Cole Strode
Sr Manager, Software Engineering at Zendesk
Columbia, Maryland, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolCole Strode is a senior engineering manager with 11 years of experience building and scaling high-performing, distributed teams and reliable cloud services. He blends hands-on technical expertise in microservices, batch processing, and API design with strong people leadership—hiring, coaching, and mentoring managers and principal-level ICs across global organizations. At Zendesk he led 35+ engineers across seven teams, drove major migrations to event-driven ingestion and Elasticsearch for 90% faster APIs, and launched significant Search UX and AI enhancements. Previously at SparkPost he owned analytics platforms ingesting billions of events, achieved ISO-27001 alignment, and helped shape product pricing through unit cost tracking. An active contributor to open-source (notably improving Slack integration and tests in the widely used Botkit project), he pairs practical engineering craft with experience on both sides of M&A. Based in Columbia, MD, he also brings an unusual background in leadership coaching and transformative communication that informs his high-trust management style.
11 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Johns Hopkins UniversityMA, Transformative Leadership and Social Change, MA, Transformative Leadership and Social Change at Maryland University of Integrative Health
Stackoverflow
10,650reputation
1.6mreached
290answers
5questions
highcharts
top-5%
css-selectors
top-5%
javascript
top-1%
jquery
top-1%
html
top-5%
Github Skills (25)
javascript10
slack-api10
jquery10
bots10
botkit10
slack10
nodejs10
chatbot10
apidoc9
css-selectors9
api9
highcharts9
html9
jtest8
jestjs8
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
howdyai/botkit
Apr 2016 - Oct 2017
Botkit is an open source developer tool for building chat bots, apps and custom integrations for major messaging platforms.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:28 commits, 8 PRs, 50 comments in 1 year 6 months
Contributions summary:Cole contributed significantly to the `howdyai/botkit` repository, primarily focused on improving the Slack integration. Their work included adding support for Slack-specific syntax for mentions and direct mentions, along with escaping dots in bot names for mentions. The user also refactored the Slack web API instantiation and improved error handling within the codebase. Furthermore, they added unit tests and improved overall code quality, especially in the Slack API interactions.
alexa-skills-kitbot-applicationbotbotkitfacebook-messenger
SparkPost/community-bot
Mar 2016 - Aug 2017
Contributions:28 commits, 19 PRs, 22 pushes in 1 year 5 months
sparkpostslack-teambotslack-botslack
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