About Ash

I started my career as an animator and interactive developer — building Flash sites and interactive experiences for free, just to learn the craft. That hustle landed me a job at an interactive design firm, where I went on to build projects for the Smithsonian, National Geographic, and the Asian Art Museum. That foundation in craft and empathy for the end user shaped everything that came after. I moved into engineering, then into leadership, and I've spent the last 8+ years managing teams that build products millions of people use every day.

I've led engineering at Spotify, Comcast, and Relay Network. I've shipped platforms, rebuilt legacy systems, scaled teams, and launched products from scratch. But what I care about most is the people doing the work — and creating the conditions where they do the best work of their careers.

How I Lead

Management Is a Creative Act

I believe management is an art form. I bring creative approaches to coaching, collaboration, and product ideation — the same instincts that once drove my design work now drive how I build teams and shape culture. Cookie-cutter management produces cookie-cutter results. I design the team experience with as much intention as I'd design a product.

Champion for Engineering Ideas

Engineers have some of the best product ideas in any organization — they just need space and sponsorship. I actively create room for engineers to pitch, prototype, and ship their own ideas. I want to work somewhere that values this too — where engineering isn't just an execution arm, but a creative partner.

Culture Isn't Optional

When the pandemic scattered everyone to home offices, I didn't just manage through Slack messages. I created "Watercooler Wednesdays" — a program that rebuilt the informal connections we'd lost — and organized a company-wide "Let's Write the Company Song" event that brought people together in a way nobody expected. Team building doesn't have to be trust falls. It can be weird, fun, and actually meaningful.

By the Numbers

Engineers I've personally coached from IC roles into engineering management positions across multiple levels and organizations.

Major platform migrations I've led — on-prem to AWS at Comcast, AWS to GCP at Spotify, and hypermedia APIs to hJSON while shifting from web-first to mobile-first architecture.

Career ladder frameworks I've contributed to and formalized — one at Spotify and one at Comcast — giving engineers clear, transparent paths for growth.

The Story Behind the Work

6 Apps → 1 App

At Comcast, I led a two-year effort to consolidate six separate customer-facing applications into a single unified Xfinity mobile app. This wasn't just a technical migration — it meant coordinating across multiple engineering teams, aligning product stakeholders, and re-architecting the platform from monolith to serverless (Lambda, Fargate) while serving 10M+ users. The result: 15% reduction in operational costs, better latency, and a single product experience customers could actually navigate.

Smart Actions at Relay Network

I architected and shipped an event-driven automation platform for finance and healthcare clients. Built on AWS EventBridge, Step Functions, Lambda, and DynamoDB, Smart Actions enabled personalized customer journeys that the product team had been trying to unlock for years. I also optimized the team's Kafka event processing, cutting cloud costs by 20%. This was the kind of work where technical architecture and product thinking have to work hand-in-hand — and where the engineering manager needs to be in both conversations.

Scaling Across Borders

At Xfinity.com, I managed two distributed teams — 14 engineers across the US and India — delivering revenue-critical features for internet, streaming, and mobile products. We relaunched the entire sales platform to meet an FCC regulatory deadline with 100% compliance. I also spearheaded the creation of a shared React component library adopted by 4 teams, because nothing kills velocity like rebuilding the same button in four different repos.

Outside the Office

I'm based in Philadelphia and I build things here too. PhillyGPT is a local AI project combining generative models with neighborhood-level knowledge. Commitmas is a "Spotify Wrapped"-style year-end review of GitHub contributions — a fun way to celebrate what your team shipped. I also make music with my project Drip Castles. I'm always tinkering.

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ASHANDRIEN