Gidi Meir Morris

Engineering Manager & Software Developer

Profile

I'm an accomplished technology leader with a track record of building, leading and nurturing top-performing engineering teams, and delivering products with sustainable efficiency. With over two decades of experience, I've held various technical and managerial roles at different levels. My focus extends beyond technical expertise to include agile practices, team dynamics, continuous improvement, and mentorship, all vital for successful product delivery. I'm dedicated not only to delivering high-quality work but also to making a positive impact on my community and industry, driving positive social and environmental change.

Work Experience

    1. 2022
    2. 2023

    NatureBound

    Co-Founder & CTO

    As Co-Founder of a climate change focused venture aimed at reducing emissions and biodiversity-loss, I raised £160k in equity and grant funding.
    Led customer discovery across several sectors, culminating in a POC Biodiversity Observability platform, targetting two of our target markets. Secured multiple partnerships and collaborations with biodiversity monitoring companies, data providers, and domain experts.
    Learned a lot about climate change, biodiversity, entrepreneurship and myself.

    1. 2020
    2. 2022

    Elastic

    Senior Engineering Manager (Alerting & ResponseOps Team Lead)

    Led the engineering team spearheading Elastic's alerting initiative, as we transformed it from a beta feature into an enterprise scale product. This included expanding the team to 20+ members, recruiting and onboarding engineers, and guiding area leads in a distributed agile environment. Implemented a cross-departmental collaboration framework, aligning the Platform, Security, and Observability teams across priorities and constraints. Additionally, I conducted organization-wide Catalytic Skills training sessions, fostering essential communication and growth mindset skills for effective collaboration. Managed the hiring process for my replacement as I departed the company to focus on climate change.

    1. 2019
    2. 2020

    Elastic

    Principal Software Engineer

    Significantly improved the scalability of the Elastic Alerting framework powering our Security and Observability products, growing rule capacity 100x per-node throughout Kibana's distributed Task Manager.

    1. 2016
    2. 2019

    Unruly

    Senior Software Developer (Supply-Side Team Lead)

    As engineering manager of an XP development team of 10+, I provided mentorship and practical technical guidance, overseeing the prioritization, research and development of Unruly's Programmatic Demand business strand.
    Led R&D of the Unruly Ad Exchange, as the team scaled it from POC into a multi-region distributed-system handling thousands of ad requests per second.
    I represented Unruly on the IAB openRTB Working Group, advocating for increased transparency, enhanced privacy measures, and the overall improvement of the online advertising landscape.
    Guided the team as they continuously improved their working practices, experimenting with agile and XP practices such as Pair and Mob Programming, Collective Ownership, and Merciless Refactoring, fostering collaboration, self-organization, and catalytic skills throughout their product delivery.
    Stewarded the Product Development Diversity & Inclusivity group and served as Unruly's first Nomad, providing roaming technical leadership across all engineering teams.

    1. 2014
    2. 2015

    Loveholidays

    Lead Front-End Architect

    Engineering management of a 7 person development team of Javascript & Python developers responsible for the Loveholidays Web Application, providing hands-on technical leadership and prioritisation.
    Led the top down rewrite of the entire website, reinvigorating a team plighted with technical debt as they modernised their delivery capabilities and developer experience. Incrementally rearchitected different parts of the site while still providing a stable code base for continued functional development.

    1. 2013

    Freelance Engineer

    R&D and Consulting

    Designed and implemented Front End solutions, coaching customer R&D teams on their process and approach to engineering. Contracted by several different companies, including ReallyGood, Conduit, Klarna and Cyhawk Ventures.

    1. 2011
    2. 2012

    Pluralis

    Senior Front End Developer

    As the first employee at an early stage startup (pre round A) I was solely responsible for the design and implemention of the Front End architecture of our A/B testing product.
    Using Backbone.js, Underscore, jQuery, Bootstrap, LESS and vanilla Javascript, I created a system for Multivariate A/B testing, an SDK for third-party developers and a web application for the management and execusion of A/B testing competitions.
    I built several Javascript libraries, including a library for cross-build module management and a reverse CSS-selector engine for persistable DOM querying.
    I supported development of a backend system using Java Spring and AWS. Implemented storage solutions using MongoDB and CouchDB.

