Bill Couch

  • Technical leader of software engineering teams
  • Based in New York City

A highly-motivated technical leader interested in product, design, and media. Driven by shaping culture, building relationships, and enabling transparency. Enjoys working with diverse, hard-working creatives who demonstrate passion toward their craft.

Contact via william@willamcouch.com or visit williamcouch.com for more information.

Experience

  • Figma

    • Engineering Manager

      - Present
      New York, New York

      Growing and leading the Prototyping Fidelity team, responsible for tooling to build interactive previews of user flows for collaborative iteration, user testing, and stakeholder presentations.

  • Twitter, Inc.

    11 yrs 6 mos
    • Senior Engineering Manager

      - February 2023
      New York, New York

      Led and grew a high-performing full-stack team of engineers across iOS, Android, web, and backend platforms, building key parts of Twitter's paid subscription product, Twitter Blue, when its mission was to support journalism and heavy news consumers with features including Top Articles and Reader Mode. Organized and aligned engineering org from Revue and Scroll acquisitions. Coached and grew engineers to Senior and Staff+ roles. Coached peer managers through team transitions and performance management. Partnered cross-functionally to organizational and process impact, and increase non-advertising revenue for the business.

    • Engineering Manager

      - 2021
      San Francisco, California

      Supported and scaled a high-performing web platform team from 2 to 12 engineers building features around conversational content and media on twitter.com, including Fleets, reply conversation controls, Direct Message improvements, video playback UI and UX for uploaded, live (Periscope broadcasts), and looping video, plus other new product explorations. Supported unifying Twitter's live video infrastructure and end-user experience across in-house and third-party solutions. Evolved interviewing and hiring processes to grow web and consumer engineering leadership team. Partnered with peer EMs to evolve the career promotion process across the engineering organization.

    • Staff Software Engineer

      - December 2017
      San Francisco, California

      Integrated Periscope on Twitter's web properties including Twitter Cards and Tweet Embeds. Added support to monetize Periscope broadcasts on twitter.com with pre-roll advertising. Key facilitator and engineer in unifying Twitter's live video (NFL, content partnerships) and Periscope broadcast products, technical stacks, and engineering teams. Facilitated work to establish best practices for decentralizing engineering operations around the world.

    • Senior Software Engineer

      - October 2016
      San Francisco, California

      Rebuilt user profile pages on web, in addition to migrating the Twitter web server client from Ruby to Scala. Helped rebuild Direct Messages on web, including the launch of Group DMs. Launched the Periscope web player at periscope.tv with the release of the Periscope iOS app, after its acquisition by Twitter. Further developed the web client, introducing user profile pages, growing the team from one to five engineers, and evolving the site into a rich, universal ReactJS application.

    • Software Engineer

      - February 2014
      San Francisco, California

      Built and designed individual internal web application tools in Ruby including an internal-Quora application for company-wide discourse with executive leadership. Open-sourced an audience moderation node.js application called Ospriet as a sample Twitter API application. Launched the Twitter Archive feature allowing Twitter users to download a full copy of their Tweets, with an offline, browser-based interface to explore.

  • USA TODAY

    3 yrs 2 mos
    • Interactive Designer

      - April 2011
      McLean, Virginia

      Front-end design and development for editorial interactive graphics and cross-platform web applications, running on Django. Collaborated with Mercury Intermedia, an external development studio, on UI design, features, and strategy for applications on mobile platforms including iPhone, iPad, and Android.

  • Orlando Sentinel

    8 mos
    • Multimedia Artist

      - March 2008
      Orlando, Florida

      Developed, built, and designed interactive Flash graphics and multimedia packages. Collaborated with reporters, editors, videographers, photographers to achieve and deliver rich storytelling experiences. Created graphics for the print edition of the publication.

Speaking Engagements

  • Twitter #OneTeam 2018

    Effective 1:1s

    July 2018

    Houston, Texas

    Presented session at first company-wide conference on practical techniques and tools for ICs and managers to ensure the time together is most effectively used to address the interests, concerns, and needs of an individual contributor.

  • Streaming Media West

    How Periscope Migrated To HTML5 and Low Latency HLS

    November 2016

    Huntington Beach, California

    Joint presentation with Pieter-Jan Speelmans of OpenTelly to discuss how Periscope integrated OpenTelly's HTML5 HLS video player, THEOplayer, into Periscope's web client to enable playback via LHLS Media Streaming on any device with near-realtime performance.

    More details
  • South by Southwest

    Design from the Gut

    March 2012

    Austin, Texas

    A moderated panel with independent and in-house designers and engineers from Facebook and Twitter to discuss when and whether to use instinct or data analysis to inform design decisions. Audience input gathered via custom-built, and open-sourced Twitter API project, Ospriet.

    More details
  • O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing

    Designing iPad Apps

    February 2011

    New York, New York

    Workshop panel with Jennifer Brook and Craig Mod to discuss how the NYTimes, USA TODAY, and Flipboard handled designing printed content on the emerging tablet platform in the form of the Apple iPad.

    More details
  • The Poynter Institute

    Storytelling Techniques and Tablets

    June 2010

    St. Petersburg, Florida

    Joint presentation with Andrew DeVigal of the New York Times discussing compelling storytelling techniques for tablet devices.