As Director of Engineering with Phase2, Steven Merrill is instrumental in propelling into its position as a leader in Drupal architecture and performance. His work in cloud-based hosting architecture, sophisticated caching structures, and optimization power tools like Varnish and Scala have served to push our projects past the perceived limits of Drupal performance.

In addition to site performance, Steven has implemented and evangelized innovations in leveraging Jenkins (formerly known as Hudson) job automation, including continuous integration and a spectrum of automated testing approaches. These automations yield substantial quality and efficiency benefits to clients including Zagat.com and TheStreet.

Steven Merrill is a frequent contributor to the Drupal community. He contributed and maintains the SWFAddress module, made significant contributions to Drupal 7's core Bartik theme and the Color module, and submits frequent patches to contributed modules on Drupal.org.

Steven's acumen, however, extends beyond that of technology. He is recognized and respected as an exceptionally eloquent speaker and skilled mentor. Steven leverages his background as a university instructor to break down advanced concepts and lead others with practical implementation advice. His audiences range from industry conference attendees to internal client development teams, to peers at local meetups and camps.