Engineering leader and architect with 29+ years building and scaling product systems in growth-stage companies. Specializes in stabilizing fragile architectures, modernizing platforms, and raising engineering standards through hands-on technical leadership and mentoring. Most effective in product organizations with established market fit that are scaling teams and infrastructure.
Provided hands-on technical leadership to product organizations needing to stabilize production systems, modernize architectures, and improve delivery reliability during periods of growth and platform transition.
This customer later ended up migrating to a new ERP, and we were able to maintain the existing system, on the old ERP, and transitioned to the new ERP with no downtime while continuing to ship new functionality at the same time. We also added on another API client that needed to help expose customer quotes in their Adobe Commerce Edge implementation.
Building on the success of the digital sinage project, we developed a new streamlined ERP front end in Nuxt.js for Showroom sales staff that integrated with Entra ID. To accomplish this we extended the previous API to include their ERP, and Bloomreach Customer outreach tooling.
Rehabilitated an existing Vue.js, Couchbase, on-prem digital signage application that experienced extended down times, and inaccurate information. We converted it to a .NET API, with a Nuxt.js front-end. This allowed us to quickly bring the application to a point where new features could be deployed.
Worked on core search infrastructure supporting large-scale web-crawled public sector data, improving discoverability of government entities and related documents.
Focused on entity resolution and relevance challenges, including matching organizations by primary toponyms and handling ambiguous naming across state and local agencies.
Collaborated with data ingestion and platform teams to improve indexing pipelines and query behavior as data volume and coverage expanded.
Contributed production code and operational improvements to systems responsible for search accuracy and performance at scale.
Built on prior platform automation to evolve infrastructure services into repeatable, productized offerings for customers running large-scale search workloads.
Partnered with engineering and sales to design service packages aligned with operational cost models and customer performance requirements.
Helped mature company operating practices, including experimentation with async-first workflows, reduced meeting load, and a four-day work week to improve focus and delivery.
Acted as executive sponsor for infrastructure and reliability initiatives supporting customer production systems.
Led automation of customer cluster provisioning, reducing deployment time from approximately two days to under 15 minutes.
Designed and implemented scalable infrastructure workflows that enabled growth from roughly 200 to over 8,000 servers across AWS and GCP with no increase in operations headcount.
Worked closely with engineering teams supporting hosted search platforms, gaining deep exposure to search indexing, performance tuning, and reliability concerns.
Contributed to open-source search tooling (Tantivy) and developed a practical understanding of inverted index internals and relevance tradeoffs in production systems.
Coordinated across engineering, operations, and support to ensure reliable customer-facing production systems.
Served as technical lead on a multi-tenant fulfillment platform integrating two separate ERP systems across multiple business units in a $1B multi-division enterprise.
Designed abstraction layers that allowed divisions to transition to the new ERP incrementally, without forcing synchronized migrations or disrupting order fulfillment.
Collaborated with distributed engineering teams and business stakeholders to align technical architecture with operational and supply-chain requirements.
Established integration patterns and service contracts that reduced coupling between downstream systems and ERP implementations.
Supported high-volume order fulfillment and inventory workflows critical to daily operations across multiple divisions.
My name is Dru Sellers. I’m an engineering leader and architect that focuses on building and modernizing product systems in growing companies, with an emphasis on reliability, scalability, and strong engineering practices.