Victoria Daphnée Jeffrey

I began my software engineering career at Chef Software during the summer of 2015.
Focusing on my development in Javascript, I helped build the UI for our enterprise product (at the time, that was Delivery).
As I solidified my knowledge of javascript, I fell on the "compliance" team, led by two of the folks who wrote InSpec. I familiarized myself with InSpec, and started giving presentations about the problems it could solve.

After proving my skillset in learning new technologies and executing on goals, I moved to working in go, which has been my focus since.
As a Golang developer, I designed and implemented a scheduled infrastructure scanner service for our enterprise product (Automate).

Once the scanner service proved itself stable, I was given the responsibility of extending the scanner service to work with cloud integrations (AWS and Azure). The end result is auto-discovery of nodes in cloud services, extended filtering mechanisms for sorting through that infrastructure, and the ability to scan the nodes with InSpec without providing credentials.
As part of my normal workload, I was expected to break down larger topics into consumable chunks, show progress, create an mvp solution, get feedback, incorporate feedback, and explain the feature to others. I was expected to code review my teammates' work, effectively communicate the status and any blockers to my work, and demo the feature to product managers for approval.

As an Engineering Lead at Chef Software, my primary responsiblity was the execution of our team goals.

I led the daily standup, prioritized work in accordance with product and the engineering directors directives, was responsible for ensuring team members were unblocked and enabled in their work, and continued to contribute heavily to the code base and product development process and ideas. I kept track of the progress on multiple features/epics and funnelled that information up.

I acted as the testing gateway that declared whether my domain of our enterprise product (the compliance section) was ready for release during each release cycle (weekly) and communicated with customers and solutions architects to debug issues found when necessary.

As an engineering manager at Chef, I was responsible for the "domain services" of Automate.
This boils down to managing two teams, for a total of 10 reports. I had bi-weekly 1:1s with all my reports, ranging in seniority from principal engineer (highest) to SDE I.

I worked closely with product and ux to lead the team in "light-sprint" development cycles, including planning meetings and backlog refinement. I was responsible for the execution of the epics to completion and attended biweekly meetings with prodeng leadership to go over status changes in epics. I spent time gathering feedback from the field facing teams and triaging customer problems (escalations) before putting them on the board, and gathering/triaging ideas with product for future development consideration. I also still contributed to the code base when time alotted.

As a people manager, I was responsible for the growth of the engineeers and worked to ensure that the team was healthy. I helped with goal setting, talked through company issues, talked about issues in the workplace, and listened. Where I could, I helped guide the engineers to the best outcome. Where I couldn't, I listened, empathized, and learned.