Christopher Cericola

CD Baby

Senior Vice President of Engineering

Jan 2025 — Present

Led engineering at the senior leadership level through a period of transition, driving platform modernization, expanding the team with near-shore partners, and setting the technical direction for the next generation of the CD Baby platform.

• During a period of transition, I over saw the product team for 6 months while assisting with recruiting for a new product leader providing perspective into a new role and how to best support them product teams from an engineering perspective.
• Revisited existing digitial distribution system, and led the development of migrating the in-house distribution system to a new sister-company distribtuion system reducing redundant delivery work by over 50%. This included migrated over 25 partners from direct feeds to a single combined been through the new aggregator.
• Led the development and execution of a rebuild of the CDBaby platform with a strong focus on modernization. This included defining the architecture, technology stack, and development process to ensure a scalable and maintainable platform for the future. This involved migrating from bare metal to containers and moving our CI/CD pipelines from Azure DevOps to GitHub.
• Brought in external near-shore development teams to augment the platform modernization and design. This was a cost savings of around 50% compared to bringing in the equivalent amount of talents. This allowed internal developers to focus on building the core infrastructure and architecture while the near-shore team focused on building out specific features and components.
• Led the progress of migration to utilizing agentic AI tooling in our daily workload with both V0 and Github Copilot. Engineers reported saving between 20-30% of their time with less redundant work.

Vice President of Engineering

Aug 2020 — Jan 2025

Took on expanded ownership across four distinct brands — CD Baby, Hearnow, Show.co, and Soundrop — leading engineering teams of varying sizes and technology stacks with a continued focus on cross-team collaboration.

• Augmented staff with near-shore contractors to help with capacity and specific skill needs saving roughly 35% over the cost of local engineers.
• Responsible for the entire engineering budget, staffing, and resourcing. Strong focus on meeting budget goals through increased growth and cost reduction. Outside of staffing costs, I was able to limit budget increases to 3% year over year.
• Started the integration with our sister brands in the Downtown Music Holdings family, including Fuga and Found. The goal was to utilize each company for its best in class services and provide a better overall experience for customers.
• Served as one of two company-wide privacy compliance leads, ensuring adherence with GDPR and domestic privacy regulations.

Director of Web Development

Aug 2015 — Aug 2020

Managed the UI, QA, backend development, and HearNow full stack teams building a a strong culture of communication, collaboration, and continuous improvement. With over 20 people reporting to me, the churn rate remained less than 5%.

• Architected and led the separation of CD Baby's monolithic application into a more modular architecture. This included defining the overall strategy, identifying the right services to break out, and leading the development efforts on the first few services. Time to test and publish were reduced by at least 10% and the new architecture set the foundation for future growth and scalability.
• As part of the decoupling, led the migration of moving the marketing site from an internal app to WPEngine. This removed the need for engineering involvement in marketing content, caused zero-downtime during the migration, and reduced engineering UI workload by 25% letting the team focus on more impactful work.
• Partnered with a local code school, Epicodus, to start an internship program at CDBaby. During this time, we took on six different interns, two of which converted to full time employees.
• Partnered with a local code school, Epicodus, to start an internship program at CDBaby. During this time, we took on six different interns, two of which converted to full time employees.
• Operated as the scrum champion during this time applying my skills with scrum and other agile methodologies helping guide the refinement, planning, and review process. This promoted a culture of communication with stakeholders and rapid feedback loops to ensure the right products were being built.

Manager of Web Development,

Feb 2009 — Aug 2015

Moved internally from Disc Makers to CD Baby to lead a newly formed team responsible for the full migration and relaunch of the CD Baby platform including both the customer-facing storefront and the musician application. This migration was completed on-time, on-budget, and with future expansion in mind.

• Relaunched the CD Baby platform in nine months. Designed and implemented an architecture that was scalable and highly available utilizing load balancing to distribute the load.
• Designed and developed an automated delivery system using custom XML and DDEX ERN for album assets and metadata to partners, such as Spotify and Apple, delivering 1000s of releases per day. The self-healing system reduced partner complaints by 50% and increased our delivery volume by 100%. It currently handles over 20 partners with their own distinct requirements.
• Created the first QA team within CD Baby with a single engineer and grew it into a team of three people during the first five years. This reduced our post-production defects by over 75% and improved engineer produciivity by at least 25%.
• Created the initial on-call rotation for the web development team. This included defining standard work for known issues and escalation guides for complex issues, leading to the 80% reduction in incident response time and recovery.
• Led the development efforts on launching BookBaby, and built its distribution system, adapted from CD Baby's audio distribution system, to send client's books to e-book stores like Amazon Kindle and Apple Books.
• Hired multiple engineers from within CDBaby identifying people who had core skills that could be applied to the engineering work, training them, and helping them grow into their new career. This was a highly successful way to grow talent and also helped build a strong culture of learning and development within the organization.
• Migrated from on-prem TFVC to using AzureDevOps with git repos and CI/CD automation . Publish and deployment complexity reduced significantly. Overall, this resulted in reducing the amount of publishes rolled by back 40%.
• Managed weekly 1:1s with all employees helping set expectations and goals.
• During the 6 years I held this title, the team grew from 4 contributors to over 12 while maintaining a churn rate of less than 5%.

Disc Makers

Lead Application Developer

Jan 2007 — Feb 2009

Grew from junior developer to team lead, taking ownership of code standards, development philosophy, and the team's most impactful client-facing tools.

• Built the web-based CD/DVD template designer in C#, JavaScript, and Ajax providing users with a WSIWYG experience for product design. This eliminated our need for a 3rd party partner decreased costs by over 30%.
• Rebuilt the core class libraries using a custom ORM, reducing the codebase by over 25%.
• Post migration of CDBaby, lead the development efforts for the CDBaby platform converting it into a more modern stack and UI while integrating it with the existing Microsoft Dynamics AX 4.0 platform.
• Defined code standards and best practices to help promote uniformity in code. These standards improved performance by reducing the complexity in debugging and understanding of what people's intent were.
• Interviewed candidates, and helped increase the team from 4 engineers by 50%.
• Mentored incoming engineers and interns in code practices, problem solving, and debugging.

SNIP

Applications Developer

Started my professional software career building internal tooling and client-facing applications for a regional ISP in the midst of expanding into telecom — learning the fundamentals that would shape the rest of my engineering career.

• Maintained the existing VB6 platform while helping architect and develop the new C# platform that would combine the two sides of the business.
• Developed tools to import telecom EDI files and process them into a billing engine.