Levent Ali Engineering Manager

I work at Intercom as the Engineering Manager for Team Operator in London

I am a problem solver and advocate of simplicity and self-organisation.

I used to be an independent consultant and software developer and love helping companies grow and work as genuine teams.
I have worked on various large and small projects with clients including Goodlord, Osper, LogMeIn and Umbrellium.
I’m good at programming but I really excel as an Engineering Manager.

Previous roles

Co-founder and CTO of Brapp

Brapp is a social music network that connects artists and producers.
If you’re a musician or fan of good music, watch some of our Brapp HD videos, like our page and please download the app.

Agile Consultant and Product Manager at Goodlord

I helped Goodlord establish a Product Management discipline and scale their engineering org.

Director of Engineering Operations at Xively (LogMeIn)

I led LogMeIn’s Xively IoT Platform engineering team as Scrum Master (CSM) and Agile Coach during a time of rapid change across LogMeIn.

Xively was acquired by Google in March 2018.

Lead Developer at Pachube

I helped grow the team and instil agile processes and engineering practices. Together we designed, built and maintained what was the primary IoT network for sensors, devices and their data. LogMeIn acquired Pachube in July 2011.

One of our proudest technical achievements was migrating our datapoint storage API from PostgreSQL behind a Rails app to a Cassandra backed Clojure API, whilst maintaining hundreds of writes per second and not disrupting our users.

I work well with: Teams, People, and Computers
I graduated from the first iteration of Y Combinator’s Startup School.

I am occasionally an open-source contributor and the maintainer of Agileista.

Other projects

Umbrellium – Software Developer

Urban Innovation Toolkit

Helped develop a toolkit for planning urban technology projects.

Cinder

Helped the Umbrellium team with automating deployment using puppet. This was a complicated project tying together openFrameworks for Kinect, OS X, Node.js and a Chromebook app. Read about the project here.

Osper – Agile Coach and Scrum Master

I spent a few months with the fantastic team at Osper instilling Agile practices and establishing a healthy cadence.

UpMail – Software Developer

Designing/implementing a user interface for creating and customising media elements within templates whilst composing emails. The bulk of the code was written in Javascript and Ruby.

LogMeIn – Consultant

Migrated xively.com to personal.xively.com. This work was predominantly updating puppet manifests, nginx configuration and implementing the new site designs in Jekyll and Rails.

New England Biolabs – Software Developer

Helping LogMeIn build and design an IoT solution for New England Biolabs’ self-service enzyme freezers. My focus is to bring stability and resilience to the various software components including the cloud api, tablet user interface and hardware interaction layer on the freezers. Here is a case study and video of their product.

Curators Coffee – Software Developer

Designed and developed their website, class booking system and I manage their IT infrastructure.

Curators Coffee recently helped Square launch their global free register system and has been featured on their blog.

Visit my LinkedIn profile for more.

Me

I am married to Catherine Seay, co-founder of Curators Coffee.

I have lived in the desert, on top of a mountain and now call London home. Once upon a time I worked as a portrait photographer. I am slightly obsessed with cars, motorcycles and bicycles.

I can be found on Twitter as @lebreeze or via email at levent@purebreeze.com.