Engineering leader, Platform reliability, Partner integrations, Multi-team orgs
Bob Wade
Nineteen years in engineering, ten of them managing engineers, across mobile, member platforms, and the commerce infrastructure $3B+ a month moves through. When the Sr. Director above me left Button I inherited four functions at once with no transition plan, ran them for a year, then handed three to leads who run them today.
$3B+
commerce a month
600K+
orders a day
15x
peak traffic scaled
30%
faster partner onboarding
What I do
Keep the platform up
The routing and order pipeline behind $3B+ a month in commerce, held through its biggest days of the year. The part that matters is how: not me on call, but a team that holds it without me.
Stop the firefighting
I take over orgs running on heroics and leave them running on process. Clear ownership, an escalation path people actually use, and engineers who get their week back instead of losing it to interrupts.
Run the delivery cadence
Two week sprints across multiple squads, and I run every ceremony myself: planning, standups, grooming, retros. Plus a straight answer for the business on what is possible before anything gets promised, so the roadmap survives contact with reality.
Ship with AI, for real
Not a pilot and not a slide. AI-augmented delivery is the default in my org: I encourage the team to use it, helped shape the engineering standards for how it gets used, and sponsored internal tooling scoped tightly enough that it cannot invent its way into production.
Case files
Four domains and one system in detail. Each page says what was built, how it was decided, and what it runs on.
Agentic systems
Three in production, and the rules about where they are allowed to act.
Commerce at scale
The pipeline behind $3B+ a month, and the organization rebuilt around it.
Healthcare
Five roles in eight years: the mobile department from nothing, then managing it.
True Care Anywhere
Hundreds of pages of paper assessment, onto a managed Chromebook in the member's home.
Digital Tide
Independent work: infrastructure, launch, and the products built along the way.
That Paleo Chick
A Ghost publication, an agentic pipeline and an iOS app, taken apart.
What changes
On-call
A rotation that worked, but had never been tested at the scale the platform was heading for.
The platform held through its biggest traffic days of the year, MTTR down, and nobody pulling an all-nighter to do it.
Partner support
Fully ad hoc. Slack DMs and email, no routing, no ownership, and no answer to how long anything should take.
A structured function with Salesforce to Zendesk to Jira as the spine. Tiered SLAs, P0 acknowledged inside fifteen minutes, and a team that owns it.
Delivery
The core platform engineering team interrupted constantly, and no gate between what the business wanted and what was actually possible.
Interrupts routed away from the core platform engineering team, two week sprints run end to end, and a feasibility gate between revenue, product, and engineering on what actually gets built.
About
Nineteen years in engineering, the last ten in management. I came up through code and design before moving into leadership, and I have managed both sides of the stack: frontend and mobile engineers building member-facing products at Centene, backend and platform engineers running commerce infrastructure at Button. I run orgs the way I would want mine run: clear ownership, real escalation paths, and nobody having to be a hero to keep the lights on. I am most useful somewhere the platform matters commercially and the organization around it needs rebuilding at the same time.
Experience
Button, Inc.
Oct 2021 - Aug 2026
Senior Engineering Manager, Core Engineering & Solutions Engineering
Owned the routing, attribution and order pipeline behind $3B+ a month in commerce, then inherited four functions and rebuilt the org around them.
Digital Tide
Mar 2025 - Present
Principal
Take early-stage companies from a name to production: infrastructure, identity, deployment and launch, plus the brand on top.
Centene Corporation
Oct 2016 - Oct 2021
Manager, Software Engineering
Ran three orgs in sequence inside a managed care company: the mobile practice I had built, a member AI assistant, then the engineering chapter.
Centene Corporation
Sep 2014 - Oct 2016
Senior Application Software Engineer
Joined as the company's only mobile engineer and built the department, its processes and its stack, then was promoted to manage it.
Earlier
- Software Engineer / Web Producer, Centene (2013 - 2014)
- Team Lead, Visual Design, N-Depth Solutions (2008 - 2013)
- Web Developer, Clear Pages (2007 - 2008)
Education
- A.S., Computer Science, St. Charles Community College (2004 - 2007)
Certifications & training
- ITIL Foundation, AXELOS
- Scrum Master training, Centene
- SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) training, Centene
- Leadership Development Program, Centene
Stack & expertise
- Leadership
- Multi-function org design, Offshore teams and SOW vendor management, Multi-team Agile ceremonies, Hiring and bar setting, Coaching and career development, Performance management, PERM sponsorship, Exec and VP reporting
- Platform reliability
- Incident command, On-call and PagerDuty, Blameless postmortems, SLAs, Observability, Peak load readiness
- Partner engineering
- Enterprise integrations, Escalation management, Infosec questionnaires and vendor security review, Penetration test remediation, Attribution and event pipelines, Retail media
- Product and delivery
- Agile, Scrum and SAFe, Sprint ceremonies and retrospectives, Quarterly planning and estimation, Roadmapping and release planning, Backlog and capacity planning, Feasibility and scoping gates, Cross-functional delivery across product, revenue, and support
- Design and UX
- Brand and logo design, UI/UX, Figma, Front-end build
- AI and automation
- Claude and MCP, Custom MCP servers, Agentic PRD to ticket pipelines, Multi-agent orchestration, Human-in-the-loop approval gates, LLM output validation, Generative creative
- Backend and data
- Go, Python, Node.js, PHP, Postgres, Aurora, MongoDB, BigQuery
- Frontend and content
- TypeScript, React, Next.js, React Native, Angular, Tailwind, Headless CMS (Ghost, WordPress)
- Cloud and infrastructure
- AWS (ECS, EC2, RDS/Aurora, S3, SQS, SES, Route 53), GCP, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes (deployment target), GitHub Actions