    1. 2011
    2. 2010

    Metacafe

    Web Engineer

    Development of a Web Application using PHP and Javascript for the Metacafe portal and the site's semantic data layer in a high scale and high traffic web environment.
    Designed, implemented and extended infrastructure packages using PHP for Mediawiki, Semantic MediaWiki and an in-house MVC web framework.
    Integrated the Metacafe Semantic data layer with the Sesame RDF database.
    Implemented caching layers using Memcached and Varnish, and tuned caching and eviction strategies in PHP and VCL in a massive scale environment (measuring several millions of request per day). Implemented asynchronous workers using Gearman in PHP to perform offline processessing and semantic analysis of video content.

    1. 2009

    Military

    Application System Engineer

    Product Management, System Analysis and Oversight over the development of a multimillion dollar Command & Control system.

    1. 2006
    2. 2008

    Military

    Team Lead, Army Captain

    Engineering management of two development teams (8 people in total) working on two ASP.Net Web Applications.
    Technical design and development of Web Applications and Services in Javascript and C#.
    Designed the data layer and integration with both the Oracle 9i and SQLServer databases.

    1. 2005
    2. 2003

    Military

    Software Developer

    Developed an N-Tier ASP.Net web application as part of a four person team. Built both UI and BL components for data display and manipulation using Javascript and C# libraries. Created and took ownership of a department wide position responsible for all UX and design work.

    1. 2002

    Freelance

    Web Designer

    Freelance graphic designer, servicing both private clients and companies such as HP's Indigo division.

Primary Toolset

Methodologies & Catalytic Skills

  • Individuals and Interactions over
    Processes and Tools
  • Extreme Programming, Scrum
  • Pair & Mob Programming
  • Mentorship & Collaboration

DevOps Practices

  • Continuous integration, delivery & feedback
  • Monitoring, Alerting & Observability

Technical Domains

  • Typescript, Rust 2018+, Java 8+
  • Node.js, React, JS Compilation
  • HTML, CSS, Browser & Web APIs
  • Functional & Reactive programming
  • Reactive system design
  • AWS, GCP, Terraform & Immutable Infrastructure
  • Elasticsearch & the ELK Stack, PostgreSQL
  • Test Driven Development
  • Automated Testing (browser & black-box)

Open Source Projects

on github.com/gmmorris

Over the past 20 years I have been involved in several open-source projects. In addition to releasing my own projects I have contributed over the years to several community projects such as Babel, jQuery, highlights.js, and mootools .

Education

  1. Software Development Management

    Officer Candidate School (IDF)
    1. 2006

    A 6 months of Military Officer training covering Leadership and Team Building, with a specialisation in Software and Product Delivery.

  2. Software Development Bootcamp

    Mamram (IDF)
    1. 2003

    Intensive 6 month course covering development and software design principles, actual work experience in a variety of development environments such as C, C++, ASP & Javascript, Java, Perl, SQL and PL-SQL and working environments such as Windows and Unix.

  3. High School Diploma

    Kvutzat Yavne High School
    Computer Science major
    1. 2002

Who Am I Really?

I grew up in an agricultural village in Israel, but it was in Tel Aviv that I truly discovered my passions and interests.
In addition to my tech pursuits, I've enjoyed exploring various hobbies. Photography has been a fulfilling endeavor, with opportunities to exhibit my work in Israel and London and collaborate on commercial projects in the entertainment sector. I'm also enthusiastic about martial arts and have achieved a 2nd Master grade in Wing Tsun Kung Fu, as well as a dedicated rock climber.
I'm also an avid commentator on political and theological matters, possibly too much, as in 2014 Quora named me one of their Top Writers - an achievement that came with a custom fleece jacket, which I cherish but seldom wear.
My life revolves around creativity, and this passion has led me to feel at home in both the startup and art scenes.