New York Institute of Technology-Old Westbury

The City College of New York

Vice President of Software Development

Walnut Creek, California, United States

Lead and scale the Digital teams for innovation in Product Experiences.

Undisclosed major retailer

Vice President Of Software Development

Connected Commerce (CoCo) platform enables Target omnichannel commerce (in-store and online) to offer bundled products, services, and subscriptions that require service activation.  Engineering at CoCo operates in small mission-focused teams that are tasked with complex business problems. They've got depth and breadth across the technologies we use to run the CoCo platform at scale.  The team contributed to Target's advanced software posture, which allowed the company to handle major events like a 500% increase in a curbside pickup during the pandemic.

-  Lead and grow teams of over 30 passionate engineers in our San Francisco office.
-  Provide support and guidance that enables the teams to self-organize and to achieve sustained high velocity and predictability.
-  Plan against and pivot the team for new challenges that arise during development.
-  Foster growth and diversity, ensuring that each new hire significantly improves the team.
-  Collaborate with leadership across Product Management, Architecture, DevOps, and QA to deliver high-value products that solve urgent business needs while designed in a sustainable way, so the value continues to deliver in the long term.
-  Collaborate with business stakeholders and technical leads throughout the enterprise on the business and technical architecture.
-  Drive zero-defect culture throughout a custom Agile engineering life-cycle.
-  Evaluate the current backlog for releases and develop a strategy to get the engineering team back on track.
-  Increase the consistency and timeliness of new releases with a focus on increasing efficiency while maintaining quality.

Target

Director Of Technology

OneLogin provides a cloud-based identity and access management (IAM) solution that offers single sign-on (SSO), making it easier for companies to secure and manage access to web applications both in the cloud and behind the firewall.  Led development of the major revenue generating flagship products: OneLogin Desktop, Mobile Launcher, and OTP.

- Responsible for anticipating, enabling, and mapping business strategies to a high-performing technology execution model delivered by several teams with a mandate to bring new innovative software solutions to OneLogin’s portfolio
- Collaborated with an Architect to drive design framework and implementation of the first micro-services architecture
- Partnered with the Technology Leadership Team to drive the design and phased implementation of the next generation platform.  Worked closely with product management on product vision and requirements; with the CTO office on technology strategy and architecture; with professional services to ensure predictable and repeatable configuration and deployment; and with the leadership team to develop vision and strategy driving processes, technology and people management initiatives.
- Adopted Agile principles to exploring new solutions.  Organized SCRUM teams and trained technical leads and project managers in how to run ceremonies and manage artifacts effectively.
- Owned product development and produce regular, high-quality releases. Ensured status is measurable and transparent.
- Key driver for the transition of the organization from an isolated development and release model to Continuous Integration (CI) and low-latency releases.   Worked with leadership to identify continuous improvement opportunities for software development, design and engineering areas.

OneLogin, Inc.

Director of Engineering

Vungle (acquired by Blackstone) is the leading in-app video ad platform for performance marketers, which serves ~4B+ video ads per month on over 200M unique devices. 45000+ mobile apps and games use Vungle's SDK including companies like EA, Ubisoft, Zynga, King, Microsoft.  Built and led mobile engineering unit that developed and supported the flagship mobile ad product (iOS, Android and Windows).

Vungle

Director Of Engineering, Mobile Platform

Lead the engineering team to create consistent, modern, personal, fast, endless, intuitive and beautiful experiences in the Shopping area of this social e-tailer.

-  Work closely with product owners and other engineering teams to make an optimum and timely feature and technical choices that bring a maximum business advantage.
-  Established an effective Agile process, which empowers the team to ship frequently, by identifying obstacles that are stopping engineers from unlocking their full potential and helping them to navigate organizational, process, and people-based challenges.
-  Successfully leveraged off-shore developers in Russia to re-launch new mobile site in 3 months using node.js and rendr.js technologies, which produced 10x performance improvements over the previous RoR site.  This doubled the revenue due to an increase in page views and a decrease in the bounce rate.
-  Directed endless performance tuning sprints focused on reducing latency to make the mobile shopping experience blazingly fast.  Collaborate with the DevOps team to add instrumentation and monitoring to support production environments.

