Willis Redd

Highlights
* 10+ years of professional software engineering and management experience,
mostly in startup environments.
* Managed small (4-6 person) engineering teams at eBay (2005-2006) and JG Su
llivan (2000-2001).
* 3 years of social networking site experience, including software engineeri
ng, operations and hiring/team building.
* Hired onto a 5 person engineering team at Rent.com, which was later purcha
sed by eBay for $433 million dollars.
* Developed e-commerce and music subscription services for mp3.com, emusic.c
om and Sony's PressPlay music service.
* Developed the first ever e-commerce systems for Maytag and GE Appliances,
who sold millions of dollars worth of appliances through a nationwide network of
retailers. We also developed the e-commerce systems on the retailer side (Deale
r E-Channel).
* Built the first ever online application for admission for my Alma mater (I
llinois Institute of Technology - 1997).
* Built the first ever web site for my high school (Wasilla High School - 19
95).
Experience
Rubicon Project
July 2009-Present
The Rubicon Project is an internet advertising technology company that optimizes
remnant advertising for many of the world's top web sites. Started in 2007, the
company now optimizes and serves over 1.5 billion ads per day.
Noteworthy projects:
* Roughly doubled the throughput of Rubicon's core stats aggregation system,
which handles ~600 gigabytes of log data per day and produces 25 separate repor
ts and ~250 gigabytes of daily output.
* Suggested architectual improvements that reduced the amount of data requir
ed to be distributed to each ad serving machine by ~95%.
* Developed Rubicon's ad pacing system, which enables ads to serve evenly ov
er a fixed period of time (half of a 2 person project team).
* Supported the deployment of REVV, Rubicon's largest software release in ov
er a year, and helped diagnose and fix numerous bugs associated with that releas
e.
* Led architecture and technical prototyping efforts for Rubicon's Real Time
Bidding system, which is designed to support over 30,000 requests / 150,000 bid
responses per second.
Technology used: Perl/mod_perl, mysql, Apache, Linux (CentOS), Memcached, munin
ThisNext
May 2006-July 2009
ThisNext is a product review and discovery web site that aims to combine online
shopping with social networking concepts. The company was funded in late 2005 by
Clearstone Venture Partners and Anthem Venture Partners, two LA area VC firms,
and received a B round of financing from these firms in late 2007. I joined the
company before the site was launched and helped it grow to over 5 million pagevi
ews per month with a small engineering team.
Noteworthy projects:
 * Developed a web crawler and classifier that helps ensure that we only disp
lay good links to external sites.
* Developed a personalized product and social activity feed modeled on the F
acebook news feed.
* Conceived and developed an algorithm for matching products based on user g
enerated tags. This drives the Related Products section of our product pages and
has had a significant impact on our SEO traffic.
* Developed Javascript based widgets that enable ThisNext content to be easi
ly placed on other sites.
* Conceived and developed related tags and tag intersection pages. The latte
r have been our most successful high traffic page type in terms of stickiness (i
.e. avoiding bounce).
* Developed most of ThisNext's XML API, and abstracted the interfaces so tha
t new types of product collections are automatically available on the site and o
n the XML API, RSS and widgets.
* Conceived and developed ThisNext's first facebook application.
* Built and launched the first version of thisnext.com in August 2006 (part
of a 4 person engineering team).
Technology used: Perl/mod_perl, mysql, Apache, Javascript, Linux (ubuntu), Memca
ched, Mason, Class::DBI, lvs, postfix, mon, munin
Rent.com (an eBay company)
Software Engineer, Manager - Site Applications
April 2004 - May 2006
Note: Rent.com was purchased by eBay in February 2005 for approximately $433 mil
lion dollars.
Rent.com provides a free service to renters who want to find an apartment online
, and offers a $100 reward to renters who find an apartment and sign a lease. Re
nt.com is a pay for performance service for property managers, charging a succes
s fee for each lease generated.
Noteworthy projects:
* Led technical development (4 person engineering team) of Rent's small prop
erties initiative, an entirely new service offering for owners of small building
s and homes for rent. This included experimental testing of several business mod
els and e-commerce development.
