Sign in Subscribe

Kyle Johnson

VP of Technology. Engineering leadership, cloud-native infrastructure, and the teams that build it.

Seattle, Washington

About

I'm a technology leader with 20+ years of experience building and scaling engineering organizations. I've worked the whole range of it, from writing code as an individual contributor to running multi-team organizations and leading cloud transformations as a VP.

Most of the work that's meant something to me happened at inflection points. A startup that needed its first real engineering culture. A growth-stage company scaling past $200M in revenue. A legacy system that had to be rebuilt without anyone noticing. The common thread is that I do my best work when the problem is hard, the stakes are real, and the team needs someone who can both think through the architecture and develop the people building it.

I also care a lot about how engineering teams actually function day to day. Good culture doesn't happen by accident. It comes from clear feedback, recognition that's genuine, process that helps instead of slows things down, and leaders who stay close enough to the work to keep their judgment sharp.

Experience

Vice President of Technology

Prep Sportswear · Jul 2021 – Present · Seattle, WA (Remote)

Leading technology strategy and engineering for a high-volume custom e-commerce platform. The role covers everything from the cloud infrastructure underneath to the systems that generate and serve millions of unique product pages.

Infrastructure & Cloud

  • Closed the legacy data center entirely and migrated to GKE Autopilot, delivering over $185K in annual cloud savings.
  • Containerized core .NET services and rewrote legacy generators to a .NET Core container architecture, improving deployment agility and reducing operational overhead.
  • Migrated reporting infrastructure to BigQuery with Metabase, enabling self-serve analytics across the organization.
  • Drove observability, deployment safety, and infrastructure improvements that produced consistently high uptime and strong performance scores.

Commerce & Platform

  • Launched a new shopping cart and migrated to Stripe Checkout, adding Apple Pay, Google Pay, Affirm, and other modern payment methods.
  • Migrated email infrastructure (Responsys → Customer.io + Postmark), cutting marketing email spend by over 75%.
  • Launched a new image rendering server capable of serving millions of unique product images, and stood up a white-label printing system to support new business lines.
  • Integrated performance marketing tooling (Criteo, Attentive, AdPostX) and completed a GA4 migration.

SEO & Growth

  • Led SEO initiatives that grew Google-indexed pages from under 1M to over 3M, drove a 1,600% increase in Product Snippets and Merchant Listings, and scaled customer reviews from zero to over 1M through a migration to Yotpo.
  • Implemented AI-generated content across 200K+ product pages.
  • Deployed propensity AI models using Google Analytics and BigQuery data to improve marketing conversion.

Organization & Operations

  • Managed a corporate split separating one business line into its own standalone company, including full infrastructure separation, a new operating facility, and independent billing.
  • Drove ADA compliance, revived the partner program, introduced DTF print capabilities, and led adoption of NIL (Name, Image, Likeness) capabilities for college athletes.

Director of Engineering

QuoteWizard · Oct 2019 – Jul 2021 · Greater Seattle Area

  • Owned engineering delivery for products accounting for $200M+ in annual revenue, leading a 20-person multidisciplinary organization across multiple product teams.
  • Built engineering culture initiatives including a company-wide peer recognition and feedback program, improving cohesion and retention during rapid growth.
  • Partnered with product and business leadership to set technical direction and align engineering investment with company priorities.

Software Development Manager

QuoteWizard · Jul 2018 – Oct 2019 · Greater Seattle Area

  • Managed engineering teams through a period of rapid growth, building the people, processes, and structures that scaled the group into a Director-level organization.

Software Engineering Team Lead

QuoteWizard · Mar 2016 – Jul 2018 · Greater Seattle Area

  • Led a team of engineers and introduced modern development practices like standups, code reviews, and pull requests that elevated code quality and velocity.
  • Drove source control migration to Visual Studio Team Services and led initial cloud migration of on-premise applications.
  • Kicked off the effort to break apart a legacy monolithic application and modernized the internal CRM with a new API layer and Vue.js frontend.

Lead Software Engineer

Prep Sportswear · Mar 2012 – Mar 2016 · Greater Seattle Area

  • Led end-to-end web development for a fast-growing e-commerce retailer, driving migration of the platform to ASP.NET MVC and modernizing front-end tooling.
  • Introduced modern front-end frameworks and contributed to design, UX, and SEO initiatives that improved customer experience and organic traffic.

Senior Programmer (Contract)

Microsoft · Apr 2011 – Feb 2012 · Redmond, WA

  • Architected the front-end for an unreleased product using .NET MVC, jQuery, and Modernizr.

Earlier Experience

  • Front End ASP.NET Web Developer, Groundspeak (2011)
  • Senior Web Developer, Seattle Children's Hospital (2008–2011)
  • Web Site Coordinator, The Nebraska Medical Center (2006–2008)
  • Web Designer, American Broadband (2002–2006)
  • PC Technician, Iowa Western Community College (2000–2002)

Skills

Leadership: Engineering Leadership · Engineering Management · Team Building · Org Design · Hiring & Mentorship · Cross-functional Leadership · Strategic Planning

Cloud & Infrastructure: Google Cloud Platform (GCP) · Kubernetes · GKE · Cloud Migration · Containerization · System Architecture · Observability · Scalability

Engineering: .NET / .NET Core · C# · Software Architecture · Microservices · API Design · CI/CD · DevOps · Vue.js

Data & Commerce: BigQuery · Data Analytics · Machine Learning · E-commerce · Payment Systems (Stripe) · SEO

Education

Associate's Degree, Microcomputer Support Iowa Western Community College · 2000–2002

This was one of the early "computer support" programs, built to give students a broad, hands-on foundation across the field before specializing. The curriculum covered PC maintenance and hardware, server and network administration, and programming fundamentals. With demand for tech workers running high in 2002, I went straight into the workforce out of this program and built my career on real-world experience from there.

Community

Search + Rescue Volunteer, Seattle's Union Gospel Mission

Riding along on outreach runs into isolated parts of the greater Seattle area, distributing essential supplies to people experiencing homelessness and helping connect them to shelter and support.