Engineer Software

MARK J. CASTROVINCI

* ***** **** ****, *********, NJ 08867

****.***********@*****.***

Senior Internet Technology Executive

. Web programmer and Internet leader since the early '90s

. Extensive hands-on experience driving business value with innovative

infrastructure and application solutions

. Strong management skills and deep technical acumen with product and

project management responsibilities

. Long record of success building engaged and productive teams

. Multi-million dollar budget and vendor responsibilities

. Proven track record of reducing vendor costs and exceeding budget

expectations

. Excellent relationship management skills ensuring service delivery aligns

with business requirements

. Effectively managed technology and staff integration through numerous

mergers and acquisitions

. Successful track record managing geographically dispersed groups across

the continental US, South America and China

. Responsible for strategic long-term planning, architectural direction,

SDLC development and production operational support

OLX.com January 2010 to present

Chief Technology Officer Buenos Aires, Argentina

Lead Technologist and member of Executive team reporting to the co-CEOs.

Responsible for technical strategy and operational management of all

technology teams representing 50% of the company (70 technology employees).

Originally hired to transition the company from start-up mode to prominent

international competitor. Led the technology presentation to Naspers which

resulted in Naspers making a large strategic investment in OLX.

Reorganized teams to align with business objectives ensuring engineering

teams met strategic business goals. Introduced new processes and created

new roles to streamline software development process. Created a program to

identify and improve site performance that improved the user experience and

reduced hardware costs. Re-architected the entire site application which

was in disarray, a source of poor employee morale, and slowing business

progress; accomplished while continuing to deliver new features and

maintaining business competitiveness.

Specific Operational Responsibilities and Initiatives Included:

. As CTO lead the entire technology organization: All software

development teams, mobile applications, operations, infrastructure,

QA, remote China engineering team, product development, project

management and the office IS systems

. Provide strategic analysis and implementation plans to co-CEOs on

changes to the organization and new initiatives

. Retired duplicate software systems to leverage a single platform

. Reorganized software development teams into product aligned and system

aligned models

. Designed a plan to rebuild and refactor site application software to

correct accumulated technical debt and software disintegration; goals

included fixing code quality, performance, extensibility and to speed

software feature turnaround.

. Replaced manual QA processes with an automated QA testing system

. Added performance/staging environment to validate releases under real-

world conditions prior to release

. Defined a separate Mobile development team that built and contracted

to build smart phone and app versions of OLX

. Upgraded China Data Center by moving to a modernized facility;

negotiated terms and managed successful transition

. Created a data warehouse and reporting tools that enabled data driven

decision making

. Built an A/B system for testing revenue applications

. Improved page load speed across the entire site for scalability, SEO

and user experience benefits

. Designed and implemented a new and efficient project management

process to strengthen the existing Agile methodologies

. Replaced manual QA processes with an automated QA testing system

. Created special roles and processes to streamline the software release

management process

. Consolidated numerous documentation repositories into a single

productive wiki

. Introduced standard operating procedures for managing the production

systems

. Grew staff by 20% and introduced new hiring practices to improve the

quality of new hires

. Reduced employee turnover by 65%

. Relocated full-time to Buenos Aires

CBS Interactive (formally CNET.com) July 1996 to January 2010

Vice President, Platform Systems

Joined CNET in 1996 as a Senior Software Engineer building website

solutions on the Microsoft IIS platform and ActiveX client side solutions.

Later promoted to Director and then Vice President managing a variety of

teams in both shared software services and site groups such as News.com,

TechRepublic.com and Download.com.

Specific Areas of Responsibilities included:

Budget Ownership Vendor Data Warehouse Business Intelligence

Relationships

Open Source Ad Delivery eCommerce Personalization Systems

Software Systems

ERP Financial Sales Order China Sales Order HR Systems

Systems Systems System

Video Encoding Search Solutions SEO/Search Newsletter & Alert

Platform Optimization Delivery

User Registration Application & Web Project Management Technical Documentation

Servers

Detailed Descriptions of Project and Department Responsibilities:

Project Reinvention

. In 2001 CNET rebuilt its entire infrastructure and content management

systems. Several large acquisitions such as ZDNet and mySimon had

created a disparate set of duplicate systems and it was time to move

to Java and bring all the brands together for economies of scale.

