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B Bob Elwell

Atlanta, Georgia

Engineering leader scaling cloud platforms and the teams that build them.

I'm Bob Elwell, Vice President of Engineering at MacStadium. For twenty years I've been building search infrastructure, cloud platforms, and the engineering organizations behind them -- with deep work across platform architecture, DevOps, security, and compliance.

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Portrait of Robert Elwell
Years scaling cloud orgs
20+
Cost savings driven
$10M+
Revenue growth contributed
40%
Engineering org scaled
2×

About

I lead software organizations that build the unglamorous, high-leverage parts of modern infrastructure. This includes everything from search engines, data platforms, policy engines, developer platforms, and more. I care about scale in both senses of the word: systems that don't buckle under load, and teams that don't buckle as they grow.

I came up writing search infrastructure (Lucene, Solr) and NLP pipelines at Wikia / Fandom, then moved into platform and DevOps leadership at Lookout, GE, UserTesting, and Vultr. Along the way I've earned a patent for remote device configuration, drove HIPAA / SOC2 / SOX compliance at UserTesting ahead of its IPO, modernized Vultr's platform while doubling the engineering org, and most recently led $3M+ in licensing cost-outs at MacStadium.

Outside of work I'm exploring new places, learning a new language, or hanging out with my wife and three dogs. My last few big trips have been South Africa, Patagonia, and Alaska. This year, we're going to the Galapagos! Next year, I hope to visit Turkey, and I'm currently working my way through Turkish level 1B. Memnum oldum ve kolay gelsin!

Selected writing

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Work history

  1. Current
    Vice President of Engineering · MacStadium

    Leading the software org delivering virtualized and bare-metal Mac compute, with Kubernetes orchestration via Orka.

  2. Prior
    Senior Director of Engineering · Vultr

    Helped an independent public cloud sophisticate its engineering organization -- more than doubling headcount, aligning teams with technical domains, and shipping several key products.

  3. Prior
    Director of Engineering, Platform Foundations · UserTesting

    Transformed DevOps and evolved engineering processes, making our IPO a breeze from a compliance and accountability standpoint.

  4. Prior
    Senior Staff Software Architect · GE

    Built a highly configurable cloud-native policy enforcement engine touching all of GE's major businesses.

  5. Prior
    Staff Engineer, Tech Lead, Enterprise · Lookout Mobile Security

    Led the engineering side of Lookout's enterprise product.

  6. Prior
    Senior Software Engineer · Wikia (now Fandom)

    Architected the search platform and led a small NLP / data science team.

Consulting & advisory

I've run a software consulting practice for over a decade. Notable engagements include search and recommendation systems for Beats Audio (now part of Apple Music), a real-estate search and underwriting engine (Django, React, Kubernetes), authentication and search work for clients in the security and industrial-products space, and a pricing-analytics platform supporting class-action litigation.

As Chief Information Officer at Thaddeus Medical Systems, I designed and built a monitoring and chain-of-custody platform for smart coolers in the cold chain. During COVID-19 I partnered with executive leadership to secure funding through venture capital, accelerators, and BARDA's Operation Warp Speed program, enabling the platform for vaccine-distribution use cases.

Always happy to make new connections! Reach out by email or LinkedIn.