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Developer, consultant and team lead with over 25 years of internet experience, successfully deploying and managing complex projects. Actively engaged as a CTO, board member, advisor, mentor and team lead. A writer, speaker, hacker and creative tinkerer who is constantly learning.

Alpnach, Switzerland, 2022-2023

In the field of automated retail and smart vending, Invenda is a swiss-based startup that develops hardware products and an IoT platform. As CTO, led product, hardware, software teams in a fast-paced scale-up, growing product/engineering from 25 to 50 people in Switzerland and Serbia, as well as establishing an design office in Berlin. Managed product/tech leads and supported key accounts with Sales and Customer Success. Introduced product team patterns and rituals: weekly demos, roadmaps, incident management, and more. Brought devops and automated testing, reducing releases from 6 weeks to just days. Established company metrics, streamlined QA and manufacturing steps, improved tech sales processes. Worked with customers and teams across a variety of projects, launching new devices and retrofits, impactful software features, and mobile payment solutions in markets across 19 countries (EU, Middle East, US, Asia-Pacific).

Zurich, Switzerland, 2020-2022

Leading engineering for TX Marketplaces, working together with Ricardo, Tutti, Homegate, JobCloud, CarForYou and more to further develop Switzerland's most successful online marketplaces. Pushing engineering culture, a pragmatic mindset, and excellence in software development - backed by a small team of experts in security, tech, strategy and communications. Setting up guilds and collaborative events, workshops, training, hackdays and engineering branding via storytelling, conference talks and social media. Coordinating and advising cross-brand topics related to tech, security, privacy, tools, recruiting, compensation, diversity, incident response, strategy/planning, service agreements, M&A projects, product/tech budgeting and IT cost management.

Providing support to a dynamic B2B startup that connects production professionals with top studio spaces worldwide, in photography, film and art. This unique tool allows top-tier studios to handle the complexity of industry bookings, holds and challenges, coordination and billing through the use of threaded messaging and patent-pending workflows.

Helped evolve the development team, infrastructure, architecture, and product roadmap together with the founders. Acting as board member, investor and CTO advisor, and working with the portfolio group RevRoad.com in executing growth (US, 2020-present).

Zug, Switzerland, 2016-2020

Helped Ricardo achieve a turnaround in four years resulting in record earnings and output, while realizing greatly reduced IT costs and overhead. Engaged to develop a new platform to bring a modern architecture and team structure to around 50 engineers located in multiple locations (Zug, France, Belgrade). Helped steer breakthrough for tech, including a full cloud migration, new web and native apps, agile work processes, CI/CD, and ML/Classification to search. Focused on organizational change through trust, ownership, high levels of collaboration and transparency, data-driven thinking, and working closely with business and product divisions. Pushing engineering culture and legacy replacement, through APIs and domain-driven design, microservices, containerization, automation, and strong empowerment of teams and topic leaders. (more: Revolution Ricardo)

Zurich, Switzerland, 2016-2017

Tamedia Digital "Core Engineering" is a centralized expert engineering team that provides services, solutions, and innovation support to the many companies in the Tamedia portfolio: Ricardo, 20 Minutes, Doodle, Homegate, JobCloud, Tages Anzeiger, Tutti, Starticket and many other brands.

Working together with tech teams and external suppliers to build cross-company projects and shared services, leading a team of powerful hackers who provide consulting and expertise, realizing a wide range of applications around traffic, commerce, growth and publishing. Core Engineering brings great value and innovation to the entire portfolio of Tamedia.

Zurich, Switzerland 2011-2016

Joined local.ch as an on-site contractor in 2011, and shortly thereafter as a full-time senior Rails engineer. Became engineering lead for the web team in late 2012, responsible for web architecture, resource planning, deployment and infrastructure in coordination with various product owners and departments within local.ch.

Led a core team of eight talented front-end engineers on web and mobile projects, and managed various contractors, designers, partners and vendors. Together, the team replaced the legacy web platform in 2012 with Rails (in 9 months), launched a new customer center, deployed a national sales application, along with many APIs, services and infrastructure. Towards 2015 the web department grew into three cross-functional teams.

