Build right. Hire right. Rebel forever.

I'm a fractional Head of Talent for Series A-C startups and defense contractors. I build recruiting infrastructure companies own forever, ATS workflows, sourcing frameworks, scorecards, pipelines; then close critical hires in under 30 days.

My path wasn't traditional: TGI Fridays → booking bands → managing tours → 14 years in recruiting. It taught me to spot talent fast, sell with conviction, and treat every search like representation. I operate like an agent, take care of both sides, protect the brand, close the deal.

Currently: Fractional Head of Talent at EarthDaily Federal (geospatial intelligence, defense). Board member at Underground Admins.

Author: Head and Heart: Winning the AI Recruiting War

richie@rebeltalentsystems.com | rebeltalentsystems.com

Richie Lampani

Global Technology Leader at Converse | Driving Innovation and Excellence in Tech at Nike Inc | Expert in Scalable Tech Solutions

**Opinions are my own**

I build commerce infrastructure and lead distributed engineering teams that ship at scale.

15+ years as a software engineer with deep experience in full stack development, solution architecture, data engineering, and platform design. 

The last 7+ years leading engineering teams across multiple continents while staying hands-on with technical work.

What I’m good at:

Building systems that eliminate entire categories of problems, not just fix symptoms. I’m currently focused on leveraging AI to collapse workflows that burn hundreds to thousands of engineering hours, turning multi-day manual processes into single button deployments, and complex code reviews into automated quality gates that learn from our patterns.

Leading distributed teams by designing for autonomous velocity. AI-assisted documentation and systems that make the team faster whether I’m online or not. The best engineering leaders multiply output without multiplying headcount.

Making strategic bets on what to automate, what to build, and what to kill. The highest ROI work right now is teaching machines to do the repetitive technical work so engineers can focus on the problems that actually need human judgment.

Technical background:

Software engineering and full stack development across the entire stack. Solution architecture, data engineering, and platform infrastructure. Hands-on experience with Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Shopify, BigCommerce, and e-commerce infrastructure at scale. Currently experimenting with LLM-powered tooling for code generation, testing automation, and engineering workflow optimization.

Current:

Leading multiple engineering teams on commerce infrastructure at Nike, with continued hands-on work in platform architecture, full stack development, and AI-assisted engineering tooling.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Jono Herrington

Your Jira board is lying to leadership. 

Everyone knows except leadership.

The single biggest disconnect in most organizations is the gap between what Jira shows and what's actually happening.

The board says 120 points completed. Leadership sees progress.

What the board doesn't show.

1. The engineer who spent 6 hours creating tickets for offshore team members instead of building the feature they were hired to build. 

2. The story that got split into 4 tickets so velocity would look higher. 

3. The 3-point bug fix that took 2 days because the root cause was in a system nobody documented. 

4. The architect who did zero points of "work" but unblocked three teams with a single design decision.

Jira is a workflow tool. It was never designed to measure the value of engineering work. But the moment someone put a velocity chart in a leadership deck, that's exactly what it became.

And now engineers spend more time managing the board than doing the work the board is supposed to track.

Here's what I've learned works instead.

1. Let Jira be a coordination tool for the team. Not a reporting tool for leadership.

2. Report to leadership in outcomes. Features shipped. Revenue impacted. Risk reduced.

3. If an engineer spends more than 15 minutes a day on Jira hygiene, your process is broken.

4. The best signal of engineering health is what questions the team asks. Not what numbers the board shows.

When you manage the dashboard instead of the work, you get a beautiful dashboard and mediocre software.

Every experienced engineer knows this. It's time leadership heard it too.

Head of Engineering | Building High-Performing Global Teams at Scale | AI-First Operations

“We trust the team.”

Then stop designing systems that prove otherwise.

If the design review ends with “let’s run it by leadership first,” the trust isn’t real. If estimates get pushed until the number feels safer, the trust isn’t real. If the meeting ends with “we’ll wait for approval,” the trust isn’t real.

The team notices.

Decisions travel upward before they move forward. Engineers start optimizing for approval instead of outcomes. Meetings turn into status theater so leaders feel informed enough to allow the next step.

Control wearing the language of trust.

Real trust shows up in the system. Who can decide. How quickly trade-offs happen. What doesn’t require permission anymore.

If the leader still has to touch every meaningful decision, the team isn’t trusted.

They’re supervised.

And supervision does not scale.

What decision on your team still needs permission that the people doing the work should already own?

The market has ADHD.

Every year it finds a new obsession.

Yesterday it was crypto. Today it’s AI.  Next year it will be something else.

And like clockwork, everyone rushes to talk about it.

New frameworks. New hot takes. New experts.

Meanwhile the things that actually make teams win barely get mentioned.

Clear ownership. Small pull requests. Fast feedback loops. Testing. Tight product-engineering collaboration.

The boring stuff.

The fundamentals.

They aren’t exciting. They don’t change much. And nobody gets attention for repeating them.

But championship teams don’t chase the spotlight. They execute the fundamentals until everyone else gets bored.

And that’s exactly why they win.

Velocity should stabilize. 

Not grow forever.

I've watched this destroy teams from the inside.

Manager reads a headline about AI making developers 3x faster. Brings it to sprint planning. Sets a new target. Raises it again two weeks later.

90 points becomes 120. 120 becomes 150. By Q4 you'd need 500 points a sprint to stay on track.

Nobody questions the math because nobody wants to look like the person who "can't keep up."

Here's what actually happens when velocity becomes a growth metric instead of a planning tool.

1. Engineers inflate story points to survive. 
2. Complex work gets avoided because it scores the same as easy work. 
3. The backlog turns into theater for dashboards. 
4. The codebase rots while the charts look incredible.

Velocity was designed to predict capacity. That's it.

If your velocity chart looks like a hockey stick, you don't have a productive team. You have a team that learned how to survive your metrics.

The fix is boring but it works.

1. Use velocity to forecast. Never to evaluate.
2. Measure outcomes delivered to users. Not points closed in Jira.
3. Ask "what shipped and what did it change" instead of "how many points did we burn."
4. Let velocity plateau. That's the sign of a healthy team.

The best engineering orgs I've worked in never once celebrated a velocity increase. They celebrated stable delivery with fewer surprises.

If your team's velocity only goes up, something else is quietly going down.

Golden handcuffs don't feel like handcuffs.

They feel like guilt.

Great pay. Smart coworkers. Reasonable hours. Generous PTO.

You list all of that and think "I have no right to feel this way."

But you're still staring at your laptop at 2pm unable to write a single line of code.

I've been there. I've also watched engineers I manage go through it. Here's what I've learned.

The "objectively good job" is the hardest burnout to escape. Because there's nothing obvious to blame.

Bad jobs give you a villain. Good jobs that drain you give you guilt. Here's how to diagnose it.

Remove the compensation from the equation. Would you still choose this work? Think about the last time you were genuinely excited about a problem at work. How long ago was that?

Ask yourself if you're staying because you want to or because leaving feels wasteful.

If all three answers make you uncomfortable, the handcuffs are on.

The hardest career move isn't leaving a bad job. It's leaving a good one that's slowly making you invisible to yourself.

taplio

The Battle

Richie Lampani

Jono Herrington

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taplio

The Battle

Richie Lampani

Jono Herrington

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Jono Herrington's LinkedIn Performance

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