Experience

Balance Innovations, a Brink's Division

• United States
• Software Development
• 1 - 100 Employee

• Chief Technology Officer

  • Apr 2023 - Present

  Responsible for leading our LEAN/Agile software development teams that build and operate VeriBalance. I work with our product management and customer facing teams to set and manage expectations on the chronology of incremental releases that will be delivered to our customers.Responsible for the IT functions that keep our division operating. The VeriBalance product facilitates our fully managed cash solution Brink's Complete Enterprise. Through the optimizations and workflow standardization that VeriBalance brings to the cash office Brink's is able to make a simple promise: your retail operation will maintain just enough cash, will not run out and will have rapid access to the capital that deposit funds represent.While the promise is simple, the technology behind fulfilling this promise is rewarding to work with.Our teams manages development and operations of an AWS software stack that is natively event driven and serverless. Automation is key to our success and is the foundation of the guardrails that allow distributed decision making. I strongly believe that decisions around software deployment should be made as close to the information as is possible.Over the last four years we've invested heavily in education and training to support our transition from installed solutions to SaaS offerings. We now operate as a remote distributed team. Show less

• VP of Software Engineering

  • Feb 2019 - May 2023

  The organization is in the middle of a migration away from full stack, tenant specific installations to a cloud hosted, multi-tenant microservice architecture that is dominantly written in .net core for the backend and React JS for the component based front-end. The solution is native AWS with a strong preference for serverless and event driven solutions.We are on a DevOps journey, as many organizations are. I am proud to be in a spot where our architecture is built for continuous delivery. Our teams are able to deliver value to production at any time and typically deploy more than a dozen iterative changes into production every business day. Show less

• Store Virtualization Architect

  • Apr 2017 - Jan 2019

  Balance Innovation's technology stack includes integration of data from Point of Sale systems, self checkout units, smart safe systems, devices that receive and dispense currency, armored cars, currency/coin counting devices and other hardware that touches cash in a retail environment. The role of Store Virtualization architect is to bring all of this data together in a way that decouples physical hardware systems from the software solutions that drive cash operations in the retail enterprise.This role is in addition to my Team Lead and Senior Software Engineer roles. Show less

• Development Team Lead

  • Nov 2015 - Jan 2019

  Responsible for the VeriBalance Desktop product development team. This is the product that built the Balance Innovations company over the last 20 years. VeriBalance Desktop is an installed solution that operates on customer equipment to support large scale retail cash operations.

• Senior Software Engineer

  • Aug 2015 - Jan 2019

  Senior developer on the VeriBalance Desktop, the company's flagship product for retail cash reconciliation and tracking. The product is primarily a C++ Windows application built in Embarcadero C++ Builder 10 with supporting components and services written in C# using Visual Studio. Technical lead on integrating the VeriBalance Desktop with the VeriBalance Platform, Balance Innovation's cloud based product offerings. In this role I have the opportunity to draw on more than 25 years of experience in real time event driven distribution architectures to define and build a distributed data collection and delivery architecture for Balance Innovations. Show less



Generation Technologies Corporation

• Director of Software Development

  • Mar 2013 - Jun 2015

  - Matured requirements and planning process from dominantly reactionary to Agile cycle, establishing continuous engagement with stakeholders allowing the development team to rapidly respond to changes in the business focus.- Introduced Microsoft Team Foundation Server and application lifecycle tools for work item and code asset tracking which improved responsiveness on production support and increased the team’s ability to work concurrent projects. Personally installed and administered.- Created the internal support tool chain for support and operations using C#/.Net, WPF, WinForms, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Dynamics CRM SDK and the Microsoft Team Foundation Server SDK.- Understand single page application (SPA) development, JSON, Web Services, Silverlight, SOAP, REST, templated theming.- Understand mock implementations, dependency injection, unit testing.- Understand data normalization, stored procedures/functions, database design.- Understand Android and iOS development and release management.- Used Microsoft SQL Management Studio almost daily to evaluate production behaviors, confirm that new features were working top to bottom and to answer business questions.- Heavily involved in architectural design choices, data modeling, database schema design and APIs between layers of the company's software stack.- Represented company at trade shows, conferences, and on client calls.- Supervised team of six software developers building and running the NIMxchange broadcast quality video sharing platform for quick turnaround television news.- In 2014 3.5 million minutes of television news content was smoothly delivered to over 300 television stations with 99.999% up-time. Show less

• Director, Operations and Development

  • Apr 2007 - Mar 2013

  - Formalized tracking of customer interactions by deploying and integrating Microsoft Dynamics CRM and coded real-time dashboards for support team to provide insight into how systems were running. The CRM integration allowed for permissioned and reliable management of production configuration.- Designed and managed the implementation of an alerting backplane to notify operation staff to failures system-wide which allowed operations team to deal with issues, generally before they manifested as problems for users.- Managed the transition from racks of individual servers to an internal IaaS deployment of modern shared storage, shared computing VMWare environments and virtual networking. Reduced the space needs by half but provided ten times the computing capacities and increased efficiency- Managed staff, hiring, mentoring, coaching, retraining and releasing to keep the team's skills in line with the business needs and performance optimal.- Led the development team to significantly increase the resiliency of the system component by component to the point where major system upgrades were not visible to clients on the production platform. Show less



