Daniel Whitfield Cross

Northbeam Technologies // Austin, TX

142 engineers · 9 teams · $31M engineering budget · reports to CTO

Joined at 38 engineers and Series C; the company has since crossed $200M ARR.

• Grew engineering from 38 to 142 across four countries while holding regretted attrition at 4% — roughly a third of the industry benchmark for the period.
• Led the re-platform from a single-region monolith to multi-region services, taking availability from 99.4% to 99.98% and cutting p95 latency by 61%.
• Reduced cloud spend by $12.4M annually (38%) through workload right-sizing, a committed-use strategy, and retiring three redundant data pipelines.
• Took deployment frequency from twice monthly to 94 times per day by rebuilding CI/CD and test infrastructure; change-failure rate fell from 18% to 2.3% over the same period.
• Built the incident practice from nothing — on-call rotation, severity model, blameless review — cutting mean time to recovery from 4.2 hours to 19 minutes.
• Established the engineering career ladder and promotion process now used company-wide; 31 engineers have been promoted through it, including 8 to staff and above.
• Passed SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 on first audit, unblocking $40M in enterprise pipeline that had been gated on compliance.

Quillon Data Systems // Austin, TX

44 engineers · 4 teams

• Rebuilt the ingestion pipeline to handle 14B events per day, up from 400M, at 22% lower unit cost.
• Cut new-service provisioning from three weeks to under an hour by building the internal platform layer and its self-service tooling.
• Hired and onboarded 29 engineers in 18 months while lifting the team's internal engagement score from 62 to 87.

Arcata Systems // Denver, CO

18 engineers · 2 teams

• Promoted to Senior Manager in 20 months after turning around a team that had missed three consecutive quarterly commitments.
• Shipped the company's first public API, which reached 1,100 integrating customers within a year of launch.

Arcata Systems // Denver, CO

• Designed and built the distributed job scheduler that remained the backbone of the product for the following seven years.