Experience

I’m a person who is passionate about technology and people. I’ve spent most of my career focused on engineering leadership and solving technical challenges. I have a passion for startups, open source communities, and journalism.

Engineering Leadership

I’ve been a professional software engineer since 2005. I am currently Senior Director of Engineering and an Engineering Fellow at Deseret Digital Media, where I set the technology strategy for modernizing and unifying dozens of legacy systems. In the past, I’ve been the CTO and CIO for two successful small startups. I specialize in creating teams that ship reliable software on time and on budget. I have a pragmatic passion for agile and prefer to throw the buzzwords out the door and just use it effectively with our teams.

I’ve made the transition to being full-time in management (though I still get my hands dirty most weeks with side projects). I love working with engineers and helping them grow. I have a passion for mentorship, coaching, and training. My greatest accomplishments have been the engineers I’ve helped find their stride and become fantastic.

Open Source Communities

I love participating in Open Source communities locally in Utah, as well as internationally with large groups. I served as a core team member of the Utah Open Source Foundation for several years. I’ve helped organize OpenWest, previously known as the Utah Open Source Conference, for several years. I ran the Utah PHP Usergroup for several years and was a member for over a decade. I love contributing to Open Source projects when I can find some time to do so.

Speaking

I am passionate about preparing and delivering high-quality presentations. Since 2008, I’ve delivered dozens of presentations across the world. You can find a list of some of these talks here.

Journalism

I had the privilege of being the Director of Engineering at the Deseret News for six years. I started with no experience in journalism (I didn’t know what a byline was…) and left there with a real passion for it. Helping transform the Deseret News to a digital age during some of the toughest years were the most rewarding in my career. I left with a passion for journalism; and yes, I have a dozen news apps on my phone; and yes, I do get all of their push notifications. #breakingNews

Personal

When I’m not working, I enjoy spending time with my wife and two young children at home. Our current family hobbies include video games, music, dance parties, giant blanket forts, cooking, playing in the snow, and causing chaos around the house.

Oh, and Minecraft. My son and I have played so much Minecraft over the years it is ridiculous. Personally, I’m completely exhausted with the game, but he still loves it so we continue to play.

If any of the above sounds interesting to you, and you’re in the Salt Lake City area, feel free to message me on Twitter. I’m always up for meeting other people over lunch.

— Carmony

Work History

Deseret Digital Media

14 yrs 5 mos

2022 —

Sr. Director of Engineering, Engineering Fellow

Sep 2022 — Present · Salt Lake City Metropolitan Area · Hybrid

Define technological strategy and roadmap for modernizing and unifying dozens of legacy systems. Working closely with teams to move from 2010-era PHP to a service-oriented architecture in the cloud, enabling the business to roll out features faster.

Engineering Fellow since Sep 2022; Sr. Director of Engineering since Aug 2023.

2016—22

Sr. Director of Engineering, Principal Architect

Mar 2016 — Sep 2022 · Salt Lake City Metropolitan Area

Director, then Sr. Director of Engineering for DDM's Technology department, which operated KSL.com, DeseretNews.com and several other products.

Co-led a technology department of 40+ through 2020 after the CIO retired at the end of 2019.
Directed teams building the KSL.com news site and apps, DeseretNews.com site and apps, a real-time programmatic advertising platform, big data and internal finance systems, and an internal CMS.
Mentored new managers into leaders, and guided the mentoring of engineers to increase team velocity.
Identified, pitched and co-implemented a manager training program for the tech department, setting expectations and growth guidance for all managers.
Took the scrum process from missing deadlines by months to predictably hitting them, typically early.
Designed and implemented a big data strategy on a central cloud solution, joining diverse datasets for reporting that was previously impossible. The system now stores and analyses nearly 1 PB.
Deep experience with web and app analytics across Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics.
Reassessed and reorganised teams and projects that were behind schedule to hit new milestones.
Led teams architecting highly available, scalable systems handling traffic surges from breaking news — tens of thousands of new users within minutes.

2012—16

Director of Engineering

May 2012 — May 2016 · Salt Lake City, Utah

Managed two engineering teams running day-to-day technology for the Deseret News website and CMS. Identified the need for better display-advertising data, worked with leadership to set advertising KPIs, and built tooling that raised advertising performance by 660%. Pioneered the use of remote development teams with the company's first Ukrainian engineers, increasing feature development cost-effectively.

Dating DNA, LLC

4 yrs 3 mos

2008—12

Team Lead, CTO

Mar 2008 — May 2012

Led a small team across all development and technical operations for an online dating platform. Scaled to millions of users, including the storage and retrieval of billions of relationship records. Launched iOS apps for multiple product verticals and built the APIs behind them. Maintained a fleet of 20+ virtual servers running Apache, Nginx, PHP, MySQL, Redis, SaltStack and monitoring tooling.

For most of my time at Dating DNA I functioned as CTO, owning all technical strategy and decisions.

Received a multi-million dollar acquisition offer from a competitor, which the CEO ultimately declined.

CEVO, LLC

4 yrs 10 mos

2005—09

Lead Engineer

Mar 2005 — Dec 2009

Reporting to the CTO, built websites and tooling to run online competitive tournaments with thousands of participants. Launched branded e-sports sites for Dell, NVIDIA, DirecTV and others.

An evening startup, run alongside my day job.

Eventually acquired by Gfinity.

Ambient Partners LLC

1 yr 4 mos

2006—08

Software Engineer

Dec 2006 — Mar 2008

Designed, developed and deployed communication solutions between thousands of remote locations and enterprise headquarters. Built web tooling to manage day-to-day operations for hundreds of employees.

Acquired by NCR.