Geoff Mendal, PCC
Campbell,
CA 95008-5833
(408)
796-7710
https://www.linkedin.com/in/geoff-mendal
Give back to others by helping make them great:
build, mentor, grow, and disrupt software engineering organizations to make
them high performing.
LEADERSHIP COACHING AND MENTORING: Leadership coach
(ICF PCC accredited), mentor, and confidant for mid- and senior-level software
engineering managers and ICs.
LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT FACILITATION: facilitator of
a number of adaptive leadership and case-in-point intensives, able to perform
in-person and online, delivered to both intact teams and open enrollment
cohorts.
ENGINEERING EXPERTISE: CI/CD automation/scale,
developer tools, source code management systems.
CHEF: Professionally trained and in-demand in the
workplace, at home, and for charity events. Ask me about my unique recipes and
signature dishes.
Leadership Coach
and Leadership Development Facilitator, 8/2019 to present
I help make leaders great. I bring
my leadership development skills and decades of experience from the tech
industry to help those in leadership roles mobilize change in their
organizations. I work 1:1 with talented managers and senior ICs who want to
strengthen their leadership muscle. Leaders who feel
stuck, are struggling to find their purpose, or have work/life balance issues
can benefit by working with me. I also work with companies, am available for
short- and long-term contracts, and relish working with intact teams.
Pandora Media, Director
Software Engineering, 9/2017 to 8/2019
My unstated role in the company
was as a deep thinker, disrupter and change agent for Software Infrastructure
Engineering, challenging the status quo by not settling for incremental
progress or adhering to company norms. Outside my defined/expected role, I was
a member of a SWAT team charged with making significant progress on diversity
and inclusion within Engineering. Similarly, I helped to seed leadership and
culture with the company's new Atlanta-based engineering team.
After being promoted to this role, I spun up
a new Oakland and Atlanta based team that owned both mobile and backend/server
infrastructure tools for internal customers (Dev and Quality Engineering).
Initial goals for this team were to completely automate the CI/CD pipeline,
migrating its workflow from on-prem to self-service
in the cloud (hosted on MacStadium, GCP and AWS) to
support daily or more frequent hands-off automated deployments, evaluating
cloud test automation providers (Sauce Labs, Perfecto, Browser Stack, pCloudy, etc.) against an in-house solution, migrating
legacy services from Perforce to git (with full
history), removing roadblocks to enable migration of the primary/DR data
centers to active-active, wholesale replacement of Tableau based dashboards
with Hygieia powered ones, and providing auto-provisioned,
on-demand production-like sandboxes to Dev and QE in under 5 minutes per
instance.
Additionally, I helped define long-term
strategic initiatives for Pandora's newly formed SRE team.
Pandora
Media, Manager Production Engineering, Infrastructure Team, 7/2016 to 9/2017
I led multiple teams comprising release engineers, DBAs,
and platform engineers who owned the build
and deployment of Pandora's server, web, and mobile (Android and iOS) client apps and back-end
services, maintain the internal test and staging environments, and initiated
migrations of Engineering's SCM from Perforce to git.
Google, Senior
Release Engineer, 3/2013 to 7/2016
I was an individual contributor on
the Android Build and Release team working to help improve the quality and
velocity of Android OS platform and unbundled app releases, and to improve the
existing automation/infrastructure to accomplish these aims.
I also facilitated two internal
People Dev leadership programs: one was a 3-day immersion for the next
generation of Google engineering leaders and the other was an Adaptive
Leadership 3-day experiential course for more senior leaders. I also performed
on-demand leadership coaching for alumni of these programs.
Periodically I taught cooking
classes at the Google Teaching Kitchen, and occasionally cooked with the Google
culinary team including offsite catering and charity events.
Google, Senior
Engineering Manager, 1/2007 to 3/2013
I managed a basket of teams in the
Developer Infrastructure group that operated and helped architect massive
performance and scalability improvements to the SCM systems used internally by
every engineer in the company, world-wide, plus release platforms and
automation. I also sat on a hiring committee, served as the 24x7 on-call
escalation point for all infrastructure teams that I managed, coordinated with
Legal on urgent SCM court-ordered discovery requests, helped drive the annual
company-wide disaster readiness exercise, and served as the SOX POC for a
subset of SCM/RE services.
Google,
Senior Tools Strategist, 10/2005 to 1/2007
I
began my Google career as an individual contributor in the Eng Infrastructure
Build & Tools team. My primary responsibilities were to be a change agent
for core Google infrastructure and create runway with existing infrastructure
to allow long-term disruptive changes to take hold.
Microsoft,
Senior Tools Strategist, 5/2000 to 9/2005
I was a build/release and developer tools front-line
manager in the MSTV and MSN TV divisions.
B.S. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Computer and Communication
Sciences.
Ignite
Global, Professional Coaching Mastery certification, September 2021. ICF PCC
credential obtained 6/21/2022.
Kansas
Leadership Center, Leadership Coach certification, June
2020. ICF ACC credential obtained
11/30/2020.
Kansas Leadership Center, Case-In-Point leadership
development certification, June 2016.
Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Executive Education Program.
Art and Practice of Leadership Development, May
2012.
Essential
Professional Culinary Skills in the Culinary Arts at the Professional Culinary Institute, May 2010.
Leadership
Facilitator, Kansas Leadership Center, September 2018 – August 2020
Engineering
Career Advisor, LinkedIn, January 2017 –
October 2020
Chef
Instructor, San Jose Ballet School (The New Ballet), March 2018 – present
Investing, wine collecting, gourmet cooking, and
tax planning/automation tools.
Google,
Founders Award, April 30, 2010. China Hacking Incident Response.
Recognized
by Donald Knuth in July 1996 as being the first to find an error in the
Straight Selection Sort’s stability property noted in the table on page 381 of
The Art of Computer Programming, Sorting and Searching (Volume 3), first
edition 1973. Awarded $5.11 ($2.56 plus
interest), paid by personal check (never cashed, still in my possession). Originally communicated to
Professor Knuth in November 1985.
Finding New Purpose: An Advance Scout’s Glimpse of
the Road Ahead, published on LinkedIn
and Medium.com,
March 2020.
Engaging Unusual Voices in Building High Performing
Teams, published on LinkedIn
and Medium.com,
October 2019.
The Book of Philemon Through
the Lens of Leadership, published
on LinkedIn
and Medium.com,
September 2019.
Exercising Leadership in the Moment: Focusing on
the Here and Now, published on LinkedIn
and Medium.com,
August 2019.
Chekmate. Original jazz composition. Wrote, arranged, and performed this musical
piece for the New Trier West Recording Jazz Ensemble. Recorded live as the title
track of the album Chekmate. March 1979.
Rocky’s Theme: Gonna Fly. Jazz composition arrangement. Arranged and performed this musical piece for
the New Trier West Recording Jazz Ensemble.
March 1978.
References available upon request