Jun 2022 – Apr 2023 · 10 mos · Los Angeles Metropolitan Area

• Leading engineering teams focused on improving end-to-end advertiser experiences

May 2016 – Oct 2017 · 1 yr 5 mos

• Leading our newly formed Ad Technology group that is a hybrid team made up of engineering teams, product management and ad operations. Focused on brining scalable ad products to market that delight our OEM and Dealer partners.
• Areas of focus:
• Recruitment and development of engineering and product teams
• Leading ad tech platform system design/architecture
• Evolution of Ad Solutions product that achieved a $15M run rate in under 1yr
• Strategic GTM planning with sales and marketing leadership
• Led move from in-house Ad Order Mgmt. system to Operative and YieldX

Jun 2015 – May 2016 · 11 mos

• Charged with creating a brand new function at Edmunds focused on scaling our ad revenue through innovative technology methods. Leading hybrid team of engineering and product management.
• Areas of focus:
• Development of a native ad authoring & dynamic creative optimization platform
• Programmatic optimization via analytics and header bidding techniques
• Using audience extension to monetize our valuable audience beyond Edmunds
• Automation of ad trafficking and billing procedures

Jun 2013 – Jun 2015 · 2 yrs

• Responsible for leading our Software Architecture & Data Operations organizations. Our Software Architecture group is responsible for building out many of the capabilities/frameworks all software and product teams here at Edmunds leverage such as:
• Data Service API's (Java, REST, etc)
• Online experimentation (A/B testing)
• Application monitoring & performance (statsd, graphite & seyren)
• Ratings & Reviews API's
• Predictive modeling/analysis
• Messaging (ActiveMQ, Thrift, etc)
• Various self-service custom internal tooling
• We are also responsible for developing the system architecture that supports our Price Promise program, which is comprised of a toolset that allows Dealers to set prices on VIN's, view analytics of how they are performing, etc.
• Our Data Operations org. is a new undertaking for me that began in 2014 and is aimed at creating better alignment between how we acquire/manage the data and the products on our site that utilize this data. For too long Content Ops was a "silo" that was not integrated into the larger org. We are also very focused on automating workloads so the team can focus on higher order work.

Jan 2010 – Jan 2013 · 3 yrs

• In addition to my responsibilities as Director of Software Architecture, I also took responsibility of our front-end engineering team which is responsible for building out most of the pages you see on our site using CSS, javascript and HTML.
• During this time I also led up a new team that was tasked with either purchasing or developing an online experimentation platform (aka AB testing). In the end we looked at all the vendors and chose to build our own from scratch so it would cleanly integrate with our custom CMS and provide the features our front end engineers needed to assemble tests quickly and the reporting/analytics so our product owners could determine if a test was successful or not. A write up on this project can be found here: http://technology.edmunds.com/2014/04/4-reasons-to-deploy-website-testing.html

Jan 2007 – Jan 2010 · 3 yrs

• Led both onshore and offshore development teams in migrating our data services layer away from Oracle DB to Oracle Coherence which is a NoSQL in-memory data grid. This included developing a entirely new service layer that other development teams depended, as a major re-write of our site was happening concurrently. As part of this migration we also developed a publishing platform/messaging bus utilizing Apache ActiveMQ/Camel and Thrift (serialization protocol) to allow data to be published from internal data stores out to the data services layer that powers our live site.
• During this same time we developed a CMS that now powers the entire Edmunds.com site to move away from a 3rdParty proprietary CMS that had been in place for years.
• In addition to this above development activities I also evangelized various Agile practices through out the company such as Test Driven Development (TDD) through presentations and and was the first person at the company to figure out how to scale my teams using a combination of full-time and offshore development resources.

Jan 2004 – Jan 2007 · 3 yrs

• Designed data access layer for InsideLine using Spring service proxies to decouple web app from service layer. Spring service proxies allow other spring clients to interact with only an interface and spring actually wires up the plumbing using JNDI and Java Dynamic Proxies. Data access was powered using Hibernate and Oracle. This was the first system that utilized Spring at Edmunds.
• As part of the InsideLine project I also developed a custom flash video player that could stream content from our CDN Vitalstream. I designed an XML playlist spec that a 3rd Party Flash developer used to implement the actual player and I built a set of API’s that the player would interact with over HTTP to get the actual XML playlist to power the video’s content.
• Led implementation of our site migration to Day Communique 3.x, which ended up being an effort on my side to performance tune their platform with their engineers.