Melete Web Solutions

• United States
• IT Services and IT Consulting

• Principal

  • Sep 2006 - Dec 2014

  - Information systems solutions consulting. - Found and met with clients, understood needs, budgets and requirements. Managed the process and expectations through to delivery. - Web applications development and hosting using Apache/MySQL on Linux (LAMP). - Used the Drupal CMS to build sites that included simple brochure sites, e-commerce sites, business process sites, and forum/community sites. - Used PHP, SQL, Perl, Python, Bash. - Integrated with Google Maps API and openstreetmap.org. - Managed and configured Fedora Core and CentOS Servers to host client websites and email services. Show less



Savvis

• Business Consulting and Services

• Technical Vice President, Software Development

  • Nov 2005 - Apr 2007

  - Specification of a new CRM system to replace a deeply embedded legacy CRM. - Used XDoclet as part of the build process to automate generation of significant amount of the code required to create an EJB. Used Java J2EE and Unix Make. This change allowed the internal services team to focus on the delivery of business logic. - As-needed support for large-scale, cross-discipline projects in collaboration with head of development. - Specification of a new CRM system to replace a deeply embedded legacy CRM. - Used XDoclet as part of the build process to automate generation of significant amount of the code required to create an EJB. Used Java J2EE and Unix Make. This change allowed the internal services team to focus on the delivery of business logic. - As-needed support for large-scale, cross-discipline projects in collaboration with head of development.



Thomson Reuters

• Canada
• Software Development
• 700 & Above Employee

• VP, API Development

  • Mar 2004 - Oct 2005

  - Managed teams spread across wide geographic area, in St. Louis, Oak Brook, Kansas City, and Bangkok.- Built long-term plans for simplification of company's public APIs including initiating internal open source patterned API development. The Internal open source APIs initiative allowed dependent development teams within Reuters to be more responsive to their customers. Subversion used for code management.- Managed development of a major protocol upgrade, moving to flexible structured data model which allowed for wire optimizations to meet sub-millisecond delivery requirements for algorithmic trading.- Managed multiple software development teams responsible for publicly facing application programming interfaces (APIs) to Reuters' development platforms including RMDS, iFinance Platform, TIB, and Triarch. Show less

• VP, Architecture and Software Development Project Management

  • Apr 2001 - Mar 2004

  - Defined architectural improvements and changes across related development teams and oversaw implementations.- Oversaw the creation of a system-wide trading symbology cross reference service, which facilitated integration across systems. This translated to cost savings when acquired financial data delivery systems could be shut down.- Managed senior team of domain experts in technology group responsible for architecture and large-scale project implementation across real time data, news, and historical content delivery systems. Show less



Bridge Information Systems

• Financial Services
• 1 - 100 Employee

• Director, Data Feed Development

  • Feb 1998 - Apr 2001

  - Built development team of ten staff members, including hiring, training, and delegation to most appropriate tasks. - Used C and C++ to build a Windows NT based data feed server and programming SDK, which was built for Linux, HP-UX, Solaris 2.x, SunOS, AIX, OpenVMS and Windows NT. - Code Managed in Visual SourceSafe. - Tuned TCP/IP for high performance, including using Win32 thread pooling APIs. - Managed field issues on existing product versions while designing next major product version, BridgeFeed 4. - Integrated New York City-based Telesphere group into data feed development team after company was acquired by Bridge Information Systems along with client base. Managed staff developing under Solaris in C. - Administered Bridge’s combined financial data feed product and workstation terminal server. - Communicated with clients for development support, managed product documentation, planned with quality assurance team, and provided 24x7 support for operations group. - Trained internal teams as well as released scheduling and defect/enhancement prioritization. Show less



Knight Ridder Financial (Acquired by Bridge Information Systems in 1997)

• Team Leader

  • Sep 1996 - Feb 1998

  - Led team of three developers focused on the Interactive Data Feed (IDF) Server API Toolkit, documentation, training materials, example code and test applications for use by the quality assurance organization. - Migrated client facing server product from Knight-Ridder Financial (KRF) to connect to the Bridge delivery network, resulting in significant savings caused by shutting down the KRF delivery network while retaining the client base. - Used SunOS and Solaris. Coded in C. Code managed in CVS. - Used SunOS LWP (Light Weight Process) threading, shared memory, semaphores for performance and interprocess communications. Show less



Knight Ridder Financial

• United States

• Software Engineer I

  • Mar 1996 - Sep 1996

  - Established an API toolkit team within the Interactive Data Feed (IDF) Server development group.- Ported the ANSI C based IDF API to HP-UX, SunOS, Linux, AIX, Solaris 2.x, OpenVMS and Windows NT.- Spearheaded data modeling within the server API.

• Programmer/Analyst II

  • May 1995 - Mar 1996

  - Collaborated with clients implementing feed handlers to the Interactive Data Feed (IDF) real-time financial market data server.- Wrote and offered API training sessions for the IDF server.- Implemented an interface between the IDF server and the Reuters Triarch system.

• Programmer/Analyst

  • May 1994 - May 1995

  - Took the lead on a number of development tasks, including X windows programming under SunOS, writing test scripts and programs to exercise the company’s Unix-based market data server and did development work directly in the data server.



Brand Software

• Internet

• Senior Software Engineer

  • Sep 1989 - May 1994

  - Key contributor to startup of company and building into functional organization. - Expanded the original Turbo Pascal based code. - Rewrote the product using Borland C. Used Raima RDM Network Model database. Used SQL. - Planned and implemented development process for Therapist Helper, which by 1993 dominated in it's vertical market where it remains. - Coordinated testing, customer beta cycles, software documentation. - Alternated time between development-related functions and direct help desk roles supporting end users of the product. Show less