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Gary Saunders

Gary Saunders

Engineering Leader • Team Builder • Culture Catalyst

Engineering Leadership

Engineering team builder with a bias for action, accountability and impact. 25+ years transforming organizations through technology strategy, culture development, and scalable system architecture.

25+
Years Experience
100+
Engineers Led
2
Major Acquisitions
50M+
Users Serviced

Leadership

Team Building Lean Transformation Culture Development Strategic Planning

Technology

AWS & Serverless React & TypeScript Distributed Systems CI/CD & DevOps

Business

OKRs & KPIs M&A Integration Stakeholder Management

Engineering Philosophy

My leadership approach centers on three core principles that drive sustainable team performance and culture transformation:

🙏

Gratitude

Engineering is hard. Celebrate success, find meaning in the work and acknowledge the remarkable feat of delivering software that impacts real people.

"Strive to find joy in the work."
⚡

Performance

Focus on flow, fast feedback loops, and team-first collaboration. Performance is about the relative optimization of all the things.

Tools, alignment, trust, and removing arbitrary gatekeeping decisions.
🧠

Learning

Aggressive humility as a key enabler. Question assumptions, embrace experimentation, and maintain objectivity about solutions built years ago.

Is that thing you love still objectively valuable? Does it need to evolve?

Professional Journey

July 2024 - February 2025

Jaine AI - Freelance

Brought on with mandate to ship MVP for collaborative research platform leveraging AI and infinite canvas. Product now in Beta.

Biotech AI
Lean Startup Rapid Prototyping
AWS Bedrock React TypeScript Serverless DynamoDB TLDraw Websockets
Jan 2022 - June 2024

NBC SportsNext - Sr. Director of Engineering

Led two divisions spanning 50 engineers across 5 teams (100+ engineers developed career-wide). Stabilized FinTech systems and delivered $6M+ eCommerce integration.

90% reduction in critical incidents through observability and fault tolerance improvements
50% NPS improvement via key platform enhancements
$6M+ new annual revenue from eCommerce integration in checkout flow
FinTech Sports Management eCommerce
Distributed Systems Cross Functional Teams Lean Methodologies Vendor Management
Stripe Ruby on Rails Node.js React AWS Kubernetes DataDog Splunk CloudWatch w/x-ray Angular
Nov 2018 - Jan 2022

NBC SportsNext - Director of Engineering

Led agile transformation, scaled engineering team, and decommissioned legacy platforms. Hired 30+ engineers and introduced organizational hierarchy.

Improved feature development velocity by up to 70% through Team Topologies adoption
Athelete Safety & Compliance Sports Platform Aggregation
Distributed Teams Team Topologies Agile Legacy Decommissioning
Ruby on Rails MySQL Mobile Dev Containerization ELK Jenkins
Dec 2017 - Nov 2018

NBC SportsNext - Engineering Manager

Led NBC acquisition integration and promoted serverless adoption for seasonal workloads with "scale to near-zero" architecture.

M&A Integration Sports Management CMS
Serverless Architecture Infrastructure as Code Cost Optimization Distributed Systems
AWS Lambda Terraform Angular Ansible CloudFormation RabbitMQ API Gateway
Jan 2015 - Dec 2017

SportsEngine - Lead Software Engineer

Launched multi-tenant CMS, migrated finance systems from NetSuite to in-house solutions, and led Developer Experience improvements.

Financial Systems Developer Tools
System Migration Developer Experience Multi-Tenant Architecture
AWS .NET C# Serverless PHP TeamCity Redis Octopus Node.js Laravel MySQL/SQL Server NetSuite API
1999 - 2015

IBM, EDS (HP) & More

16 years building enterprise infrastructure, storage solutions, and virtualization platforms. MCSE and VCP certified with deep expertise in data center operations and enterprise networking.

Enterprise Infrastructure Data Center Operations Storage Solutions
ITIL Enterprise Architecture Capacity Planning
VMware vSphere Windows Server Active Directory SAN/NAS Storage Cisco Networking MCSE VCP

Let's Build Something Great

Currently seeking VP Engineering or Sr. Director opportunities where I can drive technical strategy, build exceptional teams, and create lasting cultural impact.

Available for new opportunities
📧 garysaunders1981@gmail.com 📱 (647) 404-1156 💼 linkedin.com/in/gasaunders