Tech & Innovation Blog

GPT’s Jesse W. Won Built In’s Inaugural Tech Innovation Award    

Jesse W., the Senior Director System Reliability Management, recently won Built In’s Inaugural Tech Innovation Award, honoring visionaries in tech space and making significant contributions to the world of tech.  

Jesse helped created a Global Reliability Operating Model that gives developers clearer direction, more agency, and improved job satisfaction while allowing them to deliver more innovative codes to customers faster and with fewer mistakes. His contribution to ADP represents a new culture of ownership-driven outcomes rooted in document-driven engineering, self-service onboarding, and human-centered designing.  

Jesse focused on his team, “I want to give credits to the teams we work with. Without them, we would not be able to execute this larger strategy.” He worked with engineering leaders from product-minded approaches to backend engineering, connecting technology capabilities to business goals. Together, they build faster and safer software.  

What are some fun facts about you?  

I am an innovation leader, a prop plane pilot-in-training, and a vintage Japanese watch collector.  

Could you tell us about the Engineering Reliability (EREL) team?  

The EREL team is a platform engineering group that builds tools and infrastructure with a vision to help enable an outstanding developer experience at Lifion. It offers capabilities for feature teams to manage their security and develop their cloud-native infrastructure. My team works with them to provide self-service incident and change management.   

A vital part of this success is the Global Reliability Operating Model (GROM), a holistic approach to building complex software in the cloud. GROM has allowed software teams to work autonomously, pushing collaboration to the max and minimizing complexity within Lifion’s systems. EREL is constantly building upon its systems, focused on feedback to understand what tools and pipelines can evolve to improve the user experience.  

What words would you use to describe engineers at work?   

Simplify, Innovate and Grow. EREL actively measures its impact based on real data available to them within the systems. Utilizing real-time data makes this possible and provides a creative space for all engineers at work.    

Jesse (right) with his family

What advice do you have for those with a focus on innovation?   

Separate the ideation and inspiration from the execution allows your leadership and individual contributors to devote their full intellectual capacity towards solving problems in the most innovative way.  

Don’t limit yourself to what you think is possible. Look out three, four, five, or even twenty steps ahead of what can be done right now, then figure out the north start you need and inspire your teams to meet the larger business goals.   

Congratulations, Jesse and the EREL team!   

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