About Me

Professional

Holly Gardner is a software engineering leader who works with small to mid-sized companies to build teams and process that ease the communication challenges faced by remote teams.

With a background in Physics, Computational Statistics, and Data Science, they enjoy multi-disciplinary problem solving and data-driven decision making. After working with cross-functional teams in multiple countries and continually reinventing their Agile process, they understand communication is the most challenging and critical part of growth in a technology organization.

Personal

Holly is a New Orleans native who loves reading, cooperative board games, baking, watercolor, and curating their home library. They currently live in Minneapolis, MN with their cat Freddie Mercury.

  • 2021- Present

    Practicing authentic leadership inspired by Brenè Brown

    • Engineering leader leading data driven AI product teams, including the new Maintenance Performer, an agentic AI experience supporting over 1 Million units

    • Support managers across 4 purpose driven, cross-functional teams of full-stack engineers solving real customer problems

    • Focused on creating purpose driven teams, data backed product development, and career development

  • Finding my why and helping people find theirs along the way

    • Leading two Agile teams to deliver high-quality software to support the 3M+ questions per day on the Lucid Marketplace

    • Support 8 direct reports via leadership, coaching, feedback, training, and goal setting

    • Evolving communication and process as we grow from a engineering organization of 15 to 60+ across 9 timezones

    • Broadening problem solving skills by introducing a “Big Debate” meeting Re: Radical Candor by Kim Scott

    • Training via gamification to improve incident response

  • Created knowledge from facts and wisdom from knowledge

    • Coordinated analytic development efforts to facilitate communication between engineering teams producing audio translation models and those implementing downstream analytics

    • Interfaced with Hive, ElasticSearch, and local data structures to generate metrics

    • Wrote Java MapReduce jobs and python scripts to create repeatable validation processes

      • Precision, Recall, and F1 measures against a validation set of 1M documents

    • Investigated quality concerns and implementing improvements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) models from tokenization to entity recognition

  • M.S. in Computational Science

    • Entered the PhD program in Computational Science and Informatics

    • Finished with a M.S. after realizing I liked real world problems more than academic ones

    • Research Project: Evaluating Potential Energy of Theoretical Zeolite Structures

      • Inherited 10k+ lines of Fortran to write implementations of standard and optimized potential energy calculations

        • Edited solely in VI (have since learned the wonders of IDEs)

      • Validated the speed and accuracy of these methods

      • Applied most efficient method on simulated crystal structures to identify the best catalysts for chemical manufacturings

  • B.S. in Physics, Minors in Mathematics and Computational Science

    • Entered undeclared while deciding between English Poetry and Physics

    • Decided to formally study Physics, while I would independently pursue Poetry

    • Computational Chemistry with Dr. Thomas Spence

    • Computational Statistics with Dr. Maria Calzada

WHAT I'M GOOD AT

Team building Technical strategy Facilitation Mentorship Data-driven decision making Public speaking
Contact Me

  • so damn foolish we have become beautiful without even knowing it.

    Billy Collins

  • if you inherently long for something, become it first.

    Victoria Erikson

  • Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

    Mary Oliver