Lucas McGregorCTO (Architect) | Santa Monica CA, 90404 |
| mcgregor_lucas at hotmail.com |
Brief
I have successfully led technology companies through the key challenges of Development, Operations and Management:
- As an executive I was charged with developing and running corporate strategies, developing competitive technologies, creating leading teams, developing and protecting intellectual property, representing the company to investors and executive level communications.
- As a development lead I have led business analysts, requirements gathering, SDLC, QA, release management, product life cycles and technology choices.
- As an operations lead I have been responsible for live sites, QoS, upgrades, hardware choices, vender management, capacity planning, metrics and tracking and support staff.
- As a manager I have built staffs through hiring and working with recruiters, created budgets, fostered productive environments through training and mentoring, developed and managed processes and handled HR issues.
Experience
I report to the CTO and the Head of Product where I am responsible for providing our business with the ability to operate efficiently, accurately, and intelligently through the delivery of robust reporting tools that drive better business intelligence, more self-serve analysis, and a focus on actionable insights.
I work with the business and product teams to develop strategic plans, technical policies, and engineering practices to achieve our goals reliably, repeatably, and predictably. I work with project managers and engineers to develop plans, designs, and requirements.
My team develops and operate systems for the large scale, near time processing of massive data. We ingest data from a wide range of internal and external sources, normalize the data for warehousing and provide reporting, analytics, and insights.
We work with 200+ core Hadoop cluster for raw processing, maintain multiple PostgreSQL based warehouses for reporting and directly support analytics via MicroStrategy and support a Tableaux reporting team.
I coordinate teams and work across geographically separate office to support Adconion's global business footprint. We have offices in 27 countries using these reports 24x7x365.
We ensure strict QoS and SLAs with our customer teams, provide training and customer support, and handle product development.
I report to the VP of Technology for Disney Online where I am responsible for architecture, shared services, technology standards, and technical strategy for Disney Online
My primary responsibility is leading the team developing the next generation of Disney Content Management Systems and development tools.
I work with different technical teams across Disney to represent Disney Online's technical strategy, participate in designs, and to help manage co-owned programs.
My team works with other Disney Online divisions to lead architecture and code reviews, and reconcile various disparate and legacy technologies. I am charged with developing technology roadmaps and creating strategies to address our cost/risk/opportunity portfolio for our division.
I dual-reported to the VP of Mom and Family products and the VP of Technology for Disney Online where I was responsible for development, operations; and project and portfolio management.
I was charged with development and maintenance for the Disney Online Family portfolio, which includes approximately 30 minor content products, 1 e-commerce site, and four keystone properties:
I managed a staff of 20 developers, two development managers, and three project managers.
I introduced program management to control workflows, change management, and delivery of work. These changes increased department wide work throughput by 52% (as tracked by deliverables) over a 3 month period with no increase to staff. I built the project management team and led the adoption of iterative product development and portfolio management. We led scrum and agile management for technology and the rest of Mom and Family Products. We adopted tracking and reporting tools (Version One). My staff led training for the whole department and corporate-wide evangelism for agile/iterative processes and tools.
I instituted modern development and automated practices, using many open source and off the shelf tools:
- continuous integration
- unit and integration testing
- code coverage testing
- peer and team code reviews
- modern source code management
- change and configuration management
- deployments and rollbacks
These changes allowed us to go from irregular and error prone deployments to regular weekly releases and daily candidate builds. Defect rates dropped and rollbacks went from an average of 2+ per deployment to 8% of deployments requiring a rollback
I oversaw the acquisition of multi-million dollar technical purchases and the migration of assets into the Disney hosting facilities. I managed all Family's third party hosted infrastructure. I coordinated with Disney Technology Shared Services (TSS) to develop deployment practices and standards for TSS hosted applications.
As the Project and Portfolio Director, I lead business and technical prioritization for the department. I managed cross-functional workflows, capacity plans, and budgets. We ran processes which allowed for an adjustable blend of maintenance, strategic work, and rush opportunities.
In this role, I launched 3 major new products:
- User Generated Content Contest Framework, which was used for the 2009 Gap Kids Casting Call
- Family Trip Planner, an interactive GWT web planner for family trips and budgets
- Family Single Sign On, an OAuth based authentication system for the wider DOL Family Portfolio
I reported to the GM of Userplane where I was responsible for the development and operations of Userplane's services and its technical staff.
