About Richard Morgan
Software Engineering Director with a proven record of improving software engineering organizations.
Richard currently lives in Miami, FL with his wife, Hannah, who is also a software engineer. They are prepared to move to the San Francisco Bay Area immediately to pursue professional goals as soon as the right opportunity arises.
Richard’s childhood experiences of living in Amman, Jordan and South Korea instilled a love of travel and diverse cultures that has taken him to nearly 50 countries.
Richard’s software engineering career began in 2002 as an intern at the Electronic Clearing House, Inc. (now Intuit). Over the following two decades, Richard has worked as a backend engineer, a frontend engineer, and now as Director of Software Engineering.
Outside of work, Richard enjoys photography, music, travel, and investing. He also created a monthly wine club in Dallas. In 2016, he ran for the Dallas County Community College Board of Trustees and placed second with 30% of the vote.
Short-Term Goals: Optimize for learning and continue developing leadership and management strengths without losing technical skills.
Long-Term Goal: Co-found a software company building a B2C SaaS product and grow it to millions of active users.
Professional Background
As a software engineer and engineering manager with over 20 years of software engineering experience, Richard is comfortable wearing a variety of hats. In new leadership roles, Richard initially takes a hands-on approach to understand business needs and engineering challenges. His North Star objective is to empower the team by ensuring they understand business objectives and are equipped to fully own engineering decisions so he can focus on culture, strategy, and communication. For additional information, see Richard’s software engineering leadership principles.
Richard’s current responsibilities and recent accomplishments include:
- Managing up to 30 engineers across 12 teams in a matrix model; overseeing technical practices for four engineering teams
- Improving engineer satisfaction and retention by establishing and leading the Engineering Culture & Engagement guild for past two years to proactively identify and address engineers’ pain points.
- Leading 3 strategic working groups to improve employee engagement at parent company, improve collaboration across leadership, and define engineering practices for over 400 software engineers
- Acting as right-hand for Associate VP of Engineering, leading key initiatives and supporting an organization of 70+ engineers.
- Oversaw the implementation of monitoring and observability and an ongoing migration to a microservice architecture
- Defining and overseeing the the aptitude LLC engineering roadmap
- Coaching, supporting, and developing engineers into leaders
- Led team in redesigning a core data model and migrating CPU-bound calculations from realtime APIs to nightly batch jobs, improving API response times by 80%, enabling new business capabilities which led to the acquisition of key customers
Before transitioning to management, Richard spent nearly a decade as a backend developer specialized in PHP, followed by a decade as a frontend developer specialized in Angular, React, and TypeScript. He has extensive experience with automated testing, web performance optimization, and application security.
Work-related interests include leadership, test automation, machine learning, application performance and security, functional programming, microservices and micro-frontends, automation, CI/CD and DevOps.
References
“Richard Morgan is a dedicated professional that knows how to work together with people to accomplish goals. He has a firm grasp of many technologies and is willing to share that knowledge with others.” - David Pennington (software engineer at Amazon)
“Richard isn’t just a good developer, he is always pulling the team towards new architectural and process improvements. Richard makes whatever he is working on into something better.” - Mike Lee (coworker at aptitude, LLC)
“Richard is one of the brightest and most talented web developers I have ever encountered. He is a problem solver and system thinker in every sense of the word. It has been a true pleasure working with someone of his caliber. Would highly recommend!” - Dr. Grey Hoff, Jr.
“Richard has the unique ability to bring value to every project he is engaged in. He has good ideas, looks at tasks in light of the desired end result and is focused on delivering quality to his assignments… I would not hesitiate to provide the highest recommendation for Richard to any potential employer.” - Georga Kopa, VP of IT, Project Management at Heritage Auctions
“I have known Richard for a while now, both in a personal and political capacity, and admire his passion for making a difference in the community. He knows the issues that matter, and works to communicate with the people in order to find creative and fiscally responsible solutions to problems faced by our communities (which most politicians either create or ignore). He is an extremely hard worker, understands how to work and deal with people/constituents, and maintains a compassion and sense of humbleness so often lost in the world of politics.” - Brian Oley, Las Aguilas Real Estate