Technologies: Ruby on Rails/node.js /PostgreSQL /Joyent/Pivotal Tracker/GitHub/SOA

ModCloth

Sr. Engineering Manager, Shopping Platform

Managed engineering team responsible for the development of a multi-channel CRM tool for Customer Service with homegrown chat and VoIP capabilities and the Netflix Help Center.  Through the use of highly integrated custom software and enterprise-class cloud-based technologies, the engineering team has enabled Netflix to reduce operational costs without sacrificing the impact on the superior customer service, which is consistently ranked among the best in the US.

-  Defined the vision for new integrated CRM that would improve customer service agent's productivity and quality of service across multiple channels: voice, chat, internal/external web sites and streaming devices. The new UI, modeled after Facebook’s News Feed, displays every customer history as a trail of “stories” about the issue and what people have done to resolve it.
-  Redesigned customer-facing Help Center (<a href="http://help.netflix.com">help.netflix.com</a>) as a major hub for self-service, which greatly improved call containment saving organization time and money.
-  Lead VoIP-CRM integration, which embeds telephony functionality directly into the CRM platform. Integrated ACD identifies incoming phone calls from customers, instantly recalling data from an organization's CRM system. When a customer call comes in, the agents receive a pop-up window on their desktop with a complete picture of the customer's relationship with the company.  This feature will slash telephony costs while providing new and innovative features and give operational managers a continuous and reliable performance tracking system.

-  Define the UX vision through the leadership and cultivation of cross-disciplinary Application team including Interaction Designers, Visual Designers, User Researchers, and Web Engineers.

Technologies: Java /Cassandra/AWS/FreeSWITCH/Asgard/Jenkins/Jira/Perforce/SOA

Netflix

Sr. Engineering Manager, Call Center Technology

Kleintech is a start-up delivering applications that allow people to express taste by building virtual, 'followable' portfolios of the products they love (<a href="http://www.tastejive.com">www.tastejive.com</a> and <a href="http://www.frugar.com.br">www.frugar.com.br</a>). Responsible for building and driving an agile global engineering organization (US, Brazil, and Russia). Focused on leading the continued growth and development of the engineering team, building the best products in an environment where talented engineers love to work, and keeping products ahead of the competition.

-  Worked with product management and leadership on the product strategy and the product roadmap.
-  Provided day-to-day people and project leadership to the team of highly talented developers working in a dynamic customer-driven environment
-  Defined the technology platform and crafted the technology strategy to achieve the company's goals
-  Identified technology trends and evolving social behavior that may support or impede the success of the business
-  Planned, recruited and managed a world-class development team
-  Created an agile process by adopting practical features of agile development methodologies: user stories, sprint planning meetings, test-driven development, automated build, and rapid iterations
-  Established governance processes of direction and control to ensure that objectives are achieved, risks are managed appropriately and the organization’s resources are used responsibly
-  Coordinated work of product managers, designers, engineers, researchers, PR and marketing in creating a best-of-breed product
-  Characterized analysis and design activities, set standards for product specification and system models, set schedules and manage expectations for product launches
-  Provided technical oversight and continually assess the skill sets and capabilities of the onshore and offshore development teams located in Brazil and Russia
-  Created a resilient infrastructure and establish a culture of accountability and quality delivery

Technologies: Java/MySQL

Kleintech

Vice President of Engineering (Founding Member)

Teksera is a boutique San Francisco-based technical consultancy focused on creating custom solutions to help companies drive innovation, productivity & collaboration.  Teksera delivers a fluid, individualized web and mobile application development program that transforms and streamlines business while creating efficiencies that elevate the business to greater levels. Our customized open source-based solution is a proven, innovative, functional and adaptable revenue and profit generator that allows businesses to expand beyond boundaries of traditional means through the unique design and strategic, effective marketing that is sure to boost sales! We apply automated online technology to enhance the consumer experience while driving down the operational cost.

Teksera has broad expertise in software architecture, QA, project management, technology strategy; we have extensive expertise in managing high-performance engineering teams and effective use of off-shore services.

