Jack Humphrey
VP Engineering Capabilities for Indeed.com
Austin, TX
I enjoy building and leading high-caliber teams to create software that reaches millions of users. I
feel successful when my teams love what they do and our users love what we've built. I tend to be
hands-on and highly technical. In my current role as VP Engineering Capabilities at Indeed, I lead an
organization of 8 groups and over 500 people. I spend a lot more time on strategy these days, but I still
love to dive into the details with my teams whenever I get a chance.
I've been building services and applications that provide real value in the world over two decades.
I have experience at all levels of engineering leadership. I have formed new teams to implement
products/features from the ground up, and I have led pre-existing teams to improve process and
productivity and deliver significant new versions.
In my previous roles as VP Engineering at Indeed, I led a small, talented team of engineering leaders
to support and develop the capabilities we need for our product development teams, and I provided
leadership support for teams working on user-facing applications. Prior to those roles, I was Senior
Engineering Director for Jobseeker Applications, leading teams in Austin and Seattle that iteratively
built highly-scalable consumer-facing web applications. I started at Indeed in 2009 as Engineering
Manager for the Job Search development team and later formed the Resume team in December 2010.
Before Indeed, I was a Tech Lead/Manager at Google in the New York and Santa Monica offices, leading
AdWords projects. Before that, I led the development of the data acquisition platform for Coremetrics.
My previous software development jobs were at Reactivity, Trilogy, and EBT/Inso.
Specialties: Data-driven engineering leadership, agile development process, managing and mentoring
technical staff, web services/application development, Java, JavaScript, C/C++, various SQL and NoSQL
databases
Authorized to work in the US for any employer
Work Experience
VP Engineering Capabilities
Indeed.com - Austin, TX
April 2009 to Present
I have worn multiple hats at Indeed over the years. In my current role (since mid-2017), I report to
the SVP Engineering and lead an organization of 8 groups and over 500 people. Some of my groups
are comprised of software development teams that produce tools, services, and platforms employed
by all product development teams at Indeed. These teams focus on concerns like engineering
velocity, reliability, performance, developer productivity, security, privacy, user experience, compute
infrastructure, and test automation. Other groups provide functional expertise (Quality Assurance, Site
Reliability, Technical Content Management) to the product development teams. One special group runs
our Open Source program.
From 2016-2017, I was VP Global Engineering Capabilities and led a small, talented team of
engineering leaders to support and develop capabilities for product development teams. This was a
more matrixed leadership position and focused on initiatives similar to those I lead in my current role.
Prior to that, as VP Engineering, Applications, I provided leadership support for teams working on user-
facing applications. I helped coordinate efforts in areas such as front-end technology and application
security, and I spent plenty of time working on org-wide initiatives (such as Indeed University) and
mentoring leaders around the engineering organization as it grew to over 500 people.
For several years, I directly led the Jobseeker Applications teams, including Job Search, Resume, and
Indeed Apply, in Austin and Seattle.
Efforts I've led include:
Engineering Capabilities
• Designed organizational structure that includes development teams in Austin, Seattle, San Francisco,
and Tokyo
• Hired and coached engineering directors as well as senior managers for each of the 9 groups in the
organization
• Worked with a Product Director counterpart to provide overall vision and direction for the
organization
• Introduced Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to align groups and teams with overall mission
Global Engineering Capabilities
• Managed Engineering Directors for our QA and Data Science cross-site organizations. QA Analysts
and Data Scientists embed in product development teams and take as much ownership of their
products as the Product Managers and Software Engineers on those teams.
• Managed Engineering Directors and senior technologists working on a variety of cross-cutting
concerns, including velocity, productivity, reliability, privacy, security, user experience, service
infrastructure, and experimentation (A/B test infrastructure). We work to support and encourage
innovation and continuous improvement across all 5 engineering sites worldwide.
Management Practices
• Proactively influenced the development of Indeed's approach to engineering career growth and
quarterly evaluation
• Built and maintained a tool (called Hindsight) that helps engineers and their managers track their
contributions over time.
Indeed University (oversight)
• Helped design and implement this 12-week on-boarding program for new college grads.
• Advised and managed the program's leader for 2015 and 2016.
• Advised on the evolution of the program in 2017 and 2018.
Development Process and Productivity
• Introduced continuous integration (using Jenkins) and code coverage tracking.
• Implemented initiatives to increase visibility across teams.
• Improved release management process and mentored individuals in best practices for release
management. Implemented a tool that drastically simplified weekly release management.
• Improved tools for tracking errors logged by production code
• Introduced practices (like "Fixits") to encourage development team to pay down technical debt and
address long-standing issues.
