Bruce Alderson
Senior Engineering Manager
Over 25 years in project management, product design, and data analysis
- White Rock, BC
- 1.604.•••.••••
- bruce.alderson@gmail.com
- linkedin.com/in/bruce-alderson
- brucealderson.ca
Summary
Outstanding engineering leader offering expertise across software development, systems architecture, and technical leadership. A proven track record of scaling high-performance teams and delivering innovative solutions in dynamic environments. Deep technical expertise combined with an understanding of the importance of client engagement and satisfaction.
Collaborative team leader continually focused on building relationships to produce highly effective teams, increasing productivity, and improving outcomes. Dedicated to self-reflection and personal improvement, and consistently exceeds performance metrics.
Core competencies
- Product launch
- Agile methodologies
- Engineering principles
- Budget management
- Data & analytics
- Team leadership
- Cloud infrastructure
- Talent development
- Risk mitigation
- Operational processes
- Software architecture & scalability
- Process optimization
- User experience
- Solution integration
- AI/ML systems
Experience
Northbeam
Principal Product Manager
- Grew the product vision and execution for Northbeam’s multi-touch attribution (MTA) product.
- Launched the new 3.0 UI with improved UX and up to 5x faster graph loads.
Intuit Mailchimp
Staff Product Manager
- Led a team of 25 staff in delivering technical roadmaps for a $1B product portfolio, driving system improvements to achieve 99.9% uptime while increasing customer retention to 80%.
- Directed a machine learning infrastructure initiative, launching a prototype service that classified 100M+ API datapoints in < 1 week, linking customer ecommerce revenue to marketing spend across a platform with ~$800M ARR.
- Implemented a modernization initiative to improve operational excellence for all 265 public APIs, exceeding 99.99% uptime, lowering failure rates by 35%, and reducing the median request time by 40% (from 1200ms to 500ms).
- Deployed new data infrastructure, increasing ecommerce data coverage from 45% to 95% for customers, supporting event-based data and enabling ingestion of 7 additional ecommerce and business data models.
- Streamlined partner onboarding by simplifying signup and authentication flows (11 screens to 3, 3 steps to 1) and optimizing backend API sync performance, driving a 60% increase in integration success (from 50% to 80%).
Senior Product Manager
- Oversaw a team of 20 staff and managed a portfolio of 265 public APIs and infrastructure products, developing strategic plans and product roadmaps to ensure teams met 100% of KPI targets.
- Managed the public platforms team through a $12B acquisition, spearheading the migration of infrastructure services from GCP to AWS within 2 years while ensuring the project was completed within budget.
- Served as an Integrations Product Director and Engineering Director, supervising 5 product managers, 75 product staff, and 50 engineering staff, ensuring continuity of services and projects.
- Directed a special growth team, improving the first-use experiences based on measures and VOC to achieve a 6% increase in onboarding success (from 8% to 14%) within 3 months, with an additional 14% growth the following year.
- Launched an ML-driven product to detect and classify public endpoint abuse and TOS violations, reducing spurious and suspicious API calls by 75% and boosting performance for paid and trial customers by 60%.
- Modernized an email-only solution to include SMS based marketing tools, supporting expansion into a $13B global market, and oversaw a project to improve operational excellence, exceeding the target of 500ms median call duration.
Mailchimp (The Rocket Science Group)
Senior Product Manager
- Managed the public API and infrastructure team of 20 staff to support 60 strategic partners and 300 independent partners, supporting over $900M in annual revenue for the organization through scalable platform reliability.
- Oversaw the creation of the ecommerce engineering group, delivering a beta product within 1.5 years, and created a payments product within 6 months, supporting the organization’s strategic growth objectives.
- Spearheaded a project to upgrade 10-year-old infrastructure, implementing advanced analysis features to enable customers to measure ROI and improve the conversion to paid customers by 22 points (from 58% to 80%).
Senior Engineering Manager
- Led engineering for Mailchimp + Commerce initiative reporting to VP Product, scaling team from 5 to 75 engineers (15 direct reports including managers and tech leads) while shipping bi-weekly releases.
- Drove post-acquisition integration of LemonStand platform, architecting data migration for 10K merchants and $2B GMV, implementing phased sunset strategy completed on schedule.
- Established engineering culture combining startup agility with enterprise reliability: implemented SRE practices, reduced incident response time by 70% and improved deployment frequency from monthly to daily.
- Identified product opportunity in payments space through customer interviews and data analysis, presenting business case to leadership; transitioned to PM role to execute vision.
LemonStand eCommerce
Chief Technology Officer
- Led a team of 12 product, engineering, and design staff for a startup, reducing operating costs by 90% (from $250k annually to $20k) and leading the team through a successful $15M+ acquisition.
- Built new product features for high-profile customers, including new sales tools and advanced trial features, supporting growth from 100 to 10K merchants, who served over 10M customers of their own.
Discovery Software
Architect and CTO
- Chief developer and co-architect of web, mobile, and desktop software for educators and school administrators: system and UI design, implementation, project management, and review.
- Ran software development and IT (systems, strategy, and budgets); senior consultant and technical lead for partner companies, technical and management trainer, and SR&ED technical consultant.
Earlier experience
- Chief Technology Officer, Napkinware Design Services Ltd. 2009–2014
- My own side consultancy, run alongside full-time roles with a part-time team of designers, content people, and developers.
- Created customized interactive media webpages for a portfolio of 166 clients, driving up to $20M in client revenue and generating over 150M page views within launch periods.
- Improved client user experience by increasing positive webpage feedback from 65% to 95% through targeted enhancements informed by voice of customer (VOC) data and iterative development.
- Consultant, Napkinware Design Services Ltd. 1996–2009
- Contract development, often websites for non-profits: a way to broaden skills without competing with work projects.
- Embedded controller for a collision detection system (VxWorks, C++), and embedded protocol drivers (C/C++, TCP/IP).
- Natural-language parser libraries (Perl, JavaScript, PHP), and an online training system (PHP, JavaScript, CouchDB).
- Coached SaaS development managers and CTOs on product management, development standards, and SQA.
- Classroom trainer and speaker: C/C++, software design methods, web design, little languages, regex, and SEO ethics.
- Senior Architect, Triant Technologies 1996–2004
- Designed and built data collection and analysis infrastructure for tracking and tuning semiconductor manufacturing quality: embedded and enterprise systems in C, C++, and Java.
- Worked on early machine learning for semiconductor process control: a process modelling system that learned from statistical sampling, using tiny models.
- Built a Pascal compiler for the Motorola 68030, and data acquisition (DAQ) device drivers for Linux and Windows.
- Joined out of university; roles included software developer, technical team lead, senior developer, and software architect.
Technical skills
- Languages & frameworks: Java, C, C++, Assembly, PHP, JavaScript, ReactJS, AngularJS, Node.js, Perl, C#, .NET
- Web & data: XML, RESTful web services, SQL, MySQL, Apache
- Cloud & tools: AWS, GCP, Visual Studio
Education
Undergraduate, Computer Information Systems, University College of the Fraser Valley