Glenna Buford
LinkedIn: gbuford | github: glenna
Experienced Engineering Leader; iOS and React Native Engineer
About Me
I’m a passionate people leader with 6 years of experience managing engineering teams, and 2 years in the company management team. I’m a strategic thinker and like to focus on understanding problems before working on solutions. I love bringing individuals and their skillsets together to work on and solve problems towards a common goal.
In my role as VP of Engineering, I focus on People Management, Technical and Product Development.
On the People Development side, my passion is to work with my team to understand their needs and skills and coaching them to achieve their personal and career development goals.
On the Technical side, I have 10 years of technical experience, focused mostly on mobile development. That has allowed me to deeply understand the technical space in which my teams are working (and I’m still known to do code reviews, bug fixes, technical improvements and small features :) ).
And lastly, on the Product Development side, I like to immerse myself into knowing our users and how a product can support them in their lives. I like to work as a sparing partner with the Product team to discover areas of improvement, best practices, and to approach Product Development as a team working hand-in-hand.
Management & Leadership skills
Thoughtful communication to teams and individuals; 1:1s; Coaching team members and peers; Conducting peer review feedbacks; Interviewing & hiring; Process improvement & optimization; Communication & Expectation setting with stakeholders; Execution & delivery of projects; Leading through change;
Technical Skills
- Advanced: Swift, Objective-C, iOS, Xcode, git, various CI/CD solutions (Bitrise, Github Actions, etc)
- Intermediate: gdb, lldb, fastlane, React Native, JavaScript/TypeScript, JSX/TSX
- Beginner: Android, Jenkins, C/C++, Ruby on Rails
connected device company, combining premium design with medical grade features into its products. In February 2022, Withings acquired 8fit.
Utilizing my team’s experience in managing and delivering content to the 8fit app, we built a new Content Management System (CMS), including APIs used by technical teams, a web interface used by Content Editors, content databases, as well as, all of the supporting technical infrastructure, supporting the Health+ offering, serving xxx users of the HealthMate application available on iOS and Android.
Engineering Team Leader, February 2021-August 2023
- Served as both the technical and product lead for the Content Management System (including including APIs used by technical teams, a web interface used by Content Editors, content databases, as well ass all of the supporting technical infrastructure), building out technical and product roadmaps in order to deliver features, improvements, and bug fixes to support the public launch of Health+ (October 2022) and new Health+ features.
- Responsible for stakeholder management of the CMS, including the Content team, product managers, CRM, mobile, qa, and web services teams.
- Learned RoR development and contributed features, bug fixes and UI/UX improvements to the CMS.
8fit people and processes integration lead, February 2021-August 2023
During the initial integration phase with Withings (ongoing), I was responsible for planning and executing the migration and merging of technical services and tools, team integration, as well as legal and compliance documentation. In addition, I led and executed the project for sunsetting the 8fit apps and services, setting up roadmaps and executing the product development work.
- Managed and executed the migration of 8fit’s backend application and database to a new infrastructure.
- Successfully planned and executed the sunsetting of the 8fit mobile and web applications and service; including removing 3rd party integrations, planning for customer subscription renewal cycles, reducing 8fit operating costs, and ending the service altogether.
- Continued managing all technical team members (mobile, web, backend, QA, data), as well as the maintenance of all 8fit services and technologies, including web, mobile, APIs, and admin panel.
- Responsible for knowledge share/transfer after natural attrition of the 8fit engineering team after the acquisition, ensuring a handover and knowledge transfer for continuity of service.
health & fitness app, acquired by Withings in February 2022
Vice President of Engineering, December 2020-December 2022
- Managed all technical team members (Mobile, Web, QA, Backend, Data)
- Contributed to the monthly 8fit board meetings as the Technical representative of the team. Provided insights to the technical roadmap, product development updates and strategic decisions
- Revamped the interview process for Engineering
- Responsible for scaling up the team, and managing the hiring process for engineering roles
- Key player for acquisition process with Withings, including:
- technical due diligence during the acquisition process with Withings, including providing documentation of our tech stacks (Frontend, Backend, Data), infrastructure, various metrics regarding performance (e.g requests / minute, users, installs), development workflow, etc.
- finalizing legal topics associated with the acquisition (e.g. updating ROPA, PIA, TOM)
- documentation on 8fit services for ISMS Compliance
- migration and consolidation of Engineering tools and services with Withings teams
Head of Frontend (Mobile and Web), May 2020 - December 2020
- Managed the Frontend team members (QA, Mobile, Web)
- Responsible for the technical roadmap of the Web and Mobile applications, instilling in the Engineering team the ideas of code ownership, maintenance, and stability
- Served as a member of the Management team along with the CEO, co-CEO, and VP of Marketing, playing a key role in company strategic discussions and decisions
- Implemented a 360 review process for the Frontend team, including peer reviews, self reviews, levels definitions, and development plans
- Responsible for Engineering budgets, regularly evaluated services / plans to ensure cost optimazation
Engineering Manager, Frontend (mobile/web), June 2019 - April 2020
- Mentorship of team members on: onboarding on the mobile project (code, processes, tooling), balancing workload and improving sense of productivity, learning the web build infrastructure, technical evaluation and implementation of new features.