Decades of management expertise in building high-performance teams of expert global engineering talent led to creating a scalable best-of-breed team for on-demand delivery using Agile principles. We have unequaled off-shore resources of the most “fit” developers and architects and a culture of creative problem-solving, intellectual design, fast-paced development and passionate product delivery for our clients. Utilizing my keen eye for design and engineering, I architect the customer's dreams into a functional, pixel-perfect reality.

A sample of custom apps that we built:
-  ERP: <a href="http://www.oenovaults.com">http://www.oenovaults.com</a> and <a href="http://m.oenovaults.com">http://m.oenovaults.com</a> (adopted OpenERP/Odoo, PhoneGap)
-  eCommerce: <a href="https://www.modcloth.com/mobile">https://www.modcloth.com/mobile</a>
-  Mobile: <a href="http://www.vungle.com">http://www.vungle.com</a> <a href="http://www.rewinery.com">http://www.rewinery.com</a>      <a href="http://www.idealseatmlb.com">http://www.idealseatmlb.com</a>
-  Games: <a href="http://www.travelingdoll.com">http://www.travelingdoll.com</a>
-  Social: <a href="https://www.facebook.com/frugar.brasil">https://www.facebook.com/frugar.brasil</a>

Teksera

Principal

Hired to bring start-up innovation to a prestigious government research laboratory renown for sequencing the first human genome.  The JGI is an R&D organization established and funded by the DOE to provide high-throughput, large-scale genomic sequencing and genomic research services to the scientific community. The Informatics department supports over 300 scientists and administrators in multiple locations and includes cross-functional teams of engineers and scientists responsible for developing and maintaining enterprise software and infrastructure, including project management and LIMS applications, data analysis pipelines, web portal, IT and System Operations.

-  Transformed Informatics department from waterfall silos to agile product line-oriented teams, re-ignited stalled development efforts and shortened development lifecycle from years to weeks.
-  Planned and delivered an entirely new platform capable of meeting JGI future needs, turning technology into a long-term asset. Replaced antiquated applications with enterprise Java systems based on the new service-oriented architecture (SOA), which formed the foundation for the scientific Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) strategy.
-  Consolidated fragmented applications into a strategic portal. Developed a comprehensive web communication strategy that promoted JGI vision, mission and strategic goals. The new enhancements extended the institute’s on-line brand and were highly regarded as a major accomplishment by the DOE and scientists.
-  Streamlined business operations by developing smart business automation applications on Ruby and Jira.
-  Oversaw the design and implementation of the new infrastructure for the High-Performance Computing (HPC) data center, which quadrupled existing capacity to 1.4PB storage, 3160 CPU SGE cluster on 10GPS WAN with tight SLA restrictions.
-  Aggressively recruited technology experts to introduce modern architectural skills.

Joint Genome Institute (DOE Office of Science)

Department Head, Informatics (CIO)

The Community Division of CNET Networks is responsible for the <a href="http://Webshots.com">Webshots.com</a>, <a href="http://AllYouCanUpload.com">AllYouCanUpload.com</a>, <a href="http://Chow.com">Chow.com</a>, and <a href="http://Consumating.com">Consumating.com</a> web properties.  Responsible for managing engineering organization delivering well-respected <a href="http://www.webshots.com">www.webshots.com</a> photo/video sharing site averaging 26MM unique monthly visitors, 1.5MM (peak) daily photo uploads and over 500MM online photos. Served as a key member of the executive team.

-  Lead successful effort to stabilize and scale the Webshots infrastructure and applications.
-  Re-architected Webshots from legacy Perl FastCGI to Java/JSP and MySQL, which allowed growth from 23MM page views per day to over 60MM page views per day in just over four months.
-  Built the technology team from scratch, implementing agile QA and release processes that supported a robust weekly product release pipeline.
-  Developed a proactive product engineering process that gets ahead of the demands, and operate from a strategic planning position.
-  Augmented local technical staff with off-shore development and QA teams.

Technologies: <a href="http://Java/.NET/C#/MySQL/Caucho">Java/.NET/C#/MySQL/Caucho</a> Resin/CVS/Bugzilla/MemCahed/Hibernate

CNET Networks

Vice President of Technology

Managed two engineering teams responsible for critical areas of the complex infrastructure: Application Persistence (DAL) and Data Messaging. These technologies allowed eBay Java platform to scale.

