Brian Henzelmann
Brian Henzelmann
Co-Founder | Pingum
Senior Manager, Solutions Architecture | GitLab
Manager, Solutions Architecture | GitLab
Co-Founder | Pingum
Senior Solutions Architect | GitLab
Senior Platform Architect | VMware Tanzu (Formerly Pivotal)
Senior Software Engineer | Northwestern Mutual
Lead DevOps Coach | Northwestern Mutual
Lead Software Engineer | GE Digital
Digital Technology Leadership Program | GE Healthcare

Experience

Co-Founder

Pingum

2018 - ongoing
Description
There's nothing more exciting than taking all your skills and experiences and pouring them into building something from scratch. Being a co-founder of a small business gives you experiences you can take back to other roles. I enjoy working with our small team to build a scalable SaaS business, identify market opportunities, quickly deliver value, operate our own code, and manage our own finances.
We use many technologies to deliver value. React Native and React with Material UI give our visual design in browsers, Android, and iOS. Spring Boot APIs and functions connected to PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, AWS DynamoDB, and AWS S3 persist relational, document, and object data. Redis caches data and queues non-critical data between services. AWS SQS queues critical data. AWS SNS and AWS SES send communications to our users. GitLab and GitLab CI handle our pipelines which run unit tests with Jest and JUnit, analyzes static code with SonarQube, and builds OCI containers before depositing in GitLab Registry and automatically deploying to Kubernetes clusters running on vSphere 7 and AWS EKS.
Pingum is a cloud and mobile workflow tool for teams and businesses who are still tracking their workflows through emails and spreadsheets. If you have a distributed team who needs to get notified of assigned work and provide updates on the go through workflows, then Pingum is the easiest solution to join the digital age. Check it out at https://pingum.io.
Responsibilities
  • Design, build, & validate capabilities to capture market opportunities
  • Engineering, finance, sales, marketing, et al.

Senior Manager, Solutions Architecture

GitLab

2024 - ongoing
Description
Lead a team of Solutions Architects at GitLab supporting the Enterprise US West territory, specializing in uncovering prospect and customer business and technology needs that align to GitLab features and capabilities to drive customer business outcomes.
Responsibilities
  • Directly leading a team of 8 Solutions Architects, including coaching, career development, and performance management
  • Operating the pre-sales business processes, responsible for the technical strategy for satisfying customer outcomes in new logos and growth accounts in close partnership with Sales, Customer Success, and Professional Services
  • Leveraging experience in Software Engineering, DevOps, and Enterprise Architecture to tailor solutions to customer needs
  • Serving and delighting our customers through direct interactions and customer advocacy
  • Driving top of funnel pipeline growth through speaking at field marketing events

Manager, Solutions Architecture

GitLab

2022 - 2023
Accomplishments
  • Drove over $20M in net ARR and nearly 100% attainment in FY24 through business and operational rigor by supporting a bimodal sales motion, regularly reviewing top deals for opportunities most likely to meet quota attainment goals, and directly engaging in the field through Value Stream Assessments, demonstrations, Proofs of Value, and marketing events
  • Grew the US West Solutions Architecture team to 16 team members and 2 teams through directly managing intermediate, senior, and staff team members, including hiring, promoting, and performance managing team members - while receiving 100% positive results for manager questions in the engagement survey
  • Supported overall organizational goals and OKRs by personally contributing and driving team members to contribute, including driving adoption and evolution of Customer Success Plans, defining and rolling out Technical Opportunity Plans to drive sales rigor, and creating and publishing AE enablement for technical win strategies

Co-Founder

Pingum

2018 - ongoing
Description
There's nothing more exciting than taking all your skills and experiences and pouring them into building something from scratch. Being a co-founder of a small business gives you experiences you can take back to other roles. I enjoy working with our small team to build a scalable SaaS business, identify market opportunities, quickly deliver value, operate our own code, and manage our own finances.
We use many technologies to deliver value. React Native and React with Material UI give our visual design in browsers, Android, and iOS. Spring Boot APIs and functions connected to PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, AWS DynamoDB, and AWS S3 persist relational, document, and object data. Redis caches data and queues non-critical data between services. AWS SQS queues critical data. AWS SNS and AWS SES send communications to our users. GitLab and GitLab CI handle our pipelines which run unit tests with Jest and JUnit, analyzes static code with SonarQube, and builds OCI containers before depositing in GitLab Registry and automatically deploying to Kubernetes clusters running on vSphere 7 and AWS EKS.
Pingum is a cloud and mobile workflow tool for teams and businesses who are still tracking their workflows through emails and spreadsheets. If you have a distributed team who needs to get notified of assigned work and provide updates on the go through workflows, then Pingum is the easiest solution to join the digital age. Check it out at https://pingum.io.
Responsibilities
  • Design, build, & validate capabilities to capture market opportunities
  • Engineering, finance, sales, marketing, et al.

