Audience Journey Team
Engineering leadership for 120M+ annual visitor platform driving SEO and user acquisition.
Consumer Platform, Discovery & SEO Engineering Leadership (Leafly)
I led the Audience Journey engineering organization at Leafly, the world’s largest cannabis information and discovery platform, serving 120 million annual visitors and over 10 million monthly active users. The mission of the team was to maximize organic acquisition, engagement, and conversion across a highly regulated and rapidly evolving market, while supporting discovery and growth for 4,500 retailers and 8,000 brands.
This role required operating consumer-facing platforms at massive SEO-driven scale, balancing performance, content richness, regulatory constraints, and partner monetization.
Consumer Platform Re-Architecture for SEO at Scale
I orchestrated a ground-up re-architecture of Leafly’s consumer platforms to support extreme SEO-driven traffic patterns and rapid content evolution.
Key architectural initiatives included: • Transition to headless, API-driven frontends decoupled from backend content and commerce systems • Aggressive use of edge and CDN caching to serve high-volume read traffic with minimal origin load • Fine-grained cache invalidation strategies driven by content updates and market changes • Stateless frontend delivery optimized for horizontal scaling during traffic surges
This architecture allowed Leafly to absorb massive organic traffic spikes while maintaining consistent performance.
Search & Strain Discovery Platform Rebuild
My team delivered a 100% rebuild of Leafly’s search and strain discovery experience, redesigning both the underlying data models and the user-facing experience.
Key capabilities included: • High-performance search and filtering across thousands of strain profiles • Faceted discovery driven by attributes such as effects, terpene profiles, genetics, and availability • Relevance tuning based on user intent and behavioral signals • Scalable indexing strategies to support rapid content expansion
This rebuilt discovery layer became the backbone of user engagement and repeat visitation.
Web Performance & Core Web Vitals Optimization
Given Google’s emphasis on user experience, we optimized frontend performance around Core Web Vitals (LCP, CLS, FID): • Pre-rendered and cached pages for critical entry points • Optimized asset delivery and code splitting • Aggressive reduction of JavaScript execution and layout shifts • Performance budgets enforced in CI/CD pipelines
These efforts ensured fast, stable experiences across devices and networks.
Structured Data & Search Dominance Strategy
To secure durable search visibility, I led the implementation of advanced structured data and schema strategies: • Schema.org markup tailored to cannabis-specific entities • Rich result eligibility for strain profiles and educational content • Canonicalization strategies to prevent duplicate content penalties • Programmatic page generation at scale with SEO-safe patterns
As a result, Leafly achieved dominant search rankings across more than 5,000 strain varieties, driving sustained organic growth.
Platform Impact & Business Outcomes
This work: • Drove acquisition and visibility for thousands of retailers and brands • Scaled Leafly’s audience growth through organic discovery • Improved engagement and retention through better discovery experiences • Enabled rapid experimentation without sacrificing SEO stability
By combining high-scale platform engineering, search relevance, and SEO-first architecture, the Audience Journey team delivered a durable growth engine for Leafly’s marketplace ecosystem.