Austin Barnes

Austin Barnes is the VP of Engineering at PLANOLY, a social media planning and analytics tool for content creators and businesses. Austin previously worked as the Director of Engineering, Foodnetwork.com at Discovery Inc from June 2015 to April 2021.

At Discovery, Austin led multiple global teams launching the Food Network Kitchen direct-to-consumer product on new platforms including web (foodnetwork.com), Roku, and web-based Connected TV reaching over 600k customers per month. Austin also built a team and launched the Food Network Kitchen subscription website in 8 weeks, including handling international team dependencies and information security reviews on a tight schedule to capture high holiday traffic – over 100k monthly visitors and $40k in recurring revenue in the first month. In addition, Austin managed 4 engineering teams including engineering managers on all 8 of the organization’s lifestyle websites such as foodnetwork.com, hgtv.com, and food.com which receive over 60mm monthly visitors. Austin also implemented new SPA based API-driven frontend architecture across lifestyle brands, contributing the approach to a cross-company frontend architectural roadmap. Furthermore, Austin regularly led team quarterly capacity planning, project estimation, and prioritization efforts with product managers and executives. Lastly, they aligned team hiring practices with new Discovery guidelines and oversaw and participated in the interview process for over 50 candidates.

Their manager is Christina Martinez, CEO. and Brandon McAnsh - Engineering Manager reports to Austin Barnes. Some of their coworkers include Djordje Jankovic - VP of Product, Kenny Teng - Co-Founder & CTO, and Christina Wells - VP of People.