Bob Wade

About

I'm an engineering leader with 19 years building and running technical organizations, including more than ten years in management. At Button I own Core Engineering and Solutions Engineering, the platform behind $100B+ in driven mobile commerce for Amazon, Walmart, Uber, Lyft, Fetch, and Sam's Club. I'm a hands on architect who still ships: I fix the systems, then I fix the organization that owns them. Separately I founded Digital Tide, a consultancy that stands companies up end to end.

What I do

• Platform Reliability & Scale

  Incident command, on-call and severity design, blameless postmortems, SLAs, and peak load readiness. The operational discipline that keeps uptime at four nines instead of hoping for it.

• Partner Integrations

  The technical and relationship surface between us and the largest merchants on the internet. Enterprise integrations, escalation management, and attribution pipelines that survive a partner roadmap change.

• AI-Augmented Delivery

  Claude and MCP in the delivery loop where it compounds: review, scaffolding, migrations, and tightly scoped internal tooling. Guardrails first, so velocity does not turn into debt.

• Product & Design

  Enough craft to prototype an idea instead of describing it. I write the spec, draw the screens, cut the scope, and hand the team something they can build.

Experience

1. Button, Inc.

   Oct 2020 - Present

   Remote (NYC)

   Senior Engineering Manager, Core Engineering & Solutions Engineering

   Own two engineering functions and 13 direct reports: Core Engineering (routing, attribution, data, infrastructure) and Solutions Engineering (partner delivery and technical escalation), for the platform behind $100B+ in driven mobile commerce across 200+ brands including Amazon, Walmart, Uber, Lyft, Fetch, Target, and Sam's Club. I own both the platform and the partner handoff that most orgs split and drop.

   Reliability, run the business and keep the lights on

   • Own the RTB/KTLO mandate for the core platform: reliability, tech debt paydown, and operational load for the systems moving $100B+ in commerce.
   • Rebuilt on-call, severity classification, and blameless postmortems from scratch, sustaining 99.99% uptime and cutting MTTR.
   • Incident commander through Prime Day and Fetch's Super Bowl, where the platform peaked at roughly 5,260 RPS, about 2.6x the planned peak, with 4XX errors inside normal limits.
   • Cut core engineering interrupts about 30% by standing up a Support to Data to Core escalation flow, converting reactive firefighting into protected delivery capacity.

   Scale, platform modernization, and AI-augmented operations

   • Hardened the order pipeline with parallelized finalization workers, load tested to 5,000 RPS, and drove Aurora migrations, ComStore and Django modernization, and Terraform plus AWS provider upgrades, clearing debt that had blocked platform progress.
   • Stood up ML platform infrastructure on SageMaker and backed cost discipline including a single AWS savings of roughly $70K per year.
   • Sponsored internal read-only LLM tooling, a Sam's Club order debugger and a CSV validator, that cut manual triage load. Built with tightly scoped tools to prevent hallucination.
   • Helped drive AI-augmented delivery across the org, with Claude attributed code reaching about 45% of lines shipped and roughly two thirds of merged PRs.

   Partner integrations and revenue

   • Solutions Engineering landed and scaled integrations across Best Buy, Sam's Club (Glass and mParticle migration), TurboTax, Target, Fetch, Uber One, Lululemon, Hostelworld, Puma, and Albertsons.
   • Cut enterprise integration onboarding time 30% and raised revenue per integration 20% by standardizing the integration path and removing bespoke per partner engineering.
   • Defined the SLAs and escalation model across Solutions Engineering, Partner Success, and Support.
   • Led formation and initial delivery of Button's retail media product with NY Post, Forbes, and BuzzFeed.

   Organization

   • Built the team I now run: raised the partner facing hiring bar, formalized design review, authored the runbook and SOP library global teams use, and sponsored a PERM labor certification end to end.

2. Digital Tide

   2023 - Present

   Remote

   Founder & Principal

   Founded and operate an independent technical consultancy. I stand businesses up end to end, covering cloud, email, application, automation, and go to market, then run them. Architect, operator, and PM in one seat. Selected engagements are listed below.

3. Centene Corporation

   Jan 2019 - Oct 2020

   St. Louis, MO

   IT Manager, Engineering Chapter

   • Led 25 engineers across seven cross functional Agile teams delivering member facing web and mobile applications and new health plan implementations.
   • Built the standard engineering process layer for all web and mobile matrix teams, and defined the metrics leadership used for staffing and prioritization.
   • Created a Developer Assessment Framework that made role expectations explicit. Top 10% employee engagement across web leadership teams.

4. Centene Corporation

   Sep 2014 - Jan 2019

   St. Louis, MO

   IT Manager, Member AI & Mobile, then Senior Application Software Engineer

   • Built and led the cross functional team that shipped a self service AI health assistant, reducing call center volume, and established the SDLC framework for the inherited application.
   • Delivered more than 20 mobile applications across iOS and Android, launched care management in the Florida market, and standardized mobile build, release, and compliance for state contracts.
   • As Senior Engineer: implemented OAuth 2.0 via API Gateway, migrated the department from SVN to Git, and hired and mentored about 10 engineers.

Selected work

• Sanbar

  Built the client's entire technical foundation: GCP and AWS infrastructure, DNS, email and identity, deployment pipeline, and production site.

  • Infrastructure
  • GCP
  • AWS

• That Paleo Chick

  Built the business, not just the site. AWS infrastructure, transactional and marketing email, automated social content production and scheduling via Postiz, publishing pipeline, and affiliate monetization. Runs as a near fully automated operation.

  • E-commerce
  • Automation
  • AWS

• Greedy

  Ran project management for the full site redesign, covering scope, vendors, design to build, and launch. Own social marketing and paid acquisition, including a competitive intelligence playbook built from live Meta Ad Library analysis and AI generated video creative.

  • Program management
  • Growth
  • Paid media

• Charter

  Designed and built an invoicing application end to end: auth, billing entities, invoice generation, and payment tracking.

  • Product
  • Next.js
  • Clerk

• Digital Tide

  The same playbook applied to my own firm, plus the engineering standards clients inherit: Linear first delivery, GitHub Actions CI, Slack automation, and a hybrid repo model.

  • Studio
  • Consulting
  • Full-stack