Dec 2018 – Jan 2020 · 1 yr 1 mo · Los Angeles, California, United States

• Verishop is a multi-category e-commerce destination to discover and shop for authentic products from quality brands, with the convenience you've come to expect. We do Free 1-Day Shipping (no membership fees or minimums), Free Returns and 24x7 Customer Service.
• In my role as VP of Technology, I head our Engineering, Product Management & Design, Data and IT teams, reporting to the CEO.
• As one of the first employees, architected and bootstrapped our technology platform from zero to a cutting-edge launch-ready retail e-commerce operation in 6 months.
• Defined our Technology strategy and its evolution, given the current and future needs of the business.
• Hired and built out our founding team of entrepreneurial engineers, product managers and designers.
• Defined and shaped our product strategy, objectives and roadmap for verishop.com, our iOS App and internal applications.
• Defined and shaped our product development process across product, engineering and design.

Sep 2017 – Sep 2018 · 1 yr · Greater Los Angeles Area

Oct 2016 – Dec 2018 · 2 yrs 2 mos

• Started out as the 2nd engineer and 10th employee, with 75K customers. Since then we’ve grown to a Billion-Dollar Company and gotten acquired by Unilever (3rd largest CPG company in the world), with over 200 employees, 50 engineers and 3.2M customers.
• I’m grateful & humbled to have a front-row seat in this incredible journey as we forge ahead towards world domination.
• In my role as VP of Engineering, I head our Software Engineering organization - a team of 50 brilliant engineers, with some of the best tech talent in LA, who are building, scaling and evolving our proprietary high-volume Subscription E-Commerce & Content platforms at dollarshaveclub.com, the Front-end Experience, Web Tier, Subscription Billing, Fulfillment, Internal Tools including our in-house CRM system, the Infrastructure that hosts our technology platforms, Data Pipelines and Data Science capabilities.
• Here's an article where I describe our tech stack: http://highscalability.com/blog/2016/9/13/the-dollar-shave-club-architecture-unilever-bought-for-1-bil.html.
• More articles about DSC Engineering:
• Forbes: Hiring Software Engineers to Shave the World
• https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2017/04/24/hiring-software-engineers-to-shave-the-world/#1d3b78236604
• ZDNet: How Dollar Shave Club went from viral marketer to engineering powerhouse
• http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-dollar-shave-club-went-from-viral-marketer-to-engineering-powerhouse/
• CIO.com: Dollar Shave Club grooming AWS cloud services for smoother growth
• http://www.cio.com/article/3123543/cloud-computing/dollar-shave-club-grooming-aws-cloud-services-for-smoother-growth.html
• Timmy Award: Best Tech Startup in Los Angeles:
• http://www.techinmotionevents.com/blog/post/2016/03/29/first-annual-los-angeles-timmy-awards-recognizes-regions-best-tech-employers-and-managers
• #25 on Deloitte’s North America Technology Fast 500 List
• Data Science at DSC: https://www.datanami.com/2017/09/14/data-science-behind-dollar-shave-club/

Oct 2015 – Oct 2016 · 1 yr

• Built teams around systems that I had architected and built Version 1s of, reporting to our COO.
• Led a high performing team of 21 entrepreneurial engineers.
• Responsible for, architected and built teams to evolve:
• Our Core Backend Platform:
• Our Web Backend Tier for dollarshaveclub.com
• Our Subscription Billing system, processing 3.2M active subscriptions and $140M in annual revenue (publicly disclosed numbers).
• Our Fulfillment System, processing ALL our outgoing shipments.
• Our Marketing Automation platform, sending over 16M emails a month.
• Our CRM system, used by all our customer service agents.
• Our Data Systems
• Our Cloud Infrastructure & deployment pipelines
• Partnered with Product & Project Managers to ideate, scope and resource projects appropriately to build an MVP that meets the defined business KPIs.
• Partnered on the Technology side with our Operations team to help launch our very own in-house fulfillment centers in CA and OH.
• Architected our high-volume e-commerce funnel to support traffic from Dollar Shave Club’s first SuperBowl commercial and led the tactical cross-functional team of engineers working on this project. The infrastructure *successfully* handled the deluge of traffic during our ad.
• Represented the Engineering team during the due diligence process as part of our acquisition by Unilever, interviewed by an independent panel of experts who certified the Dollar Shave Club tech stack as being capable of supporting our fast growing business.
• Championed the move to a Microservices-based architecture and drove awareness as to why it’s a top priority.
• Led our PCI Level-1 Compliance efforts.
• Hired and on-boarded 11 additional engineers, doubling the size of the Backend team to 21 engineers according to biz needs.
• Mentored engineers in Technical Leadership.
• Pushed for a concerted effort to build the DSC Engineering Brand in the Tech Community.

