Rob Retchless

Background

About Rob Retchless

I am the Director of Engineering at Enablon (a Wolters Kluwer business) located in The Hague, The Netherlands. I am passionate about building great software, leading high-performing teams, and fostering positive workplace cultures. My career began working for IBM in 2006 as an intern tasked with implementing the first Jazz.net community site designs. Returning full-time in 2007 with a Bachelor of Software Engineering from Queen's University, I worked with a close-knit team of developers at the IBM Toronto Lab on the development of Jazz Dashboards and the web interface for Rational Team Concert 1.0. Following its successful release, I was tasked with implementing and maintaining the common web UI look and feel, and common components, continuing thru version 4.0.1. In 2012, I transitioned to leadership as the technical lead of the Jazz.net website, leading a virtual team of talented web developers and content producers focused on telling the Jazz story to the broader software development community. I then became the technical lead and development manager of a passionate development squad at IBM's 185 Spadina office in Downtown Toronto, building the team from 3 developers to over 40, co-located with a great design team! We collaborated to create delightful, responsive, and modern user interfaces for IBM Watson Analytics, Cognos Analytics, and Planning Analytics. In 2020, I joined Varicent as the Director of Development for the Sales Planning organization, building and leading a team of 40+ software developers, quality engineers, DevOps engineers, architects, and managers in the creation of the Varicent Sales Planning product. In 2023, my family moved from Canada to The Netherlands and I began the next chapter of my career as Engineering Director at Enablon. I am very interested in user experience and design and love implementing compelling and dynamic web experiences using HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Specialties: Engineering Culture, Agile, Continuous Delivery, DevOps, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Node.js, Photoshop, Illustrator, React, GitHub, SRE