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Bobby
Dawson

I build the systems — and the teams that ship them.

VP of Engineering with 10+ years scaling SaaS, data, and AI platforms — and a builder who never stopped shipping product on nights and weekends.

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See the work↓Read the résumé
01 / TRACK RECORD

Numbers that took teams, not tricks.

Ten years of scaling platforms, budgets, and the people who own them.

$1M → $100M
Valuation to acquisition

Owned technology strategy at DonorSearch through a 100x outcome.

70+
Engineers led

Across product, data, ML/AI, DevOps, security, and UI/UX.

14B+
Documents in production

Elasticsearch pipelines serving a high-volume data intelligence platform.

$800K
Cloud spend removed

Azure → AWS migration plus container orchestration and pipeline tuning.

40%
MTTR reduction

Observability, CI/CD automation, and incident response maturity.

5
Products shipped solo

SaaS products designed, built, deployed, and operated outside the day job.

02 / THE WORK

Five products. One person shipping them.

Real SaaS with real users — designed, built, deployed, and supported outside the day job. This is what the leadership resume looks like when you never stop writing code.

DugoutHQ interface
Live2025

DugoutHQ

Travel baseball, minus the spreadsheets

Team management for travel baseball — rosters, schedules, dues, budgets, and a drag-and-drop lineup builder, with a private homepage for every family.

Next.jsTypeScriptPostgresStripeGameChanger sync
Visit site(opens in a new tab)
Singiverse interface
Live2024

Singiverse

The karaoke platform that started behind a DJ booth

All-in-one karaoke management for KJs and venues: AI song deduplication, printable songbooks, rotation management, kiosk mode, and Virtual DJ integration.

Next.jsPythonAI/ML matchingPostgresPDF generation
Visit site(opens in a new tab)
TrustPuma interface
Live2025

TrustPuma

Know where every asset actually is

Cloud asset management that replaces the equipment spreadsheet: QR audits, multi-location tracking, depreciation, and JumpCloud device sync.

Next.jsPostgresJumpCloud APIQR scanningMobile web
Visit site(opens in a new tab)
Green Flag Verified interface
Coming soon2026

Green Flag Verified

Know who you're meeting. Before you meet.

Identity verification and safety for online dating — smarter, safer first meetings.

Next.jsIdentity verificationPostgres
Preview(opens in a new tab)
Elevant Solutions interface
Live2025

Elevant Solutions

The last mile for AI-built software

My consulting practice. AI tools get a product 75% of the way there — Elevant handles the security, infrastructure, and operations that make it real.

AWSGCPVercelRailwayCI/CDSecurity hardening
Visit site(opens in a new tab)
Cover of Leadership Life: Breaking Through the Individual Contributor CeilingView on Amazon (opens in a new tab)
03 / THE BOOK

Leadership Life

Breaking Through the Individual Contributor Ceiling

The book I wanted when I was the best engineer on the team and the worst candidate for the job above me. It's about the specific, unglamorous shift from doing the work to being responsible for it.

  • The Ten Commandments of Leadership Excellence
  • Building a brand inside an organization that already has one
  • Reading org dynamics without becoming political
  • Career strategy for people who'd rather just ship
Read it on Amazon(opens in a new tab)
04 / OFF THE CLOCK

Where the products come from.

Every product I've built started as a problem I was personally stuck in. I ran karaoke nights as a DJ for years — which is exactly how I learned that every KJ inherits a song library full of near-duplicates and manages the rotation on a legal pad. That's Singiverse.

A season of travel baseball produced four spreadsheets, a group text, and a shoebox of receipts. That's DugoutHQ. Watching companies lose real money to equipment nobody could find became TrustPuma. And after a decade of shipping AI-assisted code, the gap between “it works on my machine” and “it survives production” became Elevant Solutions.

The day job is engineering leadership: org design, architecture, budgets, and the unglamorous work of making a team faster than it was last quarter. The nights are for staying honest about what it actually takes to ship — because it's hard to lead builders if you've stopped being one.

Based inWestminster, MD
CurrentlyVP of Engineering at EverTrue
AlsoFounder, Elevant Solutions
Before thatDJ — and still, occasionally
StudiedB.S. Computer Science, UMBC