My story at Bird

I joined Bird in early 2018 when the company was still operating out of a small WeWork office in Santa Monica, just after the first scooters appeared on the streets. Over the next eight years I had the opportunity to help grow the company from a small startup into a global mobility platform operating in hundreds of cities.

During Bird’s period of hypergrowth, I played an active role in scaling the engineering organization by interviewing, hiring, onboarding, and mentoring engineers across multiple teams. As the company’s needs evolved, I moved fluidly between individual contributor and engineering management roles, choosing the position where I could have the greatest impact rather than following a traditional management track.

Throughout my time at Bird, I contributed across nearly every layer of the technology stack. I worked on both Product and Systems Engineering, backend services powering the mobile applications, integrations with external partners, internal operational platforms used by support and business teams, developer tooling, security infrastructure, and engineering productivity initiatives. I was often brought into projects that crossed organizational boundaries because of my broad understanding of the platform and ability to connect technical decisions with business needs.

One of the contributions I’m most proud of was leading the design and implementation of Habitat, Bird’s proprietary geospatial configuration platform. I conceived the system shortly after joining the company and led its architecture and development from an idea into one of the foundational platforms that powers Bird’s business today. Habitat became the central control plane for every market in which Bird operates, both domestic and international, allowing business teams to configure market behavior without engineering deployments.

Beyond traditional configuration management, Habitat evolved into Bird’s experimentation platform. It enabled teams to safely launch new markets, roll out products, perform A/B experiments, configure pricing, define riding and parking zones, enforce speed limits, and customize mobile application behavior on a market-by-market basis. The platform significantly accelerated product development by allowing operational and product teams to iterate independently while maintaining a single, consistent system of record.