Rachel Baker

Reporting to the GM of Wirecutter, I operated as the defacto CTO and an engaged member of the executive leadership team. As the primary business owner of technology, I scaled our momentum and impact from 5 to 35 full-time employees by attracting and developing top talent. * Lead the vision, strategic planning, budgeting, hiring, operations, and reporting for the technology department to drive and support +50% YoY revenue growth since acquisition. * Developed and pitched my vision and plan to re-platform our legacy technical stack to a modern microservices architecture to the Board of Directors to acquire funding. Completed the re-platforming project on time and on budget. The new architecture increased our technical capabilities, unblocking key components of the company strategy, additionally improving our page performance metrics for readers and Google by 50%. * Cultivated a special culture around alignment, creative problem solving, contributing value, improvement, respect, and communication resulting in an unwanted turnover rate of less than 5%. * Fostered a strong relationship with the Executive Director of Product; setting and iterating on our organizational structures, agile processes, and strategic plans to achieve results against company goals and KPIs. * Overhauled legacy business intelligence and streamlined data engineering functions increasing data reliability and increased operational efficiency with an environment of data reporting, monitoring, and decision making throughout the company.

Joined Wirecutter to build our engineering team in April of 2015. We were acquired by the New York Times in October of 2016.

Responsible for providing technical leadership to a brilliant engineering team of 13 employees and consultants. Managed the technical side of projects for more than 20 clients including Breaking Media, JDRF, The Meredith Viera Show, Kate Spade, and Emmis Communications. Responsible for setting internal code and quality standards and helping my team members grow.

Responsible for the leading the development of software projects varying in size from 10-1,500 hours. Successfully completed projects for agency and enterprise partners adhering to tight time-lines or budgets. Completed sixteen different projects on a variety of platforms including: Ruby on Rails, Zend, PhoneGap, Drupal, WordPress, and ExpressionEngine.

Responsible for consulting, research, estimating, planning, developing, documenting and supporting web projects for our clients. Specialized in creating custom and configurable WordPress solutions with a focus on user experience and achieving the client's business goals. Clients include entrepreneurs, startups, non-profits, small businesses and large corporations. Also, worked on projects with designers, agencies and other developers. Largest client was United Way of Metropolitan Chicago; where role was to bring area offices under one site, restructure 6 websites, develop a new layout, plan and implement Blue State Digital roll out and increase online presence.

Responsible for supporting 50+ servers and over 500 workstations for 40 different clients via either onsite or remote support. Managed projects for client implementations such as new server setups, location moves, etc. Reviewed and tested new technology releases such as server virtualization (VMWare/HyperV), Storagecraft ShadowProtect, Windows Server 2008, OSX Server 10.6 and Windows 7 for use in client environments.

Budgeted, planned, and managed all IT projects including: new desktop deployments, server migrations, Cat5 cabling of three buildings, private wireless network for machine programs, website development and new IP phone system. Created ticketing system for users on company intranet in PHP/MySQL to capture all issues and improve resolution time.

Incremental in growing small local mailbox installation company into an international e-commerce business. Developed e-commerce website with PHP shopping cart that grew the company revenue over 1000% in the first year. Researched and implemented online marketing tools such as Overture and Google Adwords to engage potential new customers.