Daniel Straus

About Daniel Straus

I’m an engineering leader focused on improving delivery predictability, strengthening quality systems, and modernizing how engineering organizations operate across growing SaaS companies.Throughout my career, I’ve been most energized by bringing clarity to complex environments, building metrics dashboards that make performance visible, aligning CI/CD governance with business risk, and reducing operational friction that slows teams down. I’ve led quality and infrastructure initiatives that improved release stability, reduced alert fatigue, and increased cross-functional transparency across engineering, product, and executive leadership.More recently, I’ve focused on integrating AI into engineering workflows, leveraging AI-assisted test generation, documentation automation, and process acceleration to reduce manual effort while improving coverage and delivery confidence. I view AI not as a novelty, but as a practical force multiplier for quality and execution when paired with structured systems and strong governance.Equally important to me is people development. I’ve built and mentored high-performing QA and infrastructure leaders, helping teams move from reactive execution to measurable, sustainable operating models.

Experience

1. Senior Engineering Manager

   Compass

   Aug 2021 — Present

   Led the Tech Infrastructure and QA organizations at Compass through several years of hypergrowth, overseeing CI/CD pipelines for 500+ services, AWS cloud infrastructure, observability, and deployment processes across a large-scale distributed platform.On the infrastructure side, I scaled the team by 100% during a period of rapid growth, drove a 20% improvement in developer productivity by standardizing build, test, and deployment processes, and spearheaded a Datadog monitoring overhaul that reduced production alert noise by 89%. I also managed a Python 2 to 3 migration across 150+ services, improving security posture and reducing build times by 60%.On the quality side, I led a QA transformation anchored in a shift-left strategy (devs owning the quality of their products) by formalizing testing requirements, improving integration testing frameworks, and implementing automated testing for critical workflows. I introduced AI-assisted QA practices using Gemini Gems and custom GitHub Copilot-integrated agents, reducing manual test-case creation time from 1.5 weeks to under 2 days and improving end-to-end test pass rates from 58% to 81%.

Education

• Pace University

  BS, Computer Science

Skills

• Confluence
• Integration Testing
• User Experience
• Testing
• Jquery
• Web Applications
• Api
• Sql
• Tdd
• Appium
• Agile Methodologies
• Quality Assurance
• Amazon Cloud
• Performance Testing
• Github
• Usability Testing
• Rspec
• Ruby
• Jira
• Agile Testing
• Test Automation
• Jenkins
• Amazon Web Services (Aws)
• Selenium
• Selenium 2 - Webdriver
• Software Quality Assurance
• Git
• Page Objects
• Calabash
• Tortoise Svn
• Selenium Testing
• Xml
• Ssh
• Javascript
• Systems Monitoring
• Selenium Rc
• Bash
• Ruby on Rails
• Python
• Scrum