Job Search International Expansion
I led the effort to evolve and refine our job search web application to allow us to launch Job Search in
40+ additional countries and 20+ additional languages since 2009:
• Enhancements to configurability of multi-tenant job search application
• Evolution of strategy for data access
• Improvements to job and location matching for new countries and languages, including internal tools
for use by country managers
• Launch of internationalized iOS and Android apps and mobile sites
• Evolution of Indeed's internal translation tools
Service-Oriented Architecture
I advocated for and steered the development of our service-oriented framework (Boxcar). This
framework has enabled Indeed to move from a monolithic architecture to an efficient and manageable
ecosystem made up of dozens of distinct services.
Operational Efficiency
Led and contributed to many efforts to improve the efficiency of our operations team. Some examples:
• Implemented a central data store for application status tracking.
• Implemented a Java framework (http://go.indeed.com/varexport) for easily exposing monitored
variables from running applications and services.
• Coordinated efforts to enable serving traffic for a single country from multiple data centers.
Single Sign-On Architecture
Led the effort to build SSO for jobseeker and employer accounts across all of Indeed's products.
Continue to enhance this infrastructure to improve security and efficiency.
New Products and Product Enhancements
• Led many projects to enhance job search functionality for jobseekers.
• Built and led the team that launched Resume Upload, Resume Search, and IndeedApply.
• Led efforts to better monetize existing products, including email job alerts.
Engineering Blog
I launched an engineering blog for Indeed (engineering.indeedblog.com) in 2012 and am responsible
for the technical content published on that blog.
@IndeedEng Talks Series
I helped launch Indeed's ongoing tech talk series (engineering.indeedblog.com/talks) in 2013 and
continue to be involved in the development of content for that series.
Launching Open Source Initiatives
I have been responsible for the efforts to open source useful tools and libraries
(opensource.indeedeng.io), including our A/B testing framework Proctor and our data analytics
platform Imhotep.
Intern Program
I helped evolved Indeed's intern program and ran the program in 2013 (22 interns) and 2014 (30
interns). I have advised new leaders of the program in the years since.
Seattle Office
From Austin, I helped launch Indeed's engineering office in Seattle and oversaw its growth in 2014 and
2015.
Ongoing Recruiting
Indeed is a rapidly growing organization, and I have helped in industry and university recruiting,
presenting Indeed to candidates, doing 100s of technical interviews, and training others in technical
interview evaluation.
Software Engineer and Tech Lead/Manager
Google
November 2004 to March 2009
I led project teams developing new features for AdWords advertisers. In addition to my own technical
contributions to these projects, I managed engineers of varying skill and experience levels to achieve
their goals and help realize project success.
Lead Software Developer
Coremetrics
July 2001 to November 2004
I was responsible for the data acquisition platform for a massive-scale web site analytics data
warehouse.
Senior Technologist & Technical Lead, New Venture Creation
Reactivity
2000 to 2001
Software Developer / Team Lead
Trilogy Software
1997 to 2000
Software Engineer
Inso Corporation
1995 to 1997
EBT was acquired by Inso in 1996.
Software Engineer
Electronic Book Technologies
1995 to 1997
Developed an innovative web content management system called DynaBase.
Education
BS in Computer Science
Brown University - Providence, RI
1991 to 1995
High School
St .Stephen's Episcopal School - Austin, TX
1987 to 1991
Brownwood ISD
Skills
Agile development process, managing and mentoring technical staff, web services/application
development, Java, JavaScript, C/C++, various SQL and NoSQL databases
Links
http://jackhumphrey.me
https://medium.com/indeed-engineering/improving-the-development-process-with-metrics-driven-
insights-bb7addf8896f
https://medium.com/indeed-engineering/using-metrics-to-improve-the-development-process-and-
coach-people-70168759a249
https://ossna18.sched.com/event/FAOa/mistakes-to-avoid-when-open-sourcing-proprietary-tech-jack-
humphrey-indeed
https://ossna19.sched.com/event/PUSI/measuring-and-improving-the-efficiency-of-software-delivery-
jack-humphrey-siva-dosapati-indeed
https://pbell.wistia.com/medias/xbbdq0oew6
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKP2EY8LxTU
Awards
Hoey Award for Creative Writing, National Merit Scholarship, St Stephen's
Bishop's Medal, Trilogy Business Unit
Groups
W3C P3P 1.1 Working Group (Invited Expert)
2002 to 2002
ACM Member
2004 to Present
Austin Technology Leaders Meetup
January 2015 to Present
Additional Information
Interests: music (listening and playing), technology, film, literature, comic books, writing, fencing