About: Frank Blechschmidt

About Me

Mountain View, CA

Engineering Manager (Box)
October 2021 — Present (Redwood City, CA)

Leading Box’s cloud platform team of 12 engineers building and expanding its internal Kubernetes-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering.

Developing vision & strategy and driving the execution for Box’s Kubernetes-based platform.
Working with product managers and architects on cross-team project initiatives, including data-driven prioritization, technical strategy, and OKR management.
Managing the migration of Box’s Kubernetes platform from on-prem, multi-region data centers to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).
Mentoring and supervising engineers to set them up for success through growth plans, customized training, and frequent feedback.
Sourcing, recruiting, and interviewing software engineers to grow the team on all levels, from junior to staff.

Tech Lead Manager (Box)
March 2021 — October 2021 (Redwood City, CA)

Tech Lead Manager (TLM) is Box’s 6-12 months program to support ICs in the transition to engineering management.

Delivered key projects, such as the rollout of declarative observability tooling, Kubernetes cluster landscape rebalance and expansion, the onboarding of Box’s monolithic core app to Kubernetes, and the modernization of Box’s Kubernetes infrastructure.
Increased team productivity by streamlining status updates processes and OKR management using Atlassian tooling and reducing redundancies.
Completely redesigned the end-of-quarter team retrospective making it an objective and democratic ritual leading to increased contributions, enhanced accountability, and greater team satisfaction.
Worked as a member of a cross-functional recruiting team to hire and interview Box’s interns for the summer of 2021.

Senior Software Engineer (Box)
May 2019 — October 2021 (Redwood City, CA)

Architected and implemented new components for Box’s Kubernetes-based cloud platform, including deployment configurations, application management, high-availability setups, migration tooling, and platform integrations.
Planned and coordinated the introduction of new Kubernetes clusters and availability zones, including rebalancing existing services across multiple clusters and regions for improved availability guarantees.
Implemented a promotion model for deployment pipelines to enable secure and safe rollouts of service changes across environments and increase the reliability of services deployed on Box’s cloud platform.
Migrated platform to role-based access control (RBAC) with LDAP integration for granular authorization and reduced toil.
Onboarded, supervised, and mentored 4 full-time team members and 2 interns to foster Box’s engineering principles and values.
Received nomination for Tech Lead Manager (TLM) program as Box’s training for the transition to engineering management.

Lead Software Engineer (SAP Conversational AI)
July 2016 — May 2019 (Palo Alto, CA)

Led a global engineering team and spearheaded SAP’s Conversational AI initiative as part of SAP’s strategy to become the industry leader in Intelligent Enterprise software.
Defined and executed the development of a Docker-based cloud-scale microservice architecture on top of SAP’s Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes offering through SAP Cloud Platform.
Managed post-acquisition activities for Recast.AI by migrating the existing services to SAP’s Kubernetes infrastructure and automating the testing and deployment using Jenkins.
Supervised the recruiting of new engineering talents and mentored a growing team of software developers and data scientists.

Software Engineer (SAP Innovation Center Silicon Valley)
October 2015 — June 2016 (Palo Alto, CA)

Created a Twitter bot to accompany attendees of SAP’s most significant customer conference SAPPHIRE NOW through summarizing and recommending conference events based on the context and interest of the individual attendee.
Developed a software component for converting resumes from PDF to machine-readable format for data-driven recruiting PoC showcasing the power of Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) for the Human Resources (HR) domain.
Implemented a web app to visualize the performance tests of database queries using Google Charts and leveraging dynamic information retrieval through descriptive programming.

Cognitive Enterprise System US 20190332956, US 20180144053, US 20180144257

Filed: March 2017 | Issued: May 2018

python-sutime

Python wrapper for Stanford’s NLP library SUTime; officially mentioned on Stanford NLP website.

python-duckling

Python wrapper for wit.ai’s NLP library Duckling; used by leading Open Source NLU library Rasa NLU.

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Urbana, Illinois, USA

Degree: Master | Graduation: August 2021 | Major: Computer Science

Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam
Potsdam, Germany

Degree: Bachelor of Science | Graduation: August 2014 | Major: IT-Systems Engineering