-  Took over two major projects and re-ignited stalled development effort within weeks. Applied extensive knowledge of Enterprise Server architecture, design patterns and leading technologies to leading development of robust and scalable persistence and messaging platforms.
-  Founded an infrastructure team responsible for development and support of Data Access Layer (DAL), a highly-scalable OO framework for data access used by application developers throughout
-  A second, messaging team, developed a robust messaging infrastructure that provided live data feed for the new eBay Billing System.
-  Hired aggressively 12 engineers to ensure appropriate workload balance and ability to execute to plan. The team integrated well within engineering organization and provided engineering and production support for all persistence-related issues virtually 24x7 and trained over 100 application developers within 60 projects.

Technologies: Java/J2EE/Oracle/IBM WebSphere/Rational Rose/TogetherJ

eBay

Senior Engineering Manager

Joined an early-stage on-line credit card start-up to manage development and growth of the Technology organization through a successful IPO.  NextCard became the leading issuer of credit card on the Internet with largest affiliate marketing network and was named No. 1 by Gomez, the most visited site by Media Metrix and Top 50 financial website by Money Magazine.

-  Realized comprehensive CRM solution composed of out-bound and in-bound systems featuring real-time credit risk analytics, workflow automation, and CTI to provide powerful tools for automating enterprise processes and implementing knowledge management.
-  The eCRM system provided customers and customer-facing employees (Loyalty Marketing, Risk Management) with consistent panoramic view of the customer, which was instrumental in winning and keeping profitable customers by aligning customer facing processes, technologies and people with corporate strategy.
-  Reduced campaign turnaround time from months to near real time and generated $40MM of added revenue in FY2001 and reduced processing time from weeks to days, resulting in a 25% decrease in booking cost per account.
-  Designed extensible distributed architecture that served as a platform for several successive releases focused on back-to-front and cross-channel integration
-  Managed enterprise code reuse effort based on a multi-tier application architecture that structured objects into a hierarchy of technology layers. This initiative resulted in faster and more efficient development of flexible, reliable applications. Continuously enhanced the value of reusable assets by capturing developer expertise and by identifying assets requiring modification to improve their re-usability. Bolstered developer confidence in quality and usability of reusable components by ensuring that organizational standards for documentation and testing are met before assets are published.

Technologies: Java/Windows NT/BEA Weblogic/Oracle/SQL Server/Rational Rose/Perforce

NextCard

TDS was a pioneering vendor of electronic Hospital Information Systems that supported many health care applications including order entry, result reporting, medication tracking and scheduling, vital signs, flow sheets, active patient care, nursing support systems, patient management, laboratory orders and result reporting, pharmacy, and charting. Lead long-term program to re-engineer software processes.

-  Led the analysis teams in developing enterprise-level use case and object models providing the conceptual framework for evolving legacy products into modern client/server technology.
-  Provided motivation and experience to the ANSII Health Level 7 (HL7) standards committee in adopting OO methodology. Designed training curriculum, facilitated modeling sessions.

Technologies: C++/Visual Basic/WindowsNT/MS Access/PLATINUM (Computer Associates) Paradigm Plus

TDS Healthcare Systems

Senior Applications Architect

Wells Fargo Nikko Investment Advisors (WFNIA, now Barclays Global Investors) offers institutional investment services via index fund management using quantitative techniques. Managed a team that developed an investment management system featuring sophisticating analytics for optimizing equity crossing between index funds. The new system substantially reduced processing time and increased trade matching rates from 10% to over 70% with zero transaction cost.

Technologies: Ada, VAX/VMS, Sybase, Cadre Teamwork

Barclays Global Investors (Wells Fargo Nikko Investment Advisers)

Engineering Manager

Conceptualized, architected, and deployed IPSIS global remote service utility for enabling on-line diagnostics and troubleshooting of customer’s MRI systems. The rapid success of this project led to my expanded responsibilities at the Siemens HQ in Erlangen, Germany, including the deployment of over 200 VAX minis and corporate-wide migration to Ingres DBMS.

Technologies: Fortran, VAX/VMS, Ingres

Jacob Golder