Rich Kuzsma

Coaching engineers. Building products. Getting stuff done.

About

Rich is currently a Team Lead (Sr. Engineering Manager) at Elastic helping the Enterprise Search team make it easy for developers to build search experiences. He is a hands-on technical manager who enjoys working on deep technical problems, delivering quality software, and coaching engineers and managers.

Previously, Rich was Director of Engineering at Constant Contact, responsible for the development of Constant Contact’s flagship web-based email editor used by hundreds of thousands of small businesses to create beautiful, effective marketing emails. Rich also managed the Contacts platform, a Ruby on Rails application that manages billions of customer email contacts and processes millions of API requests per day.

Career Objective

To use his talents as a passionate software engineer and technical leader to help people solve problems and build great products.

Skills and Achievements

  • Invented, designed, architected, managed, released, supported, and maintained a test automation product that earned millions of dollars in revenue for shareholders, helped hundreds of QA engineers test their software more efficiently, and played a key role in Oracle acquiring the Empirix web business unit.
  • Consulted at customer sites, presented at technical conferences, and pitched products to C-level executives.
  • Authored requirements, functional specs, design specs, prototypes, wireframes, and sequence diagrams.
  • Over 10,000 hours of coding experience in languages such as Java, Ruby, and JavaScript.
  • Closed thousands of customer support issues.
  • Reverse-engineered and performance-tested hundreds of web apps.
  • Designed, implemented, published and maintained concise, clear product APIs.
  • Developed and released software using many languages and technologies, including: Java, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript (ES5/ES6), React, JQuery, Eclipse RCP, GraphQL, Docker, and AWS.
  • Released features and products ranging in size and complexity from single engineers working a few hours, to tens of engineers working for 3 years.
  • Initiated and delivered major rewrites of multiple highly complex, business-critical applications.
  • Directed software teams from 1 to 50 engineers, across frontend, backend, documentation, and design.

Side Projects (just a few)

Personality

  • Rich’s peers and managers describe him as enthusiastic, optimistic, empathetic, and rational.
  • Works effectively with any customer, employee, personality type, manager, and time zone, both remotely and on-site.
  • Proven capacity to lead projects and teams through turbulent organizational change, including two corporate acquisitions.
  • Perseverant; worked two jobs (paid support and volunteer development) to earn his first full-time developer role.
  • Delivers tough, effective feedback when required.
  • Has been seen typing at talking speed.
  • “I can see the big picture, and I can focus on details. I can spot spelling mistakes and crooked pixels. I can fix legacy code. I can parse logs to find a needle in the haystack. I willingly take on the dirty, unglamorous jobs so the team can focus on the rest.”

Career History

  • 1992 - Started writing BASIC code on a 386 at age 12.
  • 1995 - Launched my first software business and sold my first shareware app.
  • 1997 - Developed the first web-based defect tracking system at Amano Cincinnati, Inc.
  • 2002 - Graduated from WPI with High Distinction and a BS/CS.
  • 2002 - Joined Empirix as a Support Engineer.
    • 2004 - Promoted to Developer.
    • 2006 - Promoted to Lead Developer, acting as Architect.
    • 2008 - Promoted to Development Manager.
  • 2008 - Acquired by Oracle. Designated as Key Employee during acquisition phase.
    • 2010 - Promoted to Senior Development Manager at Oracle.
    • 2013 - Promoted to Director of Development.
      • Managed 3 products and 20 developers across US, India, and China.
      • Left my team after 11 years to start over in a new industry.
  • 2013 - Joined Constant Contact as Engineering Manager
    • 2018 - Promoted to Senior Engineering Manager
    • 2019 - Promoted to Director of Engineering
      • Managed 2 major application platforms, 4 managers, and 50+ engineers.
      • Left Constant Contact to join a fully distributed software development company.
  • 2020 - Joined Elastic as Team Lead
    • Currently managing a small team of engineers building Enterprise Search.