* Led technical development (3 person engineering team) of gigamoves.com for
the months leading up to the launch of the service. Gigamoves was a moving quot
es business (lead generation) developed in house at Rent to replace an existing
deal with monster.com. Gigamoves was a six figure revenue/month site after launc
h.
* Designed and implemented a new QA approach for testing complex matching en
gine rules created for Gigamoves.
* Developed a phone tracking service with Qwest, which gave each user of Ren
t.com uniquely trackable phone numbers with extensions to use when calling prope
rties. This was used as part of our lease documentation process, and involved as
signing and rotating through up to 500 million unique combinations.
General duties included database design, writing SQL reports, creating database
interface classes, writing interfaces to 3rd party APIs, creating Mason componen
ts to generate multipart emails and HTML, developing scheduled processes that co
mbine database access, ftp, email, encryption, etc. , and working with the produ
ct marketing group to design product enhancements.
Technology used: Perl/mod_perl, Oracle, Apache, Linux (Red Hat), Mason, postfix,
mon
Website.ws
Senior Software Engineer
May 2003 - April 2004
Website.ws is the domain registry operator for the .ws domain. The owners of thi
s business made a deal with the government of Western Samoa to market their doma
in names, much like .tv. The company sells domain names, web site hosting, web b
ased email services, and other related services to individuals and small busines
ses. My duties included developing an automated web hosting system, a web based
+ IMAP email system, and a new E-commerce system for selling domain names, email
systems, and bundled packages.
Most of the programming work was done in Perl. I also maintained and enhanced a
Java (Servlets + JSPs + struts) program that enables customers to build their ow
n websites online, and set up a new Linux system with Apache, ProFTPd, Courier-M
TA (SMTP & IMAP server), and SquirrelMail (a PHP based webmail program) for the
hosting and webmail projects.
Technology used: Perl/mod_perl, Oracle, Apache, Linux (Red Hat), Template Toolki
t, Java
mp3.com, emusic (Vivendi-Universal Net USA)
Senior Software Engineer
May 2002 - May 2003
I worked in the E-commerce division, responsible for credit card billing and sub
scription management for mp3.com, Sony's PressPlay.com, and Emusic.com customers
.
Major projects included migrating all PressPlay.com customers to newly designed
subscription plans, writing a Verisign PayFlow Pro credit card billing interface
and migrating mp3.com to this system, and upgrading the security and reporting
for Emusic.com customer billing.
All programming was done in Perl, using (and adding to) MySQL databases on both
Linux and Solaris platforms. Non-programming duties included providing billing r
eports to management, doing design work for a new subscription system, and worki
ng with the QA team and management to improve system auditing and reliability.
Technology used: Perl/mod_perl, mysql, Apache, Linux (Red Hat)
JG Sullivan Interactive, Inc.
Technical Lead - Dealer E-Channel, Senior Programmer
January 2000 - January 2002
Managed a team of programmers responsible for developing and maintaining softwar
e for the Dealer E-Channel, a division of JG Sullivan responsible for thousands
of customers and roughly one third of the company's sales.
Led the development of the retail portion of the General Electric Digital Dealer
program, a successful E-commerce project that enables GE to sell their applianc
es online through a nationwide network of thousands of retailers.
Led the development of a Java based platform to enable rapid and flexible deploy
ment of Dealer E-Channel services. Services developed on this platform have been
used successfully by several major clients, including GE and Whirlpool.
Led the development of the retail portion of a collaborative E-commerce program
that enables Maytag to sell their appliances online through a network of retaile
rs.
Developed an E-commerce application for Dealer E-Channel customers. This applica
tion enables individual appliance and electronics dealers to manage their own E-
commerce system, and has been used by hundreds of customers, including HH Gregg,
Brand-Source, and Wards. As of late 2001, over $3 million dollars in sales had
been recorded in this system.
Technology used: Perl, Java, Oracle, Apache, Linux (Red Hat)
Education
Illinois Institute of Technology (Chicago)
B.S. Computer Science - 1999
Magna cum Laude (3.87/4.0)