feedback received with the feedback form after it is returned by the browser. 🗎

Education History

University of Pennsylvania - School of Engineering and Applied Science and the Wharton School

Jerome Fisher Program in Management and Technology

• Dual degree: Bachelor of Science in Engineering and Bachelor of Science in Economics
• Engineering major: Computer Science; Wharton concentration: Business Management
• Cumulative GPA: 3.8
• Honors: Magna Cum Laude, Benjamin Franklin Scholar, Joseph Wharton Scholar, Dean’s List all 4 years

Skills

Leadership: Project Planning, Large Group Organization, Analytics, Leading Development Teams, Strategic Leadership, Technical Communication, Team Dynamics

Technologies: Svelte, Typescript, JavaScript, React, Rust, Firebase, AWS, Redux, DialogFlow, Java, HTML5, CSS3, XML, SQL, Web Services

Software Platforms: Appian, Node, Hibernate, Oracle, MySQL/MariaDB, Android, iOS

Methodologies/IDEs/Tools: Scrum and other Agile Methodologies, VS Code, IntelliJ, Eclipse, Git, Webpack, NPM, Ant, JUnit, Apache JMeter

Certifications: Certified ScrumMaster (isn’t everyone?)