Justin Jeffress

justin.jeffress@gmail.com

sleepydeveloper

Justin Jeffress

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Executive Summary

Senior Developer Advocate with experience in driving strategic planning, content creation and community outreach. Proven track record in project management and solution architecture at Amazon. Skilled in building teams, influencing product roadmaps and improving customer experiences.

Experience


  • Senior Developer Advocate, Meta, Seattle, Washington
    July 2022 - June 2023
    • Led a team of 2 developer advocates supporting PyTorch initiatives.
    • Drove strategic planning, content creation, public speaking, community outreach, and demand generation.
    • Tripled advocacy reach by equipping and partnering with external community organizers.
    • Reached developers at scale through PyTorch 2.0 launch initiatives: live-stream and on-demand.
    • Collaborated with external partners to create, launch, and evaluate 2 workshops with an average 4.7/5 rating.
    • Established a content pipeline, and marketing promotion plan for feature releases.
  • Technical Project Manger, Amazon, Seattle, Washington
    January 2022 - June 2022
    • Supported the Alexa Science Team's goal to pilot and launch flagship Alexa Skills with external partners.
    • Worked closely with the Business Development team to identify 30 potential partners.
    • Defined the scoring rubric to determine pitch prioritization and pitched 15 partners in one-month.
    • Led pitch meetings and coordinated with marketing and legal to secure partners.
    • Established a catalog of potential partners for future projects. Directed a two-person team responsible for creating flagship partner skills in-house.
    • Defined requirements and updated stakeholders weekly on progress.
  • Senior Solutions Architect, Amazon, Seattle, Washington
    January 2021 - December 2021
    • Worked with 3 video partners to integrate Alexa into TV sets.
    • Helped partners remove bottlenecks, adopt new features, and improve customer experience.
    • Identified the root cause of a major session timeout, worked with partner to fix it, reducing lag 90%.
    • Shared partner feedback with the product team to influence priorities and roadmap.
    • Streamlined certification testing, increasing throughput, productivity, while reducing product delays.
    • Mentored and prepared 5 colleagues to deliver presentations for Alexa Live.
  • Senior Developer Advocate, Amazon, Seattle, Washington
    July 2017 - December 2020
    • Authored 30 blogs, 4 training courses, and a white paper, generating thousands of engagement minutes.
    • Published 5 Alexa sample skill projects on GitHub earning 1000s of stars and forks.
    • Recruited and led the team, behind the AWS Alexa Skill Builders training course.
    • Hosted 20 hackathons, driving feature adoption and leading to the publication of 100s of innovative skills.
    • Delivered 100 talks and workshops, onboarding over 150k developers. Used third-party tools to rank feature requests, leading to the option of 5 community-driven features.
    • Mentored and educated two new hires and guided them through their first projects.
    • Worked with global teams to establish a localization strategy increasing productivity 70%.
    • Gave five presentations in Japanese at Alexa events in Tokyo and Osaka
  • Senior Software Developer, Zoe Media Group, Los Angeles, California
    April 2017 - July 2017
    • Unified four services under single sign-on, reducing confusion, cutting support requests and boosting engagement.
    • Built automation tools to aggregate and report sales revenue to stakeholders.
    • Integrated Amazon Pay across all e-commerce platforms, increasing revenue streams 3x.
    • Fixed a subscription bug and collaborated with billing to recover revenue.
  • Senior Web Architect, Booktrope, Los Angeles, California
    September 2013 - May 2016
    • Led Booktrope's R&D, developing and testing 90% of the software.
    • Interviewed and mentored new hires, and implemented pair programming for onboarding.
    • Built a system to track book rankings, optimize cover design, marketing, and author recruitment.
    • Developed pricing automation for eBooks, streamlining promotions and contractual pricing.
  • Japanese-English Dictionary Manager, CrossLanguage, Tokyo, Japan
    September 2012-May 2013
    • Communicated exclusively in Japanese as the sole American employee.
    • Maintained an improved Japanese-English translation engine's rules.
    • Automated translation tasks, boosting team efficiency through tool creation.
    • Instructed colleagues on automation tools for better workflow.
  • Japanese-English Dictionary Intern, CrossLanguage, Tokyo, Japan
    June 2012-August 2013
    • Hired as an unpaid intern due to visa limits, completing the hiring process in half the time.
    • Added 3,000+ words to the Japanese-English dictionary in record time.
    • Built a web spider in two days, a scheduled for two weeks.
  • Senior Developer, CrownPeak, Los Angeles, CA
    March 2009-August 2011
    • Led the new C# API development project.
    • Created tools to analyze template code and maintain API documentation, enhancing workflow.
    • Bridged communication between Engineering and Production for API enhancements.
    • Educated Production to use the new API and made improvements based on feedback.
  • Associate Web Application Engineer, CrownPeak, Los Angeles, CA
    September 2006-February 2009
    • Managed client projects, solving CMS, SEO, Data Architecture, backend and front end issues.
    • Developed a widely adopted AJAX event calendar.
    • Owned API documentation, updating missing functions, improving internal docs alongside Engineering.

Technical Skills


  • Alexa, Voice User Interface Design, NodeJS, Python, PyTorch, OpenAI, Rise Scorm, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Perl, Javascript, jQuery, Java, PHP, Laravel, C/C++, C#/NET, Objective-C, Smalltalk, Swift, VBScript, Unix/Bash Scripting, HTML, CSS,SQL, MySQL, Postgresql, Heroku, Amazon Web Services, Parse Server, Wordpress, Redis, Selenium, UNIX, StreamYard, OBS, StreamLabs, Restream

Education and Accolades