Anya Priestley

Turning chaos into shipped software
since 2011.

See my work Get in touch
15+years building software
4years managing teams
Portrait of Anya Priestley

01 About me

I build software, lead engineering teams, and have a habit of making ambitious ideas actually happen.

I've spent 15+ years building software and leading teams. I like hard problems, smart people, clean architecture, and shipping things that actually work. I thrive in ambiguity and love figuring out how to make it all work.

Quick facts

  • San Francisco, CA
  • UCLA · PreMed & Computer Science
  • Currently reading: Klara and the Sun

02 Experience

Sep 2022 – Oct 2026

Software Engineering Manager @ Kargo

Led two lean full-stack teams behind Kargo's core ad creation, rendering, and tracking platforms across web, mobile, and video.

  • Reorganized an eight-engineer team and lifted throughput by 30%.
  • Introduced cross-repo development practices that sped up cross-team delivery by about 50%.
  • Cut production escalations by 50% through better docs, troubleshooting, and knowledge sharing.
  • Designed a reusable JavaScript rendering engine powering multiple ad-building platforms.
  • Led AI-powered recommendation features and revenue-critical ad products, plus adoption of Claude-powered automation, with human review standards intact.
  • Hired, mentored, and promoted engineers; partnered with Product, Design, and Sales on roadmaps and planning.
Jun 2015 – Sep 2022

Software Engineer → Senior Software Engineer @ Kargo

Full-stack across React, Angular, TypeScript, Node.js, PHP, and Go.

  • Built VAST/VPAID video players and a video ad generator that helped launch a video business worth roughly $10M in incremental annual revenue.
  • Built Node.js microservices handling tens of thousands of requests per minute; co-designed API contracts between a Go-based SSP and client-side rendering.
  • Improved ad delivery performance by 20% and modernized a critical codebase from CoffeeScript to ES6 and TypeScript.
  • Designed monitoring and alerting that cut incident detection time by 75%.
Jun 2013 – Sep 2015

JavaScript Developer @ Flashtalking

Built reusable JavaScript templates and browser-based ad experiences, including video, with client-side targeting and cookie-based personalization.

Before 2013

Tech Support Engineer @ Lumosity

Built custom widgets for the help application, which is where support work turned into software work.

03 Skills

Leadership

Multi-team managementHiring & mentorshipPerformance managementTechnical strategyRoadmap planningCross-functional leadershipAgile / Kanban

Frontend

JavaScriptTypeScriptReactAngularNext.jsCSS

Backend & Systems

Node.jsGoPHPREST APIsMicroservicesCachingMySQLPostgreSQLDistributed Systems

Infra & Reliability

AWSDockerKubernetesMonitoring & alertingCI/CDGitHub ActionsTravis

AI & Dev Tools

Open AIClaudeGoogle GeminiAI-assisted development

04 How I lead

I believe in hiring smart people, trusting them to do their jobs, and making sure they actually talk to each other. My teams aren't afraid to ask questions, challenge ideas, or admit they don't know something. My job is to cut through the chaos, help make the tough calls, and keep us solving problems instead of just cranking out tickets and PRs.

01

Communicate. A lot!

02

No stupid questions

03

Trust instead of control

Let's talk!

anyapriestley@gmail.com LinkedIn GitHub