Justin Conway

Director, Web Engineering and Design | Chicago, IL
justin@conwaydev.com

Professional Summary

I lead web engineering and design for a marketing organization, and I treat the website as a product with a business to answer for. My teams ship steadily, bring AI tools in under the same standards as everything else, and stay aligned with marketing, product and revenue on what the platform is for.

Selected Achievements

  • •Moved sproutsocial.com onto Next.js and Contentful in 2023, and trial conversion rose by a third.
  • •Led AI adoption across the web team, so most engineers ship AI-assisted work through the same code review bar as everything else.
  • •Built the publishing platform that lets the marketing team release content directly, without a developer.
  • •Put bot and DDoS protection in front of every property and cut server errors by more than half.

Skills

  • Engineering Leadership: Hiring, coaching and career development • Managing engineering managers and team leads • Roadmap and capacity planning with Product and Design • Executive and cross-functional alignment
  • Web Platform: React, TypeScript, Next.js, Node.js • Headless CMS (Contentful) and WordPress • Design systems and component libraries • CI/CD (GitHub Actions) and AWS (CloudFront, WAF) • Performance and accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA)
  • Growth Engineering: Experimentation platforms (Optimizely, Adobe Target) • Web analytics and attribution (GA4, Adobe Analytics, Salesforce) • Technical SEO and answer engine optimization
  • Marketing Technology: Lead capture, routing and scheduling (Marketo, Salesforce, Qualified) • Tag management (Google Tag Manager, Adobe) • Vendor consolidation and platform strategy
  • Privacy and Compliance: GDPR, CCPA and consent management (OneTrust)
  • AI-Assisted Development: Claude Code, GitHub Copilot • Custom skills and agent workflows for the web team

Professional Experience

Sprout Social, Chicago, IL

Director, Web Engineering and Design | Mar 2025 – Present

  • •Lead the engineering and design teams, eleven people in all, responsible for sproutsocial.com and the go-to-market platform behind it, from a visitor's first click to a trial or a sales conversation. Plan the roadmap with Product, Revenue and Operations.
  • •Lead AI adoption across the web function. Most of the engineering team now ships AI-assisted work through the same review process as everything else, with custom skills that carry our architecture and conventions into the tools. Delegated ownership of delivery to an engineering manager, and delivery increased through AI process improvements and better domain sharing between teammates.
  • •Own and operate quarterly roadmap planning and the intake models behind it, with retrospectives after each quarter with partners and stakeholders. AI triage through our auto agent made intake more efficient.
  • •Run the engineering side of a long-running experimentation program that tests changes to the marketing site, the blog and paid landing pages before they ship, including dedicated programs for multiple languages.
  • •Built personalization on our highest-growth top-of-funnel pages using sales enrichment segments shared with our go-to-market teams, which lifted conversion 65 percent.
  • •Own lead capture and the marketing technology behind it. Consolidated hundreds of legacy forms into five standard ones with spam protection built in, and carry attribution through to Salesforce on nearly every demo request.
  • •Led the migration from Google Tag Manager to Adobe and the technical retirement of several marketing vendors, moving what each one did onto contracts the company already held. The audit tooling my team wrote caught a consent defect before launch.
  • •Folded the acquired NewsWhip properties onto Sprout's infrastructure within five months, ending its agency hosting and a duplicate consent-management contract.

Senior Engineering Manager | Mar 2022 – Mar 2025

  • •Led the 2023 move of sproutsocial.com onto Next.js, Contentful and static hosting with a new design system underneath. Trial conversion rose by a third and the platform costs less to run.
  • •Hired and coached the engineers the team still runs on, including a senior hire closed in 34 days from 120 applicants, which our people team turned into a hiring case study.
  • •Cut time to production tenfold by moving deployment from Jenkins to GitHub Actions. Merged pull requests nearly doubled in a year and have held there.
  • •Cut crawl errors from 3,902 to 140 and took the indexable share of the site from 41 to 65 percent.
  • •Took the monorepo from 219 open security alerts to zero and set up the support rotation that keeps it there. Merged four repositories into one and retired the legacy marketing API and two page builders.
  • •Led the program that took the marketing site international, with localization governance that keeps multiple languages current as the English site changes.

Engineering Manager | Sep 2019 – Mar 2022

  • •Started the experimentation practice that became the program above, moving the site off Maxymiser, onto a framework that wrote test exposure into Salesforce and then onto Optimizely.
  • •Led the web side of the move from Pardot to Marketo, and merged Sprout's separate content hub into the Insights publication, bringing roughly seven thousand pieces of media under one site.
  • •Became the web team's counterpart to Legal during the first wave of privacy regulation, carrying GDPR and California's privacy laws into how every property collects data.

Senior Web Engineer • Web Engineer | Jul 2015 – Sep 2019

  • •Joined Sprout as its second marketing developer and grew into the web team's technical lead as the team and the number of sites it carried expanded.
  • •Built the first content management system that let marketing publish without a developer. Before that, every copy change was a ticket.
  • •Built Sprout's own consent management tool in 2018 to meet GDPR, and it ran consent on every property until we moved to OneTrust in 2025.
  • •Set the accessibility standard the team works to, with WCAG 2.1 AA review starting at the design stage.

Earlier Career Experience

StageBloc, Chicago, IL

Front End Developer | Nov 2013 – Jul 2015

  • •Built custom websites and themes for touring artists including Kid Rock, Eric Church, Kenny Chesney, and Metallica.

530medialab, Long Beach, CA

Lead Front End Developer | Aug 2011 – Oct 2013

  • •Led a team of eight developers at an agency serving lifestyle and streetwear brands. Established version control workflows and mentored junior developers.

Recognition & Awards

Sprout Social Global Leadership Model Award – 2023

Sprout Social Company Value Award for Technical Innovation – 2019