Adam Olsen

Engineering leader specializing in platform engineering, observability, and full-lifecycle system reliability, with a proven track record as an embedded performance architect. Expert at bridging application development and infrastructure by driving early-lifecycle architectural decisions, designing enterprise observability frameworks, right-sizing cloud environments, and leading holistic test automation initiatives. Expertise spans the entire delivery lifecycle, from serverless container environments with AWS ECS Fargate to OpenTelemetry instrumentation, Splunk Observability, and GenAI-enabled engineering automation.

Software Engineering Manager at NIKE (2025-03 – 2026-04)

• Stabilized high-impact engineering teams through rapid scaling and organizational transformation, doubling team size by hiring and onboarding 15 engineers while maintaining high technical and cultural standards.
• Strengthened operational excellence and incident response by formalizing PagerDuty escalation paths, configuring ServiceNow support management, and defining team production support plans to drastically improve incident coordination and response readiness.
• Reduced recurring delivery friction by pioneering AI-driven development workflows, creating custom AI skills and commands that automated Jira management, streamlined Pull Request creation, improved documentation quality across Confluence and GitHub, and empowered production support.
• Modernized observability by spearheading the transition to an OpenTelemetry-native stack, migrating legacy New Relic instrumentation to Splunk Observability (SignalFx), and establishing standardized tracing "paved paths" for 20+ backend microservices.
• Engineered and delivered a high-impact workflow automation application, utilizing a 'hurry-up offense' methodology, to streamline cross-functional workflows between design and merchant teams.
• Reduced transition risk for the Merchant Planning application by orchestrating a global handoff to a partner team in India, providing comprehensive training and support to ensure continuity of ownership.
• Maintained delivery velocity through organizational restructuring by adjusting team dynamics, redistributing production support and QA responsibilities, and clarifying team ownership during transition.
• Directly managed 10 engineers, providing coaching, professional development, and leading annual performance reviews and 'talent offense' reporting for senior leadership.

Lead Performance Engineer at NIKE (2018-09 – 2025-03)

• Served as an embedded performance tech lead inside application development, reducing operational overhead by over 50% by modernizing delivery infrastructure from legacy Go/Chef to containerized EKS and serverless AWS ECS Fargate environments.
• Engineered 30% infrastructure cost savings by driving early-lifecycle POC benchmarking to de-risk architectural decisions, optimizing application logic, right-sizing compute resources, and fine-tuning automated scaling thresholds.
• Shifted development teams to proactive observability by owning all telemetry and alerting configurations; cleaned up application logging and engineered alerts to catch and surface performance anomalies before they impacted end users.
• Accelerated microservice delivery and reliability across 50+ services by transforming raw infrastructure into a scalable developer platform with "paved path" service templates, shared CI/CD functions, and reusable Terraform modules.
• Led the cross-functional technical reliability organization, defining the holistic system validation strategy, scaling automated regression frameworks, and championing production readiness across core application suites.
• Minimized release risk by collaborating with cross-functional tech leads to define branch and release strategies, ensuring seamless production readiness for complex, multi-team deployments.

Senior Performance Engineer at NIKE (2015-06 – 2018-09)

• Co-developed and maintained a custom performance testing framework written in NodeJS, migrating legacy JMeter/Java scenarios to a modern, scalable architecture.
• Managed test and production environments in AWS using a combination of Terraform, Troposphere, and CloudFormation, along with automated Chef scripts.
• Deployed and maintained New Relic performance monitoring for backend servers and frontend browser tracking using automated configuration management.

Software Quality Engineer at NIKE (2013-08 – 2015-06)

• Acting test lead for Assortment Visualization; designed and executed test strategies covering all application functionality.
• Coordinated integration testing with multiple external service teams for product data and images.
• Developed Selenium automated tests and Python scripts for REST service testing to minimize manual effort and ensure on-time, high-quality deployments.

Lead Software Test Engineer at WEBTRENDS (2012-01 – 2013-12)

• Managed offshore QA strategy and risk identification for enterprise project teams. Developed iOS and Android applications to test Mobile SDKs and utilized Chef for automated deploys to complex test environments.

B.S. in Business and Public Administration / Computer Science – The University of Puget Sound