Quality Assurance Management
Resume:
GREGORY R. SHERWIN 415-***-****
San Francisco, CA ****.*******@*****.***
VICE PRESIDENT, ENGINEERING
Experienced senior technology and product development leader in SaaS, online media, e-commerce, and social
media environments with a proven ability to successfully integrate business, product, and technology; to develop
systems to meet or exceed revenue/customer targets; and to build and drive international engineering teams
• Strategic technical, product, and business leader at a single family of large scale online media companies
through 11 years of rapid corporate growth and consolidation (CNET Networks)
• Results-oriented manager with a track record of success working in various challenging environments: from
scientific research & development to Internet start-ups
• Unique ability to cultivate collaboration among engineering, product development, business development, and
marketing in a metrics-driven environment
• Published author, columnist, speaker, and university instructor on e-business and marketing
CORE COMPETENCIES
Agile Development Platform Architecture E-commerce Systems
Distributed Agile/Offshoring Open Source Architectures/LAMP SaaS Platforms
Project Management Web Services and APIs Performance and Scalability
Product Management Java/J2EE Social Networking
Recruiting and Retention MySQL/RDBMS Content Management & Tools
Goal Setting and Optimization Quality Assurance and Automation Data/Content Catalogs
Budgeting 24x7 Technical Operations Search/Information Retrieval
Written & Verbal Communications Test-Driven Development Media File Management
Board Interaction Analytics and Metrics Rich Media UI
PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUND
Senior Vice President, Engineering June 2010-June 2011
Yola.com, San Francisco, CA
Yola enables small businesses to leverage the Internet for growth through a variety of self-service, SaaS tools and
services, including an award-winning Web publishing toolkit. Yola technology supports over 5 million customers
using a Service Oriented Architecture with RESTful Web services APIs, supporting services including e-
commerce payment systems, domain name and registrar management, user data modeling, Web site building, and
the personalized My Yola portal. Responsible for technical strategy and product delivery for an internationally
distributed engineering team located in both San Francisco and Cape Town, South Africa, reporting to the CEO.
• Defined and implemented an internationalization and localization strategy enabling support for all constituent
Yola Web features/services in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese.
• Introduced Kanban Agile development to the engineering & product teams for managing multiple concurrent
initiatives. Established global, standardized prioritization queues and workflows between multiple offices.
• Transformed engineering team focus from product-building to revenue growth, supporting rapid partnership
integrations with Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba, Google UK, Google Canada, and Google Brazil. Included support
for international currencies and payment methods.
Vice President, Engineering June 2009-June 2010
Meta Interfaces, San Francisco, CA
Meta Interfaces provides a digital video management platform, e-commerce technology, and Rich Internet
Application/consumer-facing Web sites in support of subscription video content. Meta Interfaces’s technology
supports over 200Tb of video content, outbound bandwidth demand of over 8Gbps, and over 100k paying
subscribers in eight languages. Responsible for technical strategy and product delivery, reporting to the CEO.
• Evolved and matured company application of Agile Development practices, including the adoption of Agile
QA principles, to ensure over 90% of bi-weekly sprints were released on schedule and with minimal defects.
• Lead the company’s technical switch to direct billing gateways, including multiple billing gateways and
merchant bank accounts for redundancy, enabling greater billing/pricing autonomy and resulting in a 3.5%
savings on every billing transaction (over $700k annually).
Lead the engineering efforts for, and contributed to the product development of, community-driven video clip
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creation, curating, and promotion. Product generates over 4,500 user clips with over 900 ratings each week.
Championed the creation of a multivariate testing framework, demonstrating over 20% lifts in both
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membership sign-up rates and total billings.
Developed technical strategy to support mobile and IPTV video product offerings and service integration.
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Vice President, Engineering & Product Development May 2007-December 2008
TeeBeeDee, San Francisco, CA
TeeBeeDee (www.tbd.com) was a social network designed for the interests and needs of Internet users at mid-life.
Responsible for technical and product strategy, reporting to the CEO. Lead a multi-disciplinary, global team:
software engineering, product management, quality assurance, and technical operations for an Internet property that
experienced 40% monthly growth through the Summer of 2008; also responsible for product feature prioritization
and measurement. Communicated/coordinated with executive management, Board of Directors, and external
marketing and development partners.
• Pioneered use of Distributed Agile Development to meet development deadlines with a geographically
dispersed team. Selected and bootstrapped an offshore engineering team in Gurgaon, India, established Agile
processes and best practices, and ensured that the distributed product development team increased development
velocity by 150% within the first month.
• Guided the conversion of TBD’s hosted technical operations from leased servers to a more dynamic, on-demand
system architecture leveraging Amazon’s EC2 and S3 cloud computing Web services, resulting in a 40% cost
savings and just-in-time hardware scaling capabilities to handle traffic spikes.
• Championed a company discipline of product measurement and metrics for optimization, leading to the
company’s use of multivariate product testing and increasing registration conversion rates by over 100%.
