Jared Thigpen

Background

About Jared Thigpen

I am an experienced and driven technology leader with 20 years of experience creating quality software with over 10 of those years involving some form of leadership. I have extensive experience leading teams of engineers, managers of teams, and directors/VPs of teams of teams. My leadership style is focused on culture and trust. Goal number one is to create an environment where great problem solvers are excited to come to work each day. I believe talent and motivation are more important than specific experience or prior knowledge, and I take that approach when leading organizations, moving my best people into the roles where they can make the biggest impact. I spent the first years of my career as an engineer and architect, spanning various technologies and industries. That experience informs my approach as a technology leader and allows me to maintain a firm understanding of the technologies my teams use and allows me to bridge the gap between the top-level strategies of a company and the low-level decisions my teams are making on a regular basis. I have led small development teams and large organizations (250+ heads), and managed budgets of $50M+. I have overhauled organizations, leading recruitment and hiring for rapid expansion, and also overseen organizational mergers and navigated significant cutbacks. I have designed and led major platform changes, including a new commerce platform for $100M+ business and a new video streaming solution for a platform that does 10M+ monthly streams. I have direct experience architecting and leading solutions in the following spaces: • Cloud-native solutions - AWS & Microsoft Azure • Mobile Applications – Native (iOS/Swift & Android/Kotlin) & Cross Platform • Connected TV Applications (CTV)- Roku, Fire TV, Google TV, Apple TV • Connected Fitness – Android Native, Mobile Device Management (MDM) • Modern Web Frameworks & Tools - React, Next, Vercel, Angular • E-commerce solutions – Shopify & Commercetools • Content Management Systems – Sanity, Builder, Wordpress • Video Streaming – HLS & WebRTC • AWS Data Storage Solutions – S3, Dynamo, RDS I recently began overseeing internal R&D and outside vendor assessments around Generative AI. This has involved protecting time for key resources to begin research and conduct POCs around different LLMs, model training, prompt engineering, and RAG usage. This has also involved engaging with various vendors focused in the space to assess their capabilities and what is currently possible for both external, using-facing scenarios and internal, productivity-focused ones.