John Engelman
Vice President - Platform Engineering & Operations
Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJohn Engelman is a seasoned technology executive with 14 years of experience scaling cloud platforms and leading large engineering organizations, currently serving as Vice President of Platform Engineering & Operations. He has driven enterprise platform modernization and developer experience at Target—building TAP to support 4,000+ users and 500,000+ instances—and now leads Crate and Barrel’s platform and operations strategy to improve customer-facing systems. A hands-on engineer by training, John has deep OSS and DevOps chops, contributing to prominent projects like Terraform, Telegraf, Spinnaker, and the Gradle Shadow plugin where he ported complex Maven Shade functionality. He blends strategic leadership with practical delivery: architecting datacenter modernization, embedding SRE practices that cut incidents in half, and enabling rapid deployment velocity measured in thousands per hour. Known for mentoring technical leaders and aligning platform investments to business metrics, he also teaches systems engineering topics at the graduate level, bringing rigorous V&V and reliability thinking into product delivery. Based in Minneapolis, he pairs electrical/computer engineering roots with broad cloud-native and automation expertise to turn operational complexity into measurable customer impact.
14 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
BCompE BEE Computer Engineering Electrical Engineering, BCompE BEE Computer Engineering Electrical Engineering at University of MinnesotaMSS Software Systems, MSS Software Systems at University of St. Thomas
Stackoverflow
4,269reputation
509kreached
22answers
3questions
java
top-1%
mocking
top-1%
mockito
top-1%
Github Skills (66)
dependency-management10
google-cloud-platform10
cloud-computing10
testing10
plugin-development10
telegraf10
terraform10
gcp10
javas10
maven10
monitoring10
javascript10
grails10
terraformer10
uid10
Programming languages (14)
Github contributions (5)
GradleUp/shadow
Dec 2012 - Oct 2022
Gradle plugin to create fat/uber JARs, apply file transforms, and relocate packages for applications and libraries. Gradle version of Maven's Shade plugin.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:27 releases, 17 reviews, 631 commits in 9 years 11 months
Contributions summary:John's contributions primarily focused on porting and refactoring Maven Shade plugin functionality into a Gradle plugin named Shadow. They were involved in migrating the core logic of creating fat/uber JARs, applying file transformations, and package relocation, which constitutes a major task given the amount of code in the initial commit. The user adjusted code imports from older maven versions and contributed improvements regarding dependency handling and inclusion/exclusion of files within the jar, which reflects the complex nature of the codebase they were working on.
maven-pluginmavengradleshade-pluginfat
hashicorp/terraform
Apr 2015 - Mar 2017
Terraform enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure. It is a source-available tool that codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned.
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:32 commits, 19 PRs, 227 comments in 1 year 11 months
Contributions summary:John contributed to improving the testing and automation aspects of the Terraform project. They added acceptance tests for various AWS resources, including IAM roles, policies, and access keys. The commits demonstrate a focus on ensuring the functionality of the AWS provider by creating comprehensive test suites to validate the resources' behavior and configurations. These changes would improve the reliability and robustness of the Terraform provider.
versionedconfiguration-filescloud-managementawscloud
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