- Maintained team collaboration and motivation of the frontend through team bonding activities.
- Fostered team accountability and ownership through a culture of continuous code and product ownership resulting in lower error, warnings, and bugs in the code bases
- Ensured timely delivery of features, bug fixes, technical improvements and releases by
- Coordination and distribution of technical tasks between squads.
- Improving the feature development and release process by working with QA to establish metrics to learn where we can improve
- Established and owned the Engineering and Product relationship with our Customer Support team, creating a traige, escalation and prioritization process
- Responsible for the success of an initiative to merge our web and mobile teams, which involved onboarding to the web project myself, as well as establishing and roadmapping a path to reach parity with mobile processes
- Continued to develop features, fix bugs, and implement technical improvements in the mobile and web apps
Senior Software Engineer, Frontend (mobile/web), April 2019 - May 2019
- Served as the engineering lead of a cross functional squad with 4 engineers
- Collaborated with product team to prioritize and evaluate new features, functionalities, and on-going code maintenance (i.e. refactoring, SDK updates, iOS and Android update compliance)
- Developed features, fixed bugs, and implement technical improvements to the mobile application
- Owned the iOS infrastructure, upgrades, maintanence, etc.
an e-mobility platform
iOS Engineer, June 2018 - March 2019
- Collaborated with design and backend to implement new features throughout the app
- Developed tooling to improve the dev workflow, e.g. automating the localization workflow
- Utilized knowledge of platform features to recommend new features to the product team, and collaborated with various teams to kickstart feature design
- Refactored our networking stack to improve usability for multiple clients
- Collaborated closely with the hardware and backend teams to implement the MVP support of a new communication technology with the scooters
a free-to-play casual mobile game studio
Engineering Lead - Jelly Splash, December 2016 - May 2018
- Led a team of 4 engineers on Jelly Splash, a live mobile game, shipping updates and new features to over ~500k DAU
- Advised on studio and company-wide technology and engineering issues and processes (e.g. sharing tech across games, and developing a workflow to promote sharing more tech)
- Represented Wooga as a speaker at gaming and tech industry events and conferences
iOS Engineer - Jelly Splash, June 2015 - November 2016
- Implemented new features in the game, ranging from game play elements to implementing systems and UI for time-limited events, offers, and sales to SDK updates to iOS or Android specific features
- Collaborated with product team to prioritize and evaluate new features, functionalities, and on-going legacy code maintenance (i.e. refactoring, SDK updates, iOS and Android update compliance)
- Improved and maintained build and Jenkins CI systems
- Supported Jelly Splash team member artists and designers with maintenance of self-service tools
creators of a platform to compile Objective-C to a native Android binary to enable cross-platform development for iOS developers
iOS Engineer, May 2013 - May 2015
- Worked with some of our biggest clients managing the prioritization of features and bug fixes in our platform
- Worked on dozens of top 100 games on Google Play and developed new Android features for games to be debuted with at Google I/O
- Implemented new Android and iOS features in our platform using our BridgeKit technology (an Objective-C wrapper around JNI) and other technologies, which were shipped to all clients
- Worked with Apple’s open source Core Foundation: CFLite, and gained deep knowledge of Objective-C, the runtime and the iOS platform
a tech consulting firm focusing on web and mobile
iOS Engineer, June 2012 - April 2013
- Learned iOS development through a 6 month internship leading to a full time position
Other
Conferences/Talks
- UIKonf, 2020, Emcee
- LeadDev Berlin meetup, From IC to EM: navigating the management path, slides, video
- NSSpain 2019, From IC to EM: navigating the management path, slides, video
- UIKonf 2019, Rolling your own network stack, slides, video
- Young Innovators Camp 2018 participant, Heilbronn, yic.camp, team placed 4th lolz
- TechRec Berlin 2018, Panel Discussion: Developing the culture of diversity and inclusion in tech
- We Rise Berlin Leadership Summit, 2018 - Emcee and Organizer
- Altassian Summit 2018, Fireside Chat - Pledge 1% and the importance of supporting non-profits (on behalf of Women Who Code)
- Quo Vadis 2018, Bringing More Girls Into Tech And Games: What We Did, And What You Can Do!
- Women Empowerment Conference at Institute for Cultural Diplomacy 2018, Women Who Code Overview
- #pragma Conference 2017, ARKit - slides, repo, video
- try! Swift NYC 2017, ARKit - slides, repo, video
- PG Connects London - Shipping Casual Mobile Games panel, 2017
- Womenize 2015, A Day in the Life of A Game Developer
- Meetup Talks
Open Source Contributions
Community Involvement
Other
Education
- Vanderbilt University, M.S. Computer Science, 2010 - 2012
- Murray State University, B.S. Applied Mathematics; Computer Science and Statistics (Summa cum Laude), 2006 - 2010