Dara Gies

TAM / Consulting Engineer


Empathetic techie invested in my customers' successes who independently assesses, plans, and executes deep technical solutions for a broad set of problems. I am a drop-in, plug & play TAM / Consulting Engineer. My career experience spans many industries and includes roles in software engineering, professional services, product marketing, and product management.

Work Experience


Sr. Consulting Engineer
July 2021 - Current

Expert MongoDB Consulting Engineer providing a full range of services both on-prem and in the cloud including installation, configuration, schema + index + query design, query optimization, data migration, scripting, operations analytics... I am MongoDB's go-to-girl for Atlas Search (Lucene) index mappings and search queries.

Product Manager
April 2018 - August 2019

As a combined product manager and scrum master I directed two teams of software engineers - onshore and offshore - in a TIBCO to Java Spring Boot microservices migration using agile methods within a waterfall project - pair programming, daily standups, and weekly retrospective and iteration planning meetings. I managed the story backlog and created technical diagrams, business presentations, and weekly status reports.

Consultant, Technical Product Marketing Manager
June 2015 - July 2017

As a Consultant, guided Cisco’s internet-of-things solution scaling for aggregating and monitoring network access point and router data in Elasticsearch. As a Consultant guided Apple’s massive financial transaction reconciliation efforts using Elasticsearch. As a Technical Product Marketing Manager, developed and delivered external and internal facing marketing materials such as blogs, tutorial videos, code examples, and sales enablement materials across the breadth of the Elastic Stack, including Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash, and Beats.

Senior Director, Professional Services
June 2008 - February 2015

First a principal engineer, then as Attivio’s first Client Delivery employee in the United States, then in EMEA, employed technical, business and people skills to build teams, architect solutions, win business and deliver novel solutions based upon the Attivio Active Intelligence Engine. Simultaneously worked both technical and management roles with many key accounts including Motorola, NICE Systems, Goldman Sachs, UBS, USGA, Citibank, General Electric and more.

API Product Manager
December 2007 - June 2008

Managed key API customer account relationships. The subscription base API enabled clients to consume people and company databases. Developed prototype mapping application to map people and companies using Google Maps, HTML, CSS and Javascript.

Principal Software Consultant
April 2006 - December 2007

Consulted OEM clients developing high performance and scalable integrations with FAST’s embedded search engine - Instream. Developed content, data, and query customizations for clients using Python and C++.

Third Screen Media
Principal Software Engineer
June 2005 - March 2006

Full stack development for Third Screen Media’s mobile advertising platform using HTML, Javascript, CSS and JSP.

Soundbite Communications
Senior Software Engineer
November 2004 - June 2005

Full stack development, including user interface, backend billing systems and database development for Soundbite’s voice message broadcast system.

Senior Software Engineer
July 2004 - November 2004

Leveraging Google APIs, developed Social Search Engine in C# and ASP.

Ask Jeeves (formerly DirectHit)
Senior Software Engineer
June 1999 - June 2004

Developed core web search engine summarization technology for Direct Hit’s popularity search engine using PERL and shell scripts. Architected Jeeves One Enterprise Search Engine and developed enterprise search engine components web crawler (Java), search engine (C++ and BerkeleyDB) and administrative UI.

Softcare Clinical Informatics
Senior Software Engineer
January 1998 - June 1999

Developed a internet shopping application using HTML, CSS and JSP to sell calorie counting personal digital assistants to dieters participating in a National Institutes of Health clinical research survey.

Thomson Financial Services
Senior Software Engineer
January 1994 - January 1998

Developed Modern Portfolio Statistics aggregation calculations, portfolio reconciliation rules, and reports for the Perascope Portfolio Performance application using C++, MFC and visualization libraries.

Education


University of Massachusetts, Amherst — BA Economics

Bachelor of Arts, Economics, Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa, 3.85 GPA

Contact


Skills & Tech


Tech


Blog Articles


Tutorial Videos