Tim Schnell

Director of Engineering @elastic, previously @rackspace and a sundry of startups. Thoughts & opinions are my own.

Product-focused Engineering Leader with 15+ years experience building and scaling teams from startup to public-company environments. Proven success in growing organizations, launching widely-adopted products, and aligning technical execution to business outcomes. Drives healthy, metrics-driven engineering cultures through strong Product partnership and mentorship.

Currently, lives in the suburbs of Austin, Texas with his wife, Tina, and 3 kids. In his spare time he enjoys indoctrinating his children into nerdy hobbies like video/board games, superhero movies and books.

Director of Engineering | Elastic, Remote

May 2019 - PRESENT

  • Manages the Kibana Analyst Experience group (30 engineers), focused on building well-known open-source products including Discover, Lens, elastic-charts, and Dashboards.
  • Leads AI working group, focused on education, tooling and usage of Agentic coding workflows.
  • Program Lead for cross-company collaboration in Discover and Dashboards.
  • Co-leads a company-wide peer mentorship program.
  • Led the transition from technology-focused to product-focused development, establishing key metrics, user workflows, and long-term roadmaps in partnership with Product.
  • Developed tooling and metrics to track bug and regression velocity, successfully reducing the backlog to acceptable levels.

Co-founder | Subscription Box Kids, Austin, Tx

March 2016 - August 2023

Kid subscription boxes to inspire a love of reading, math, science, and more!

Acquired August 2023.

Head of Engineering | New Knowledge, Austin, Tx

October 2018 - April 2019

  • Recruited and grew the engineering organization from 12 to 35+ contributors.
  • Measured and improved service reliability from 0% to 98%.
  • Measured and then achieved consistent team velocity and software release cadence.
  • Set up and managed cross-functional teams in conjunction with Product.

Head of Engineering | Cratejoy, Austin, Tx

August 2014 - October 2018

  • Key early member who scaled the company from 10 to 70 employees over 3 years.
  • Scaled the product from $0 to $10M Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR).
  • Maintained engineering turnover rate of less than 10%.
  • Partnered with the Head of Product to organize Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and hold teams accountable to quarterly goals.
  • Set the Engineering Vision, proactively executing a long-term strategy to solve scaling issues.
  • Exposed complex engineering scaling metrics to leadership with an execution plan and budget proposal for permanent problem resolution.
  • Created a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team, reducing outages down to 0%.
  • Implemented CI/CD, which increased the number of code releases from 3 to 35 per week.
  • Worked cross-functionally with Sales, Support, and Marketing to retain valuable customers by providing technical expertise, advice, and solutions.

Technical Advisor | Multiple Startups, Remote

February 2014 - September 2018

Worked with small companies to review technical implementations and plan strategic direction.

Software Developer | Rackspace, Austin, Tx

May 2013 - August 2014

  • Primary point of contact for the open-source Horizon/Heat integration for Openstack.
  • Built a cloud orchestration resource topology using d3.js and worked with the community to include it in Openstack’s UI.
  • Built a satellite front-end team in the Austin office, responsible for interfacing with backend teams to gather requirements and productize new open-source cloud technologies.

Senior Software Engineer | University of Texas, Austin, Tx

January 2009 - May 2013

  • Architected a system to collect and display faculty, student, and facilities information, providing Executive leadership with data-driven analysis for decision-making.
  • Primary System Architect of a Python/Django Infrastructure to house all related Provost Information Systems.
  • Served as a University-wide technical consultant for the Python/Django adoption process.
  • Primary technical lead for all Provost-related applications.
  • Implemented internet security enhancements for all Liberal Arts web applications, including Cross-site Scripting and Cross-site Request Forgery protection.
  • Primary contact for administrative clients on several key client-oriented applications.
  • Technical consultant/trainer for team members on Python/Django languages.