Senior Solutions Architect

GitLab

2019 - 2022
Responsibilities
  • Lead technical discovery & evaluation for GitLab prospects & customers
  • Communicate GitLab value-proposition through presentations, whiteboards, & demos
  • Collaborate with peers on best practices & custom solutions

Senior Platform Architect

VMware Tanzu (Formerly Pivotal)

2019 - 2022
Description
My passion is to enable developer productivity - reduce friction for building and deploying delightful code that solves real business problems. I help organizations achieve this by showing them ways to increase deployment frequency and reduce their lead time for change, mean time to recovery, and change failure rate. Kubernetes is the foundation, but only the start. When done right, developers spend less time on yaml and more on writing code.
I have completed my Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) and Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) certifications and have started focusing on the AWS Certified Solution Architect - Associate certifiction.
Responsibilities
  • Presented & implemented the VMware Tanzu vision & product portfolio for technical leadership at 15 large enterprises in Wisconsin
  • Defined technical strategy for over 20 account plans across region
  • Advocated for Developer Experience in a DevOps world
  • Evangelized cloud-native design patterns & XP development practices
  • Defined cloud agnostric container strategies for Container-as-a-Service & Platform-as-a-Service using Kubernetes & Cloud Foundry

Senior Software Engineer

Northwestern Mutual

2018 - 2019
Description
I developed commercial software as part of a lean, modern software engineering team. We handled the facilitation of all external and partner communication through email, web, and push notifications, while providing approved templates, recipient analytics, and centralized compliance. Since I joined the team, I introduced TDD, BDD, and an improved continuous integration pipeline while driving new features, influencing the cloud-native architecture, and being a go-to resource for React and Node development.

Lead DevOps Coach

Northwestern Mutual

2017 - 2018
Description
I worked as a senior technical coach for Northwestern Mutual's transformation team. I drove the creation of a curriculum utilizing Dojos, technical trainings, and examples to spread adoption of BDD, TDD, CI/CD, and other modern software engineering practices.
To be an effective and respected coach, it was imperative to be familiar with Node.js, Express, Reactjs, Cucumber, Jest, Mocha, Chai, Enzyme, GitLab CI, Jenkins, AWS, Sinon, Cloud Foundry, Spring / Spring Boot, and many other technologies.
Accomplishments
  • Designed 2-week immersive training on quality engineering using BDD, TDD, CI/CD, pairing, & microservice architecture
  • Coached 6 scrum teams with 100 NPS rating
  • Built scalable training strategy to expand depth & breadth of reach to the enterprise

Lead Software Engineer

GE Digital

2015 - 2017
Description
Senior Software Engineer and Architect for GE Healthcare's Digital Enterprise Technology organization responsible for the successful engineering and architecture design of Predix based software products.
Accomplishments
  • Led a DevOps team of 10 software engineers through design, build, test, and support of new manufacturing productivity solutions using modern Agile methodologies and CI/CD tools like Jenkins, Git, and Cloud Foundry
  • Mentored & directly managed leadership program members, providing career & technical guidance & semi-annual reviews
  • Interviewed candidates for various entry-level, senior, & director vacancies
  • Built a micro app and micro service based software platform used by every manufacturing site in every GE business unit globally, with over 700 daily active users and over 7,000 monthly active users
  • Trained 230+ new and experienced resources on the Predix Cloud Foundry platform in 5 countries
  • Drove the strategy and adoption of enterprise software development in Brilliant Factory, Asset Performance Management, and analytics
  • Built software engineering capabilities and standards across a global team of 30 people
  • Set architecture guidelines and governance
  • Rapidily prototyped software solutions
  • Interviewed, onboarded, and mentored new team members

Digital Technology Leadership Program

GE Healthcare

2014 - 2016
Description
This leadership program is a two-year program with four rotational job assignments focused on GE’s top digital initiatives. Program members lead by doing—gaining real-world experience by working on important and challenging projects alongside some of the brightest minds in the world.
Accomplishments
  • Advised and directed teams on the use of Predix, GE's leading software development cloud platform for the Industrial Internet
  • Architected and developed a self-service big data & analytics tool focused on ingestion, transformation, analysis, and visualization of data
  • Developed a tool to enable crowd-sourcing of ideas for all of GE Healthcare
  • Built a hybrid iOS app to allow interviewers to easily conduct and log digital interviews, saving time and resources
  • Developed testing & issue tracking tool, adopted as global best practice for the Life Sciences business
  • Developed room availability tool, improving daily efficiency
  • Led 4 web development classes for employees' growth in technical depth
  • Managed $3.7 million operating plan within 5.4% variance of planned budget
  • Led peers in an emerging technologies committee, focused on learning, sharing, and collaborating
  • Drove wing-to-wing integration testing for 7 global acquisition regions to enable the business to go-live with the $1 billion Thermo Fisher acquisition
  • Drove application testing during infrastructure cut-over to ensure day-1 readiness
  • Managed the development life-cycle of the Siebel-interfacing Mobile CRM application enhancements in 3 agile sprints, taking 110 user stories to production
  • Managed an offshore development team to build out requirements and designs
  • Implemented agile operating mechanisms, improving meeting efficiency by 67%
©2024 Brian Henzelmann