Noah H. Smith

VP/Senior Director Engineering – Platform Architecture, Cloud Infrastructure, Ecommerce, SaaS/IaaS

noah@batteredoats.com | https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-h-smith/ | 913-963-8640

15+ Years of Engineering Leadership · Technology Strategy & GTM Planning · Cloud Infrastructure · Platform Architecture · SaaS/IaaS AI & LLM Knowledge · Technical Roadmapping · Ecommerce · Product Engineering · DevOps & Site Reliability · Agile Development Organizational Design · Vendor Management · Global Business Alignment · Stakeholder Engagement · Budget & Resource Planning

  • Success carrying a pre-revenue DTC ecommerce startup through funding, rapid growth to 9-figure top-line revenue, into an IPO and beyond as a publicly traded enterprise.
  • Hands-on AI innovation and integration, including Agentic AI, Gen AI, and LLM Development, as well as platform rearchitecting and API Development to connect with off-the-shelf AI solutions.
  • End-to-end management (hiring, training, mentoring, team building) of 50 engineers located in US, EU, LATAM, and APAC, balancing culture building with hyper-efficiency.
  • Strong systems orientation as a champion of technology, automation, and scalability. Able to build, deconstruct, and improve complex solutions across the entire technology stack.
  • Strong commitment to perfecting Customer Experience (CX), User Experience (UX), subscription management, and the customer journey while enhancing DevOps and the Developer Experience (DevEx).

Grove Collaborative, San Francisco, CA — 2014–2025

DTC Plastics-Neutral CPG Ecommerce Company | NYSE:GROV

Brought Grove from pre-revenue to $400M revenues and IPO. As first Engineering hire, built core ecommerce platform, cloud infrastructure, subscription-management system, APIs, and mobile app while scaling Engineering into a multi-geo 50-person organization bolstered by Agile and DevOps.

VP of Engineering | 2024-2025

Pivoting to AI-powered services architecture and a leaner workforce…

  • Reporting to CIO, led Platform, Web, and Mobile Engineering teams in rearchitecting ecommerce platform to incorporate AI, workflow automations, API capabilities, and partner technologies.
  • Deconstructed proprietary product into ~10 third-party services, such as Stripe, Shopify, OpenAI, Zendesk, Rivo, Tapcart, Recharge, and Ordergroove (including migrating 2M+ customer records), allowing for 50% reduction in opex, 30% faster employee ramp-up, and less drain on IT.
  • Migrated support ticketing ownership from Product team to dedicated Engineering taskforce, to free up Product group to design and build next-gen CX and UX strategy.
  • Insourced mobile app development (Swift, Kotlin) to regain control over CX, refactor code to work with Shopify, and revert to best-in-class subscription management architecture.
  • Delivered progress reports to the Board of Directors, alongside the Senior Leadership Team (SLT).

Sr. Director of Engineering | 2022–2024

Standardizing and streamlining engineering to increase margins and prepare for IPO…

  • Navigated Engineering up to and through IPO by restructuring code, maturing accounting systems, joining SOX taskforce, setting up financial reporting, and running internal audits.
  • Merged 5 disparate engineering teams into a single unified organization of 25 technical resources, each with clear assignments and accountability linked to specific products.
  • Deployed and staffed first-ever DevEx (Developer Experience) function, owning tooling, documentation, and standardization of CI/CD pipeline, code reviews, and engineering processes.
  • Oversaw DevOps to optimize efficiency, reduce compute instances and provisioning, and ultimately drive down AWS hosting/storage costs 8%-10% per quarter.
  • Built anti-fraud tools and processes on Cloudflare network stack to eliminate millions of dollars/year in fraud in LATAM; worked with FBI to report abuse and further safeguard the organization.

Director of Engineering | 2018–2022

Building the engineering function from the ground up…

  • Assembled 50-person full-stack engineering team and established a hiring pool of world-class technical resources with skills in Python, JavaScript, Django, Vue.js, AWS, Kubernetes, and Terraform.
  • Rolled out DevOps and IaaS principles via Terraform embedded into the Engineering lifecycle, reducing release cycle from 30 minutes to 8 minutes and enabling 5-8 production deployments/day.
  • Determined and assigned Engineering roles and responsibilities across 5 teams: Ecommerce Back-End, DevOps/IT Ops, Product Innovation, MarTech, and Shopper Experience.
  • Launched satellite office in RTP/Durham to diversify workforce and reduce hiring expenses, onboarding 20 seasoned engineers at 30% lower cost.
  • Planned and architected migration from Heroku to AWS cloud hosting and Kubernetes.
  • Led performance initiative that delivered 30% reduction in Time-to-Interactive (TTI).

Architect | 2014–2018

As first full-time engineer, developed core ecommerce platform and supporting infrastructure…

  • Constructed scalable Django/Python ecommerce solution and drove API standardization/composability across the tech stack to support massive growth to 2M active monthly users.
  • Innovated a robust order management system integrated with NetSuite, equipped to process 10,000 daily orders of 7,000+ SKUs across 3 fulfillment centers.
  • Introduced Skylight component framework to unify efforts of Design and Engineering, leading to critical knowledge shares and common language that formed the basis of Grove’s Design System.
  • Orchestrated technological aspects of zero-downtime rebrand from “ePantry” to “Grove Collaborative,” including custom cross-domain session exchange, achieving 100% continuity and client retention.

Billy's Billing — 2013–2015

Cloud-Based Accounting Solutions for SMBs | HQ: Copenhagen, Est. 2011

Lead Software Engineer | 2013-2015

Hired by EU team to rearchitect and launch accounting product for US market…

  • Joined 5 software engineers as a full-stack developer working on Node.js/Ember.js distributed system specifically optimized for the US GAAP and federal/state taxation regulations.
  • Worked cross-functionally with technical and business teams in Denmark, England, and China.

STARTUP ADVISING & EXPERIMENTAL PROJECTS

  • 2025-PresentAccounting ERP Startup – Advise founders on product architecture, AI use cases, and GTM strategy
  • 2025-PresentDTC Ecommerce Startup – Founder support, R&D and RFP guidance for Health & Wellness CPG
  • 2025-PresentAgentic AI – Exploration of AI as a universal input layer driving customer-facing experiences
  • 2025-PresentLLM-Powered Consulting – Persona-driven knowledgebase using Claude, LangChain, and Cloudflare
  • 2013-2015Gaming Platform – Niche betting platform “KP Bet” supporting and tracking $100M in gambling

Technical Expertise

Anthropic Claude API, Gemini, ChatGPT, LangChain, MCP, RAG, Agentic AI Workflows, Airflow, API Design, AWS, Braze, Bun, Celery, CI/CD, Cloudflare, CloudFront, Constructor, Contentful, Cypress, Datadog, Django, Docker, Domain-Driven Design, Elasticsearch, Event-Driven Architecture, GitHub, Grafana, GraphQL, JavaScript/TypeScript, Jest, Kubernetes, Looker, Microservices, Next.js, Node.js, Nuxt.js, OpenTelemetry, Playwright, PostgreSQL, Pytest, Python, Qdrant, RabbitMQ, React, Redis, REST, Sentry, Shopify, Snowflake, SQS, Stripe, Svelte, Terraform, Vercel, Vite, Vue