Paul Adams

Director of Engineering

Nashville, Tennessee, United States22 yrs 9 mos experience

Highly Stable

Key Highlights

Led engineering in high-stakes environments.
Transformed teams into autonomous delivery organizations.
Achieved significant fraud reduction through ML.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a Fintech and SaaS engineering leader with strong operational discipline.

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Skills

Core Skills

Engineering LeadershipPlatform EngineeringSystem Architecture

Other Skills

Compliance ManagementTeam TransformationFraud ManagementMachine LearningRelease ManagementOperational ManagementQuality AssuranceProduct StrategyMobile DevelopmentContinuous IntegrationUser EngagementBusiness StrategyChange Management

About

I build teams where reliability isn’t aspirational—it’s the constraint that enables velocity. That instinct was formed before I ever wrote a line of code. Sixteen years across three U.S. Army Special Forces Groups—building communications infrastructure in combat zones, standing up humanitarian networks during the Kurdish refugee crisis, and running counterterrorism operations across Latin America—built the discipline of operating where failure has no undo button. Now I lead engineering in regulated, high-stakes environments—currently embedded within American Express on a loyalty platform serving millions of card members. I partner with client-side engineering leadership to shape team topology, hiring strategy, and technical direction. Across roles, my teams have spanned native mobile, backend services, and web—with QE integrated throughout. The domain changed. The operating discipline didn’t. A psychology degree and years as a grief counselor shaped the other half of how I lead. The military taught me to build systems that don’t fail under pressure. The counseling work taught me to build organizations that don’t break the people running them. Both inform how I think about team health, sustainable velocity, and developing leaders rather than dependencies. I write about the intersection of engineering leadership and organizational complexity at adams.io/blog. Always open to comparing notes—especially on scaling engineering organizations through ambiguity.

Experience

Iseatz

Senior Engineering Manager

Aug 2025 – Present · 8 mos · New Orleans, LA · Remote

Owns the delivery surface for the Amex Travel app within iSeatz’s $9B+ loyalty platform—authentication, profile, onboarding, and discovery across iOS, Android, BFF, and QA. Defined a mobile integration contract separating internal platform delivery from enterprise release governance, shifting release cadence from monthly to biweekly without breaking compliance or security constraints. Transformed a reactive post-launch team into an autonomous delivery organization, driving alignment across product delivery, enterprise security, AI integration, and external vendor partnerships to position engineering as a strategic function within client-side leadership.

Engineering LeadershipPlatform Engineering

Dayforce

Development Manager

Jun 2022 – Aug 2025 · 3 yrs 2 mos · Minneapolis, MN · Remote

Owned engineering delivery across a multi-surface fintech platform (iOS, Android, .NET gateway, operational support portal) serving 860K+ users and processing $7B+ in transactions under PCI DSS and SOC 2. Deliberately paused feature delivery to contain rising fraud risk—cutting fraud exposure by 82% through ML-assisted remediation, completing a zero-downtime U.S. bank migration, and delivering 90+ releases.

Engineering LeadershipPlatform Engineering

Quore

Development Manager

Sep 2019 – Jun 2022 · 2 yrs 9 mos · Nashville Metropolitan Area · On-site

Owned engineering for Quore, a hospitality operations platform serving 81K+ daily users across 7,300+ properties in 50 countries. Halted roadmap expansion to address accumulated architectural debt—achieving a 99.98% crash-free rate, 28% improvement in delivery velocity, and 42% reduction in production defects. Absorbed product strategy after the PM function was eliminated, driving priorities directly with Business, Marketing, and Support leadership.

Engineering LeadershipPlatform Engineering

Adams.io

Platform Architect

Jun 2015 – Sep 2019 · 4 yrs 3 mos · Nashville Metropolitan Area · Remote

Built and operated multi-tenant mobile platforms supporting 200+ white-labeled deployments from shared codebases across nonprofit, education, fintech, and hospitality. Replaced per-client builds with configuration-driven architecture, reducing release cycles by 67% and increasing user engagement by 47%. Inherited a fragmented portfolio of 37 apps across 8 Objective-C/Swift and Java codebases—standardized build systems, implemented CI/CD, and raised automated test coverage to 85%, restoring predictable releases.

System ArchitecturePlatform Engineering

United states army

Senior Operations and Technical Leader

May 1984 – Jul 2000 · 16 yrs 2 mos · On-site

Served in airborne and Special Forces units as a Ranger and Master Parachutist, leading technical and operational teams on counterterrorism, combat, and humanitarian missions across multiple theaters. Led secure IT and communications in conflict zones with 99.998% uptime and zero security incidents. Oversaw multi-million-dollar classified systems, built a mission-readiness database adopted command-wide, and enabled real-time decision-making for multinational task forces.

Engineering LeadershipPlatform Engineering