. I led the Infrastructure track. I was responsible for defining

architectures, reviewing all plans, ensuring completeness, running

project management and owning on time delivery. I managed over 100

engineers in this effort.

. The specific deliverables were upgrading our Apache servers to 2.x,

replacing our site search software, building a new user registration

system, creating an ontology solution that organized our site

hierarchies, created a taxonomy solution for tagging our content,

created a Model-View-Controller framework for developing our Java

Server Pages, created a Performance Testing Platform, built

Precachers, a Software Build System and a Co-branding solution to

create advertiser branded versions of our sites.

. The project took 10 months. My Infrastructure track completed ahead

of schedule.

. Overall the project resulted in the decrease of staff by over 50%, a

smaller set of shared servers and a platform that still supports

portions of our business today.

. After the initial Infrastructure track I later led the migration of

the TechRepublic site onto this new Platform. In the process we also

added forums and talkback community features into the core set of

shared systems.

CBS Acquisition Integration

. For the CBSi acquisition of CNET I led (or partnered with a CBS VP) on

the integration plan for many systems: Data Warehouse, Advertising

Platform, Video Encoding/Players/CMS', Newsletters, HR Systems,

Financial Accounting, User Registration and eCommerce.

. We led these efforts by defining approach, gathering details, debating

proposed solutions and making recommendations to senior management.

Data Warehouse and Data Analytics

. Elevated our Data Warehouse platform from a web activity counting

platform to an open, shared application platform for building data

driven applications and exploring rich data analytics. I did this by

replacing components of our Oracle and Orchestrate tiers with Netezza

and Hadoop and established a new set of rules to create a single

version of the truth where other, non-DW applications could combine

their data with the central DW. It also freed up the applications

from managing their own hardware infrastructure.

. Netezza allowed us to grow our data footprint from 2 TB to 25TB with

room for up to 40TB. We also sped up processing which translated into

improved SLAs. Hadoop was introduced to create an open ETL

processing infrastructure that is affordably scalable, more easily

managed and easier to write code and hire programmers given its place

in the open source community.

. Historical data retention was increased from 3 months to 2 years

creating a rich data mining environment analysis for year-over-year

comparisons, trend analysis and data discovery.

. A great example of a rich data application built upon this new

platform is our revenue attribution solution. By combining ad serving

data, site analytics and financial information we are able to

determine the revenue value of individual components of a page. An

exciting Firefox plug-in displays these revenue and traffic figures as

you visit the page informing site production staff to build more

effective and valuable web pages.

. This new platform was able to support the growth of our business from

50 million Unique Users to over 250 million and 1.5 billion Page Views

to 3.5 billion today.

. Along with the additional data we also introduced a more compelling

set of tools that grew our internal user base from less than 50 to

over 500 across our international company.

. Leveraging these new technologies and negotiating with our vendors has

allowed me to take advantage of decreases in the cost of processing

disk space from $250,000/TB to $3,000/TB and eliminate costly backup

platforms saving over $250,000.

. The restructuring of our DW processing also enabled us to deliver site

analytical data in hourly increments rather than the previous daily

cycle of data availability. Next is near-real-time delivery of data.

Personalization

. Invented a system to facilitate the creation of personalized user

experiences. It is similar to a session server or cookie but with a

structured and discoverable data schema. When attributes are stored

such as content viewed or a Google search term then subsequent pages

can display links to content they believe the user is looking for or

show targeted ads. This stored data is also extracted in bulk and fed

into the data warehouse as an additional data point for data mining

exercises.

. I created a separate Personalization and Targeting Department by

reassigning an engineer who was building personalization features in

the Data Warehouse group and giving him his own team.

Search

. I managed the team that created two separate search solutions. The

first system is based on MySQL for straightforward ID look up queries.

