Said Ketchman

Group Lead over our subscription growth platforms group spanning almost 40 cross-functional roles across 6 teams. I took this group from zero-to-one, with an initial pitch to senior leadership and gathered buy-in from across the Times. I spent the first year hiring 3 managers and filling over 20 software engineering roles, along with roles across product, project, QA, design, and data analytics. Additionally, I worked closely with the teams to set our technical strategy and overall vision and objectives. In our second year, I spent my time building a leadership team that allowed for continuity of the group’s mission, while improving engineering quality, velocity, and stakeholder relations. I helped to increase the scope of our group by adding two new teams. The group is a model for cross-functionality without sacrificing engineering quality and I’m proud to have stayed close to the tech and people along the way. Additionally, I was the Engineering Director for our Subscriber Retention group, with 3 cross-functional teams focused on developing user-facing features and experiments that optimize retention metrics and reduce subscriber churn. This group consists of 2 engineering managers and 9 engineers.

I was responsible for building and overseeing 4 teams consisting of 2 managers and a mix of over 20 full-time and consultant engineers. The scope of these teams consisted of systems spanning access control (the Times paywall), offer management, marketing tools, and customer data preference. One major accomplishment during this time was directly leading the team that successfully re-architected the NYTimes’ metering and paywall service, allowing it to scale to over 20k requests per second. This was a highly visible project with status reporting to the CTO and COO. Another major initiative was creating & executing a multi-year strategy to evolve our legacy marketing technology. This involved reducing the group from 4 teams to just 2, eliminating tens of unnecessary engineering roles, and simplifying the tech stack to support future growth of our subscription business. Technologies we used include: GCP (GKE, GAE, GCS, Datastore/Firestore, PubSub, Cloud Functions), AWS (EC2, ELB, S3), GoLang, Java, React/JavaScript, Node.js, GraphQL

A dual role as Engineering Manager and Product Owner over a team of 5 engineers. I managed the video and audio encoding and publishing stack along with the physical video infrastructure. Some standout projects included the creation of an end-to-end live streaming video experience; an event-based microservice video encoding, publishing, and delivery ecosystem; and an overhauled media asset infrastructure and management system. We worked across cloud providers and content delivery networks to create a scalable and reliable experience for our journalists and viewers. Technologies we used include: GCP (GKE, GCS), AWS (S3), Fastly/Akamai (CDN), Go (GoLang), React/JavaScript, Node.js

I worked hands-on with design, product, and my engineering team to build video experiences for the millions of readers and subscribers of the Times. Our group was akin to a startup within the Times, where we focused on growing our fledgling video offerings into a core part of the business. We introduced new technologies such as Node.js and React to the Times, and began the engineering shift towards CD/CI, test-driven development, and QA automation for our web video experiences, open source video player, and our video APIs. Previously Software Engineer in Web Technology focusing on PHP and infrastructure support.

Web and applications development for major brands including Marriott, Loews, and NY.gov. Partnered cross-functionally to help deliver award-winning experiences and capabilities.

CMS and web experience development for major US brands. Worked closely with clients and an amazing cross-functional team to create innovative capabilities and experiences.