Russell Kalmoe
Engineering leader who builds AI platforms, transforms engineering organizations, and connects technical work to business outcomes. Fifteen years of progressive leadership — from Agile adoption and CI/CD pipelines to ML infrastructure, LLM-powered products, and global team building. Known for creating structure in ambiguity, developing leaders, and shipping things that move the needle.
Porch Group
Director, Software Engineering
2023 – Present · Remote
Leading a global engineering organization of 40+ people across 7 teams (US, Latin America, India), building AI platform infrastructure and driving AI adoption across the company.
AI Platform & ML Infrastructure
- •Designed and executed a three-pillar AI strategy: AI Features, AI Platform, and AI-Powered Engineering — the organizing framework for all AI investment across the organization
- •Built a batch inference platform (Prediction Hub) in-house after rejecting VertexAI for vendor lock-in and observability gaps — now handles LLM inference at scale across multiple use cases
- •Processed 10M+ inspection report PDFs in ~2 weeks using batch LLM extraction, replacing legacy regex pipelines (88% vs. 49% accuracy)
- •Deployed AI Gateway (Portkey) as a single integration point for all LLM calls — providing unified observability, cost attribution, and vendor-agnostic model routing
- •Replaced manual property attribute extraction with an ML classification model — 85% precision across 7+ attributes, 10x+ cheaper than external LLM alternatives
- •Platform multiplier: a team member applied the batch architecture to computer vision inference — ~70% cost reduction, latency from 2.5s to 40ms
- •~50% cost savings using batch LLM APIs vs. real-time inference
Business Outcomes
- •Led telephony system replacement — $400K/year in recurring savings
- •Optimized customer access to inspection reports — 3.8x increase in customer leads
- •AI chat integration in inspection reports — 20% engagement lift
- •Built and automated the engineering capitalization process — 15% more capitalized hours, 8% lift in total dollars capitalized
- •Managing $5M+ annual engineering budget
Organization Building
- •Established "the Gardeners" — named the management team as a cohesive unit with shared accountability for organizational health
- •Launched engineering management training program — ~36 sessions delivered, grew beyond direct team to leaders across the organization
- •Built repeatable blueprint for India team launches after learning from early scaling missteps
- •Led 8 quarterly PI planning cycles for cross-team alignment
- •Drove security shift-left: SAST, secret scanning, dependency scanning, and CodeRabbit AI review across all repositories
- •Introduced DORA metrics as engineering performance framework
- •Initiated cross-BU collaboration forums (Tech @ Porch, AI @ Porch) — ~20 participants from 4+ business units
AI-Powered Engineering
- •Piloted and fully adopted CodeRabbit — every merge request across Porch Corp Engineering reviewed by AI
- •Rolled out AI-powered IDEs and Claude Code for agentic development workflows
- •~10 hours/week saved per active user; ~300K lines of code contributed via AI-assisted development (H2 2024)
Brinks Home Security
Sr. Manager → Director → Senior Director, Software Engineering
2018 – 2023 · Dallas, TX → Remote
Transformed a team of 8 order-taking developers into a tribe of 30 across four stream-aligned teams — a five-year arc that became a model for the entire software organization.
The Ziglar Tribe Transformation
- •Designed and executed a three-stage strategy: Empower Agile Teams → Promote Product Mindset → Transparent Delivery
- •Introduced product discovery as a formal discipline — replacing a BA-collecting-requirements model with hypothesis-driven product thinking
- •Grew a BA into a senior product owner through deliberate coaching over two years
- •Made a strategic hire who eventually became Director of Product Management, spinning the product function out into a 10-person company-wide organization
- •Facilitated a three-day user story mapping session for a sales system replacement — the Chief Sales Officer called it "the most successful sales system migration I've ever experienced"
- •Release cadence: every 6 weeks → twice per week
AI/ML & Business Impact
- •Team delivered AI-driven retention campaigns producing significant revenue uplift through ML-powered customer targeting
- •AI email targeting drove measurable conversion improvements
- •Led cross-functional consumer financing initiative — eliminated over $1M in debt and doubled sales within 6 months
- •Improved annual labor efficiency by restructuring from contractor-heavy to employee-based teams
Engineering Excellence
- •Created "Russell's Button" — production synthetic testing giving 80% confidence that mission-critical workflows are functioning; adopted company-wide
- •Pioneered one-button releases, Confluence knowledge management, and Jira workflow visibility across IT
- •Influenced CAB process improvements and introduced standard change classification for low-risk deployments
- •Established remote-first meeting culture before COVID — if anyone is remote, the meeting runs as fully remote
Wolters Kluwer
Software Development Manager
2016 – 2018 · Kennesaw, GA
Led 20 engineers across two cross-functional scrum teams on an Azure cloud migration for tax and accounting software.
Key Accomplishments
- •Identified a thin client architecture as an escape path from the slow, QA-heavy thick client build process — led the team to become the first in the application suite to deploy an Azure web app to production
- •Development cycle time: weeks → 1 day through continuous delivery pipeline
- •Improved development speed and quality through democratized testing and increased automation
- •Hired 6 people in 4 months to staff migration teams
- •Introduced blameless postmortems and GTD workshops — building psychological safety and team productivity practices
- •Coached Scrum ceremonies while managing through the demands of a major platform migration
eMortgage Logic / Assurant
Software Development Manager
2007 – 2016 · Atlanta, GA
Started as a software engineer, grew into management, and drove the Agile transformation that shaped everything after.
Key Accomplishments
- •Led Agile/Scrum/Kanban adoption — change management, coaching, ceremony facilitation
- •Release cadence: 6 → 20+ per year with higher quality and better business alignment
- •Created a build engineering team that accelerated development velocity and expanded operations support capacity
- •Delivered 54+ integrations; led team maintaining 24/7 availability for systems generating $35M+ in annual revenue
- •Discovered Management 3.0 by Jurgen Appelo — began treating management as a craft to study deliberately, not just a role to fill
Education
- University of Texas at AustinEnglish, 2002
- Kaplan UniversityInformation Technology, 2007
Certifications
- Certified ScrumMasterCSM
- Kanban Management ProfessionalKMP
Case Studies
Deeper dives into the work behind the resume:
Building an AI Platform
From classical ML to GenAI to a company-wide AI platform at Porch Group
Transforming an Engineering Organization
The five-year Ziglar Tribe story at Brinks Home Security
Building Engineering Leaders
Management as a craft: training programs, coaching philosophy, and engineering culture
AI-Assisted Career Curation
Using AI to curate a portfolio: the medallion model, source trust hierarchy, and catching errors before they go public