Princeton University

UCLA

Harvard School

VP Engineering at Verifi

Lead a global technology team of 160 people across 4 sites delivering class leading dispute management solutions for merchants of all sizes. Migrated from Verifi data center to Visa data center while keeping the lights on. Grew business from $55M to $142M / year with the development of Rapid Dispute Resolution and Compelling Evidence 3.0.  Guided Verifi to a secure target architecture employing Spring Boot, K8, Kafka, Tableau, MySQL, React to meet best of breed and Visa best practices.

Verifi Inc.

VP of Engineering

Technical Lead and VP of Engineering for Resale in the Marketplace.  I have also led the Reserve Abuse Program where we have focused on combating automated abuse of our systems by bots.  We have developed sophisticated multi-tiered approaches to this problem with CDNs, bot-mitigation products, queues, machine-learning, and system re-architecture. Additionally I implemented a number of anti-Fraud measures including NuData scoring for Accertify, 3DS for primary ticket sales and realtime fraud blocking saving millions of dollars in chargeback fraud.

Ticketmaster

VP Engineering

Technical leadership of "the fun carrier" - integrating messing, voice and gaming in novel application.  Focusing on growth and needle moving technical projects. Stabilized a chaotic dev team and practice, helped reduce COGS 40% while shrinking down team size to become EBITDA positive for first time in company history. Initiated B2B line of business that accounts for over 10% of gross revenue.

textPlus, Inc.

Chief Technology Officer of start up focused on parking payment solutions.  Bringing convenience to the parking industry for owners and consumers. Developed a custom solution using Agile/RAD processes to handle monthly parking using industry specific business rules.  Handled multiple payment processors including custom ACH.  Process more than $100K/mo in transactions through the system.

ParqCity, Inc.

I provide ongoing advice to Storitz on best practices and deep technical details on interfacing with storage operations systems. I proffer strategy on how to best apply technology to the Self-Storage industry.

Storitz Inc.

Technology Advisor

The most advanced way to rent or reserve self-storage online.  Storitz provides a way to find and compare self-storage in your area online.  It includes the best offers and prices available.

As CTO, I built the system from scratch using cutting edge technologies under a very short timeframe.  The Storitz system provides a sophisticated virtual inventory coupled with near-real time data from storage operators.  The site incorporates an advanced AJAX map and searches.  The pricing algorithms pull in the complex offers to create the most accurate pricing model in the industry.

High frequency trading platform venue connectivity specialist.  Experience implementing market data feeds and order entry gateways for numerous electronic trading venues.

Madison Tyler LLC

Software Engineer

Developed connectivity software for High Frequency trading including order gateways and market data receivers.  Implemented low latency systems to improve company bottom line.  Implemented solutions for options, equities, foreign exchange, treasury and commodity asset classes.  

•	Firsthand knowledge of protocols and nuances of major US equity exchanges and ECNs including NYSE/AMEX, BATS, NASDAQ (incl PHLX/BSE), EDGA/X
•	Firsthand knowledge of protocols and nuances of Canadian equity and futures exchanges and ATSs including Chi-X, TSX, Alpha, MX (SOLA/SAIL).
•	Firsthand knowledge of protocols and nuances of European exchanges Xetra (VALUES and ETS/EBS), Eurex, BME (Barcelona), LSE, MTA (Milan), Turquoise, Oslo (SAIL/SOLA)
•	Firsthand knowledge of protocols and nuances of commodity exchanges CME and ICE
•	Firsthand knowledge of protocols and nuances of currency exchange Currenex
•	Background in building/running systems that must comply with RegNMS and other complications associated with US Equities.
•	Background in use of NASDAQ protocols like MOLD, SOUP and others for internal data use in a distributed order taking and market data system.

EWT, LLC

I was the Technical owner of Inventory Engineering group and managed two groups (Pipeline and Refinery) and zTools.  One was focused on backend processing and the other was focused on web based tools serving the Enterprise.
I was instrumental in bringing Java best practices to the group, aligning with Enterprise practices and defining technical direction for Java development.  I built coherent and functioning team, with track record of delivery.
During my time, I spearheaded two Enterprise wide initiatives that helped transform key data structures in the company (enabling International Attribution, and supporting a Taxonomy service for centralized category data).
Independently, I investigated and embraced Machine Learning techniques for automated classification of data using SVMs.

ShopZilla

Sr. Director Technology

I managed the J2EE development group and the configuration management group at a Director level.  I had 10 direct reports including intermediate managers.  My responsibilities include the relationship management of our offshore partner, Satyam with a total of 30 associates onsite and offshore.

We did a major replatforming of a legacy application to modern technology using a co-development strategy with our partner.  Zenith moved from a legacy client server system to a Java n-tier system for claims processing.

I was part of this effort for over 2 years, progressing from a Technical Architect position to Development Director.  I took a dysfunctional group and transformed it into a smooth delivery team with 3 major releases under our belts and a user base of over 1000 in our enterprise.

My individual repsonsibilities included career development and management for my direct reports, strategic vision for the development team, strategic vision for sourcing, planning at an enterprise level and close work with the CIO and Senior management team.

Zenith Insurance

Director of Development

I co-founded WebEasy as a hosting company that branched into services.  We started before the Internet bubble and organically grew from 2 people to over 15 people at our height.  

WebEasy specialized in 1st round and Angel round technology for Internet startups.  We built technology solutions until the startups could staff to take over.

Our successes included early adoption and technical innovation in n-tier Java implementations including eParties from eCompanies, HSX, e24/7, RocketRadio, Ceiva and others.

We serviced local clients in the Santa Monica/Los Angeles area.  As CTO, I guided WebEasy to what eventually became industry standard architectures to achieve rapid development, robust and maintainable systems, and highly scalable solutions.

Areas of competance included:
-Java and n-tier architectures
-High scalability design
-Credit card transaction gateways
-OFX (Open Financial eXchange) technology
-Scalable system design

WebEasy

CTO/Founder

Custom solutions for difficult problems - expertise in high frequency trading systems, large and complex internet sites.  WNX.com provides technology strategy and solutions for software development.  We have extensive experience in both the financial industry as well as large internet sites as well as early stage start-up companies.

Technology strategy, team and system evaluation, RFP generation and responses, software best practices are some of our offered services.

WNX.com

Consultant

Developed P7 protocol in C for OSI stack.

ISOCOR

Software Developer

I was the 6th hire at Trillium and worked on various products including SS7 MTP Level 2, and TCAP, Siemens drivers for ISDN, MOS operating system, System services and revisions to SVCs for X.25.  I developed many of the core architectural principals for writing portable C code that became the company standard across all products.

I moved on to be the only sales engineer for Trillium working for the VP of sales.  In this role I managed 7 international distributors and our domestic sales with all presales technical support.  I used my deep technical understanding of our software architecture to guide sales solutions for multinational companies like Samsung, Qualcomm, and many others.

Trillium Digital Systems

Engineer

Developed custom source code cross referencing system in ANSI-C for use as tool by dBase III+ team.  Analyzed security or demo software to see if it could be cracked to allow full access.

Michael Amster