Vice President/Associate Vice President, Application Technology March 2000-May 2007
CNET Networks Inc., San Francisco, CA
At the time of departure, CNET Networks was the 11th largest U.S. Web property, delivering 100MM pages per
day to over 115MM monthly users. Responsible for application development efforts of various online media
businesses and for managing the associated business-technology relationships; provided technology strategy, vision,
and lead execution for organizations varying from a focused five-person, multi-disciplinary team to a 100+-person
software engineering department reporting to the CIO.
• Coordinated Web applications, in-house tools, paid services platform, user registration, data warehousing,
project management, customer service, QA, and technical operations staff to deliver revenue-driving and
customer acquisition/retention software development projects from conception through operations. Introduced
Agile Development training and methodologies to team practices.
• Championed concept, helped architect, and facilitated the development of a centralized media asset
management system. This system handled the ingestion, transcoding, metadata management, tracking,
scheduling, and publishing of digital media assets (video, audio, and image files) – for multiple CNET sites.
• Lead the evolution of the core publishing architecture to use open source frameworks, including Spring and
Hibernate, to replace proprietary Java frameworks for data access. Reduced software development and
maintenance needs by an estimated 30%.
• Advanced the technical design and implementation of CNET’s Upload Paid Services – a self-service, paid
listings e-commerce program developed to support over 40,000 software vendor accounts. The supporting
platform offers tiered pricing and service plans, payment authorization and fulfillment, custom reports, and
supports production staff located in the U.S., the Philippines, and Russia.
• Managed the organizational and technical integration of several multi-million dollar acquisitions.
• Provided technology strategy and vision for global J2EE revision of the enterprise’s Internet publishing
platform. Developed detailed financial models that projected $7.9MM in annual operational savings,
helped convince executive management of the project’s strategic importance. Lead project planning,
breakdown, management, and successful delivery for over 150 engineers.
Director, Software Engineering July 1998-March 2000
NBC Internet/Snap, LLC, San Francisco, CA
By departure, NBCi was a public company and the sixth largest Web property with over 16MM monthly users.
Responsible for strategic product planning, Web application development architecture, leadership of 15-member
Web Site Engineering team, and an annual budget in excess of $1.5MM, reporting to the CTO.
Defined technology goals, standards, processes and practices to support the then-fastest-growing Web site,
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consisting of multiple Web-based applications and over 125 content partners and 105 distribution partners.
Evaluated and recommended potential strategic partners through technical due diligence for more than
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$100MM worth of acquisitions.
Senior Software Engineer, Software Architecture Team May 1996-July 1998
CNET Inc., San Francisco, CA
Responsible for technology design and development for Web properties including News.com, Download.com,
CNET.COM, E! Online, SEARCH.COM, and Builder.com.
• Invented a highly scalable, Web-based, RDBMS-driven classification system.
• Developed business partnerships, created technical specifications and white papers, developed data exchange
APIs, and helped define contracts with various third parties on the Internet.
Internet Strategy Consultant September 1994-Present
Retained strategy consultant to venture capital firms and other early-stage ventures
• Member of Technical Advisory Board, Charles River Ventures (2002-2004)
• Co-founded (in 1994) and helped set the initial strategy for the American Red Cross’ national public Web site
(http://www.redcross.org), representing the organization and its 2,400 chapters nationwide.
Software Engineer, Controls Department March 1991-May 1996
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Stanford University, Stanford, CA
Three-time Nobel Prize-winning high-energy physics research laboratory
• Designed and developed real-time, client-server software to support high-energy physics research.
• Represented Control Software Group for first Web server in the U.S. (http://www.slac.stanford.edu).
Graduate Research Assistant, Radiation Oncology Department January 1990-December 1990
UC-San Francisco Medical Center, San Francisco, CA
• Researched theory, modeled, and developed software for determining focusing matrices for a 16-transducer
microwave phased-array used in hyperthermia treatments.
Associate Staff Engineer, Satellite Communications Group June 1987-August 1989
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, MD
• Researched theory, designed and developed software, and created system-level hardware designs to support
military satellite communications control and signal detection systems.
EDUCATION
University of California, Berkeley and University of California, San Francisco
Doctorate Program in Biomedical Engineering
University of Illinois at Chicago
Bachelor of Sciences in Electrical Engineering with Highest Honors
PUBLICATIONS AND SPEAKING
Co-author, Connecting Online: Creating a Successful Image on the Internet (PSI Research Press)
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Featured weekly columnist, ClickZ Network (http://www.clickz.com)
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Instructor, Business and Management Program of the University of California, Davis Extension and College of
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Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago
National service Red Cross volunteer trained for leadership roles in Public Relations, Community Education,
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and Disaster Services
Founder/editor-in-chief for CoffeeRatings.com and its associated blog.
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ADDITIONAL TECHNOLOGIES
Extensive hands-on and management proficiency with UNIX, SQL, Python/Django, Perl, Google Analytics,
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Amazon Web Services (EC2, S3, SQS), ActiveMQ, Lucene/SOLR, C, XML, Sybase, Resin/tomcat, Apache,
Vignette StoryServer, Selenium, Symbioware, MS Project; currently dabbling with a little Ruby/Rails
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