Phil Freo
VP Product & Engineering at Close
Saint Augustine, Florida, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPhil Freo is a seasoned product and engineering leader with 15 years of hands-on experience building SaaS products and scaling teams, currently serving as VP Product & Engineering at Close. He grew Close from a tiny founding engineering team into a 45-person Product/Design/Engineering organization, driving reorganizations, hiring programs, Shape Up processes, and cross-functional strategy with founders. Phil pairs deep front-end roots (notable contributions to Backbone and popular UI components) with backend and DevOps experience from early Python/Flask, MongoDB, and AWS work, so he comfortably switches between code, design, and org design. He’s known for pragmatic leadership—promoting and mentoring engineering managers and product leaders to improve hiring, retention, and delivery. Outside of Close, his open-source contributions show practical improvements to widely used JavaScript libraries and PHP tooling, reflecting an attention to usability and maintainability. Based in Saint Augustine, FL, he also documents hiring and remote-building practices publicly, signaling a commitment to sharing operational lessons beyond his company.
15 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Computer Engineering, BS, Computer Engineering at University of Florida
English
Stackoverflow
42,716reputation
9.9mreached
182answers
40questions
mysql
top-5%
git
top-5%
image
top-5%
shell
top-1%
timezone
top-1%
jquery
top-5%
Github Skills (65)
jquery-plugin10
sendmail10
testing10
e-mail10
mailer10
backbonejs10
timezone10
backbone10
ssh10
javascript10
jquery10
front-end-development10
html10
shell10
localstorage10
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
powmedia/backbone-forms
Feb 2012 - Apr 2017
Form framework for BackboneJS with nested forms, editable lists and validation
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:66 commits, 3 PRs, 16 comments in 5 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Phil primarily contributed to the Backbone Forms library by implementing new features and fixing bugs related to form field rendering and behavior. They addressed issues with hidden fields, improved the usability of list items by changing icons and enabling customization of templates. These changes included setting attributes for form fields and allowing customization of templates.
editablevalidationnested-formsbackbonejslists
PaulUithol/Backbone-relational
Jul 2012 - Mar 2018
Get and set relations (one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one) for Backbone models
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:42 commits, 3 PRs, 3 pushes in 5 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Phil primarily contributed to the `backbone-relational` library, focusing on maintaining and improving its functionality. Their commits included bug fixes related to collection handling, the addition of a test case, and code cleanup, particularly whitespace removal. They also addressed a requirement to specify an Underscore version and upgraded Backbone.js.
relationsone-to-manymany-to-manybackbone
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