I took over management of existing Userplane technology and staff which provide web applications and widgets to 300,000+ publisher sites and corporate customers. We deliver "instant" community web based applications and allow for customer control via our web services APIs.
I oversaw the operations and development of the enterprise ColdFusion and Flash farms to support:
- Real time Audio/Video chat
- Instant Message and Presence system
- Video recording and transcoding
- Authentication and API integration
I managed a staff of 13 software engineers, database administrators and network/sysadmins.
I worked with project and product management to bring the organization into compliance with AOL's SDLC practices and to create systems for tracking various aspects of engineering, operations and product development.
I created new systems to increase uptime and lower impact of maintenance to our customers. (Core application servers have gone from being restarted once every 2-3 days to a monthly scheduled maintenance that does not require a full outage).
I reduced cost by introducing open source solutions for presence, video and chat; and refactoring our current data center and network deployment.
I was responsible for all technical development and operations of the Xdrive division.
I reported to the VP of Digital services, where I was responsible for Xdrive, AOL Pictures and BlueString.
In the first 5 months, I completed the following:
- Migrated service form our data center to an AOL center.
- Led a technology refresh that ported the service to new hardware, OS and software versions.
- Upgraded from 8i on Solaris to a 10g RAC on Linux.
- Integrated with the AOL billing and account provisioning system.
As my group transitioned into AOL corporate, I:
- Led the development and launch of the new media product BlueString.
- Created APIs and a developer community product, OpenXdrive.
- Built a platform technologies team that developed core technologies common to the Personal Media storage and media products.
- Worked with AOL finance to create SDLC processes that feed into capitalization practices that aided in financing development efforts (More than 50% of budget for some projects).
- Managed overseas and 3rd party development groups.
- Worked on patents: 7,337,207, 7,171,472 and several on going applications.
- Evangelized AOL technology at EclipseCon, MashupCamp, Techcrunch 40 and Twiistup.
I was responsible for all technology development, technical operations, quality assurance, project management, product development, vendor management and intellectual property. I created/managed a service that supported 310,000 active accounts that drove 3,500 simultaneous requests, 180Mbs of traffic and 1 million database transactions per hour. I reported directly to the CEO to help create Xdrive's corporate strategy and product vision. As the CTO I:- Was one of three executives that handled the sale of Xdrive to AOL.
- Handled all of Xdrive's technical due diligence.
- Represented Xdrive to various brokers and companies.
- Controlled Xdrive's technical and product strategy.
As head of technical operations, I:- Worked directly with the CFO to manage a multi-million dollar budget for hardware, services, staff and facilities.
- Worked with vendors to define requirements and negotiate contracts and services.
- Managed requirements, projects and deliverables for internal development staff, outsourced teams and marketing.
- Handled hiring and managing technical staff. Grew staff from 5 engineers with 15 years of experience to 18 with 160+ years of experience. Created separate development, operational, project management and QA staffs.
- Implemented processes and automated tracking for project specifications, project status, defects, system changes and developer metrics.
- Started a system for tracking system health by monitoring "vital" system metrics and code profiling each release.
As the technical lead I:- Upgraded from Weblogic5.1 to JBoss 4.0.2
- Unified Xdrive's various code bases into a singular, modular code base.
- Refactored legacy code and tuned servers for faster, more stable operation. (Reduced "Application Down" errors served to users daily 1727%. Reduced login time from 22sec to 2sec.)
- Migrated users from legacy systems to a newer system and database schema.
As the product development lead I:- Worked directly with marketing and analysts to create specifications for new products and improvements.
- Translated Business/Functional Requirements into Technical Requirements and insured "buy in."
- Launched over 20 new services including: music streaming, faxing, photo galleries and upload accelerator, which led to 823% increase in utilization (Average account size went from 70MB to 576MB, new files added daily increased from 80,000 to 4.2M+.)
- Created new user channels: pre-paid users (sold as kits on CompUSA), free space users and various promotion and referral channels.
- Managed the successful roll out of five package suites. Defined the business rules and migrated existing accounts.
- Launched the Xdrive support forums.
As the inventor of Xdrive's Intellectual Property, I:- Spearheaded the successful settlement of a patent suite.
- Created an additional 5 patent filings.