Oct 2012 – Sep 2015 · 2 yrs 11 mos

• 2nd Engineer and 10th Employee.
• Led the development of our high volume e-commerce core technology platform, reporting to our SVP of Engineering.
• Led and managed a high-performing team of 11 backend engineers. Evaluated and interviewed potential candidates to hire for our team. Helped grow the Backend team from 2 engineers to 11 engineers.
• Responsible for key, foundational technology platform decisions. Migrated us from Magento to our custom E-Commerce platform when we had to start scaling up.
• Architected & built our scalable event-based subscription-billing platform processing ALL our e-commerce revenue of over $140M (publicly disclosed number), that continues to scale with our hockey-stick growth pattern.
• Architected and built our data models and the information flow between various components of our system.
• Architected & built our high-volume in-house marketing automation platform sending over 16M emails a month.
• Architected, built and managed our highly available, fault-tolerant, secure and scalable AWS infrastructure.
• Implemented machine-learning algorithms to help analyze customer satisfaction.
• Designed, implemented and managed our web analytics frameworks (Snowplow).
• Designed, developed and maintained our Data Warehouse in Redshift.
• Designed, developed and maintained various data pipelines, including ETLing accounting data to our ERP system, JD Edwards.
• Interfaced with Directors from other departments and formulated, evaluated and prioritized projects based on the business objectives.
• Evaluated 3rd party software vendors and decided if they were a good fit for our company.
• Periodically monitored the performance of our applications and servers and fine-tuned them for higher throughput and faster response times in order to increase conversion rates.
• Kick-started process improvements to move us to Continuous Deployments.
• Explored opening a new Engineering Office in Vancouver, BC.

Sep 2011 – Oct 2012 · 1 yr 1 mo · Santa Monica, CA

• Second hire on the engineering team.
• Git evangelist – mentored and converted the engineering team from SVN to Git.
• I worked full-stack on the web front-end as well as on the back-end components, depending on what needs to be done.
• I worked on multiple iterations of the map browsing experience on the front-end that allowed users to view different restaurant specials based on their location.
• I was also the system administrator and did DevOps and release engineering.
• I setup our Resque worker-queue framework for performing background jobs and I wrote background jobs for the framework. Jobs included dynamic business listing update depending on which parts of the map are frequently viewed on the front-end – web and mobile, async email and processing users’ Facebook likes and check-ins when they log in.
• I worked on periodic data ingestion and processing of 17 million records of business information into our database.
• Annotated the site with Kissmetrics to track key business metrics.
• Worked with remote developers.

Oct 2010 – May 2012 · 1 yr 7 mos · Los Angeles, CA

• Responsible for maintaining the grad.usc.edu server, which was used by all USC departments for PhD program administration.
• Introduced Virtualization using Hyper-V, moved our Web Servers to the new environment.
• Built a staging environment for applications to be tested before being deployed.
• Maintained & administered Active Directory, GPOs, File & Print server, MS SQL Database Server, IIS servers.
• Responsible for maintaining our backups and our physical rack servers at USC’s Colo facility.
• Helped provide end-user IT support
• Also worked on the Graduate School’s website.

Aug 2010 – Oct 2010 · 2 mos · Los Angeles, CA

• Web developer at the Marshall School of Business at USC.

Aug 2010 – Apr 2011 · 8 mos · Santa Monica, CA

• Cred.fm started off as a research project supported by kUSC. It soon won the USC Steven's Institute of Innovation's "Ideas Empowered" competition and was funded by USC and other angel investors. It is now setup as Credible Research Corporation. I worked on Cred.fm as part of my Directed Research.

Jul 2008 – Present · 17 yrs 9 mos · Houston, Texas, United States

• Wreally is a bootstrapped SaaS business I co-founded, where we build niche digital products in the business & developer productivity space. Some of our products have gotten significant traction and a lot of attention in the press.
• Given the lean, bootstrapped operation at Wreally, I wear any and all hats needed to build and sell our products, from software engineer to product manager, customer support, accountant, content writer and marketer.
• Our products include Codassium, Transcribe, Scribble, Frelay, Nudge, Pixza and more.
• Press:
• TechCrunch: Hiring Developers? Codassium Combines Collaborative Code Editing And Video Chat Into One Web App
• https://techcrunch.com/2013/04/10/hiring-developers-codassium-mashes-up-a-collaborative-code-editor-with-real-time-video-chat/
• Wired: WebRTC, Online Code Editor Team Up for Real-Time Coding [Codassium]
• https://www.wired.com/2013/05/webrtc-online-code-editor-team-up-for-real-time-coding/
• TheNextWeb: Transcribe: An awesome audio-transcription Web app for Chrome
• http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/08/04/transcribe-an-awesome-audio-transcription-web-app-for-chrome/
• Adweek: Best Free Interview Transcription Tools [Transcribe]
• http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/best-free-interview-transcription-tools/186227
• Journalism.co.uk: Tool of the week for journalists: Transcribe, a Chrome web app that saves time
• https://blogs.journalism.co.uk/2012/05/25/tool-of-the-week-for-journalists-transcribe-a-chrome-web-app-that-saves-time/