Local.ch is one of the top most-visited websites in Switzerland, with over 4.5 million unique clients. In 2013, our team won the Silver Award at Best of Swiss Web for the Technology category.

Switzerland & New York City 2007-2012 Independent Contractor and Consultant

Founded Somebox GmbH/LLC as a boutique development company of web and mobile projects. Provided project management, product development, and consulting in the USA and CH.

Somebox was a distributed company, made up of remote teams of developers. Projects were managed using agile processes, in a transparent way, collaborating closely with customer with excellent results.

Some project highlights:

New York 2007 – 2012 Partner & Developer

Primospot provided parking information for densely populated metropolitan areas. It was a free service using google maps to find public on-street parking information. Mobile apps for iOS and Android were developed as well.

Primospot received much positive attention, including a feature article by Nick Bilton of the New York Times as well as being featured in Apple Stores worldwide and in the 2010 iPad Keynote by Steve Jobs.

As a partner (and investor) together with founder Micheal Hill, I developed much of the back-end rails and service layers, and helped create content tools and integrations. Some of the challenges included importing of a wide variety of city parking data and geospatial information, large-scale busy/free scheduling, and crowdsourcing photos and information.

The service was available in New York, Boston and Seattle, with data updates coordinated with city departments and numerous commercial parking partnerships. Primospot also developed custom apps and widgets for parking-related services.

Artist Community Website 2000 - 2012 Lead Architect and Project Manager

Back in 2000, I helped create a dynamic artist community, designed a flexible framework for managing art and images. It was originally built in Perl, with several large sections now ported to Rails. Over the years, I continue to help with the project, advising on hosting, expansion, and ongoing development efforts for this site, which after many years still thrives as a close-knit community of artists in Western Massachusetts. This role taught me a ton about managing high res media, building community web applications, and working with small businesses.

Independent Media Radio and Television 2004-2011 Project Lead, Consultant

Part-time manager and consultant for web site and digital media distribution. Served as project lead for the Rails website and e-commerce store, developed in 2006, and later as advisor on technology purchases, vendors, staffing and strategy. In 2010, I helped hand over the site to ThoughtWorks, who now continues development of the platform. This role taught me a lot about journalism, fast turnaround times, and fundraising.

Democracy Now! is recognized as a leading alternative news organization, and serves millions of unique users, offering a daily 1-hour show which is streamed and archived in many formats.

Organization for the Blind 2006-2007

Lead contractor and programmer for the Vision Resource Assistance (VRA) project, an online, Adobe Flash-based mentored training course designed for instructors in vision rehabilitation, orientation and mobility, and low vision care. Featured text-to-speech technologies, animation and courseware, CMS, and comprehensive testing tools.

New York City 1997-2003

Atomic Fridge produced web sites, games, and digital content for numerous entertainment companies such as Nickelodeon, the American Museum of Natural History, USA Networks, Timex and the New York Times. Responsible customer relationships, software architecture and developing interactive concepts and games, managing the team, and project delivery. Developed in Flash Actionscript, Perl, PHP and Java.

The company launched a variety of online projects for clients such as Nickelodeon (we produced 65 games in one year!), Volvo, USA Networks, Space.com, AOL, and The American Museum of Natural History (including a Webby Award winning children's site that's still going strong today).

This Internet World article was published on Atomic Fridge in 2000. It's a nice look into what life was like for my company at that time.

Pittsburgh, PA 1993-1996

Network support engineer and programmer at the University of Pittsburgh. Hired initially in the Department of Human Genetics, later at the department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine, and as finally as a support manager and Certified Novel Netware Engineer. Served as president of the Pittsburgh Netware User's Group. Here, I learned about databases, networking, disaster planning, and working in a zero-downtime 24/7 operation.

Computer Science, Music Composition 1990 – 1993  Activities and Societies: Tulanian school band, Tulane Jazz Orchestra, Computer Club