Lara Kelley

• Transitioned back into an IC role after 3 years of starting and building up our DevOps and QA organizations.
• Focused on keeping our tooling, infrastructure, and developer experience ahead of the company's growth trajectory.
• Some highlights include helping migrate us to a new Cedar-based roles and permissions system, introducing DataDog for observability, improving our sandbox environment experience for engineers, and reducing CI job runtime and spend by almost 50% through optimizations.
• Built one of my favorite 'side projects' ever, which the team has enjoyed greatly - the Higharc CLI, which I have a separate write-up about you can read.

• Advocated for the creation and management of a new 'Foundation' team at Higharc to meet the growing infrastructure, security, and developer experience needs of the company. I ran that team for almost 3 years.
• Created our QA team, which started as one person under my supervision and has since become a dedicated function outside of the team.
• Operated in various customer-facing and cross-functional capacities over the years, including being present on sales calls, giving demos, offering reassurance to technical stakeholders, and more.
• Led SOC 2 compliance efforts in 2024-2025.

• While taking on the Tech Lead role, I continued my role as a senior software engineer, working on our options management and Showroom products primarily, while also formalizing responsibilities such as authoring and sign-off on design documents, closer working relationships with designers and product managers, and customer/sales interactions.
• I worked on a variety of products that we offered at the time - our Showroom sales tool, options management, our Studio CAD software, and more.
• I also contributed to our marketing website design and development, infrastructure management, and deployment pipeline, among other things.

Oversaw all software development and infrastructure efforts, from start to finish, for our roughly 90,000 member organization. My responsibilities included the design and development of new web applications, managing our VPS systems and deployment pipelines, and automating tasks for staff by building various cron jobs that integrate with our membership database. Additionally, I act as a project manager when working in areas that involve contributions from our tech volunteers.

Lots of React, GraphQL, and Python while making contributions across the entire stack of our application. Other responsibilities included data visualizations for customer demos using Grafana, product planning, and working with our QA team to ensure stable software releases.