Rugiet Health | Director of Engineering | 2020-2023

About Link to heading

Rugiet is a direct to consumer healthcare company based in Austin, TX, disrupting the traditional compounding pharmaceutical industry with a mix of telehealth and customised healthcare provision. I joined the company in the summer of 2020 with a remit to pay down technical debt, take a lead on revenue generating feature development and grow the engineering team.

This ended my self-enforced startup sabbatical period and was an amazing opportunity to exercise my skills and experience in a high growth startup environment - and in a HIPAA compliant and clinical setting - which added some interesting and meaningful constraints to the work. My vision for the team was to establish a world class software engineering foundation that would allow them to iterate quickly on new ideas, and add predictability in outcomes.

Methodology

The initial steps were clear:

  • improve and clarify communication
  • introduce more structure to the development process
  • bring on a product manager to handle communication between management & engineering
  • tackle the architectural issues that were prohibiting team agility and company growth.

Team Leadership

I’m a big champion of the most-fast-and-break-stuff attitude in a startup environment, but overcoming the challenges with this team required considered steps to build structure & consistency.

Contributions as team lead:

  • Introduced the company to slack
  • Identified the team as engineers and expanded headcount
  • Introduced story points & tracking weekly velocity
  • Campaigned for and lead the hire of a highly talented product manager
  • Introduced developer support rotations to spread the work-load, reduce fatigue, and increase codebase awareness amongst all teams
  • Introduced performance reviews with a mix of quantitative and qualitative approaches

Platform Refactor

The central technical challenge for the team when I joined was the platform running on two applications utilising the same database, one of which was a heavily modified ecommerce platform and with a significant amount of code duplciation and hard-coded, tightly coupled data models between them. There was minimal management or custody over the data, with either application able to modify the data at any point without the other knowing about it. The result was a development environment that was challenging to reason about or maintain, even for the authors.

It took some campaigning to get all of the stakeholders onside, but once that had been accomplished, our team scaled down feature development for a period while we worked on a full platform refactor.

Key contributions:

  • Migrated to a single, ‘modular monolith’ with clearly defined separation of concerns & namespaces

  • Re-used all the valuable components, removing & refactoring the redundant ones

  • Refactored ~30% of the application data layer for clarity, sustainability and developer sanity

  • Moved to a scaleable, containerized deployment with automated CI/CD pipeline

  • Zero downtime data pipeline to migrate the application at launch

Impact Link to heading

  • Scaled infrastructure & technology to support 50x customer growth and revenue growth from $15k to $2m per month
  • Established high velocity and stable software engineering department
  • Delivered full platform redesign to pay down significant technical debt

Technology