Snapwire: Engineering Lead

Snapwire was a marketplace connecting brands — including names like Dell and Starbucks — with on-demand photographers. For two and a half years I was the embedded engineering manager and technical product lead on it, working as part of the client's own team rather than a vendor at arm's length.

That distinction matters, so let me be specific about what "embedded" meant here.

Managing across two companies and three timezones

The team I ran was split across organizations. I managed a group of about ten engineers on our side, based in Europe, alongside Snapwire's own engineers in California and Toronto. Two different companies, three timezones, one standup. I was in that standup every day, working directly with Snapwire's CTO and their scrum master — a fifteen-year ex-Apple engineer — as one integrated team. Not "here's the spec, ping us when it's broken." Daily ownership of the technical reality of the product.

Day to day I monitored every issue, wrote the technical specifications, tightened QA and automated testing, and personally executed the hardest parts of the system. I vetted hires, took part in re-architecting the platform when the product pivoted, and helped set technical direction alongside the client's leadership.

What I built

The V2 platform. I rebuilt the product's user experience with our designer, and a big part of that job was unglamorous reconciliation: keeping the new designs aligned with the actual state of the API and the existing frontend, so what got designed was what could actually ship. A redesign that ignores the live system is just a mockup. I made sure V2 matched reality and improved on it.

Payments. I implemented Stripe Connect — marketplace payments, with all the splitting, payout, and edge-case handling that two-sided money movement demands.

The admin backends. The internal tooling Snapwire's team used to run the marketplace.

A real performance win on the frontend. The React bundle had grown to tens of megabytes. Working with the engineering team, we cut it to around three — roughly a ninety percent reduction — which, combined with the V2 redesign, transformed load time and the overall feel of the product.

The image pipeline, and the part I'm proudest of

Snapwire moved millions of images and videos, so I researched and implemented the CDN pipeline on AWS to serve them at scale. Tagging and quality scoring ran through AWS Rekognition.

Here's the honest version: Rekognition out of the box landed around 60–70% accuracy on our content. Good enough for a demo, not good enough for a product brands were paying for. So we didn't stop there. We wrote custom AI/ML code to post-filter Rekognition's output, and that took tagging accuracy past 95%. The off-the-shelf service was the starting point, not the answer — the accuracy that actually mattered came from the layer we built on top of it.

The handoff

Snapwire was acquired by StudioNow. We supported the technical due diligence, helped transition the platform, and — the part I care about — kept shipping features and polish through and after the acquisition, staying with the product until we genuinely weren't needed anymore. A smooth handoff isn't an accident. It's what happens when the people who built the system are still around, the code is understood, and nobody's scrambling to reverse-engineer their own product during diligence.

What this kind of work is

Snapwire is the clearest example of a mode I work in often: not a vendor you brief and wait on, but an engineering manager and technical product lead who embeds in your team, owns the hardest parts of the build, and runs people across companies and timezones as if it were one org. The output isn't a deliverable handed over a wall. It's a product I helped run, day by day, until it had a good home.