The second system leveraged the relevancy algorithms of Lucene by

building a robust server framework so that Lucene could be positioned

as a service accessed through a tier of replicated servers rather than

a library normally built directly into a web app. The MySQL solution

took about 1 month to build. The Lucene solution, named SOLR and now

an open source Apache project, took 3 months to build. These in house

solutions allowed us to save several million dollars in vendor fees

for proprietary search software.

. Given the internal success of SOLR and recognizing that search

solutions can become stale without strong developer support I proposed

we contribute SOLR back to the open source community. It is now a

thriving platform used by many companies. As a result CNET continues

to use SOLR avoiding the costly transition to a new platform yet

relying upon the open source community to keep SOLR current and only

allocating a fraction of an in house engineer for our own SOLR

development needs.

Platform Infrastructure Team

. I was Director of this department prior to my role as a Vice President

where it continues under my responsibility. Today I set this teams

direction and still participate in architecting the solutions it

delivers.

. The team architects and builds infrastructure solutions such as the

Video Encoding platform, Search, specialized Apache Modules to enable

competitive site features, Personalization Systems, SEO Solutions and

developer tools.

. Delivers sanctioned, supportable and customized versions of open

source software such as Apache, Apache Modules, Resin, SOLR, Hadoop,

Squid, OpenGrok, Subversion, PHP, Python, etc.

Open APIs

. I organized the effort to create a specification that defined a

uniform model for creating open APIs to our site content. Separate

business units were building their own disparate versions. This

specification and committee resulted in a uniform set of APIs that

would ease adoption by prospective programmers and incorporate best

practices into the APIs.

. Also contracted with a 3rd party to proxy our APIs so that statistics

could be gathered, applications authenticated, usage throttled and

documentation hosted.

. When RESTful APIs emerged I had our existing services create new

RESTful versions of their original SOAP interfaces

Audience Development

. Manage the department that provides Newsletter and Alert Delivery,

User Registration and eCommerce services to all business units.

. Led the effort to build the first eCommerce platform and applications

at CNET. This platform included a rich set of subscription and

payment models to sell content access subscriptions. Later added a

catalog and support for selling physical and soft goods.

. I personally led a matrix team of over 60 engineers to build a Pay-to-

Play model for publishers who wanted to list their software titles on

Download.com.

. Defined and led the effort to proxy co-registration with social media

sites such as FaceBook Connect through our own registration system

eliminating duplication of effort and quickly making these features

available to the sites.

Financial and HR Systems

. I managed the Financial Systems (Oracle Financials) and HR

Applications teams in 2008 and reorganized them into one effective

team with less managers and stronger individual contributors.

. I personally oversaw the creation of the new China sales order

management system which was a stand alone solution built in Java with

the goal of consolidating the disparate sales tools used by 16

different business units. The resulting system used a newly created

open API that fed data directly into Oracle Financials ensuring

adherence to accounting rules required by the Finance department.

. Sales staff experienced an increase in efficiency and the accounting

team was able to reduce their typical month close timing from 2

straight weeks to 3 days of normal processing.

Advertising Infrastructure

. CNET is one of few companies that owns it own in-house developed Ad

Delivery platform.

. I managed the Advertising Engineering team for several years which,

along with Financial Systems and Data Warehouse, allowed me to

influence the complete stack of revenue systems from Sales Order

Management to Ad Delivery to Revenue Attribution to Decision Making

Reports.

Project Management

. To improve project management for all my departments I designed and

implemented a set of processes to be carried out by project managers,

development managers and engineers. These processes were designed to

provide transparency into productivity, identify problems, provide

rollups of large teams while at the same time not impeding the time

available to engineers doing real work.

. This new system makes it easier to monitor and judge the efficiency of

a project and evaluate its success after completion.

Bell Labs December 1995 to July 1996

Senior Software Engineer - Contractor

. I worked on early versions of an IP to analog and IP to IP telephony

program. Researchers at Bell Labs created the compression algorithms

to facilitate fast and quality voice transmission. I wrote the

communication software for peer to peer communication, front end

interfaces and audio device drivers' shells to encapsulate the

compression algorithms. All development was on the Windows platform.

Telcordia/Bellcore Research December 1993 to December 1995

Senior Software Engineer - Contractor

. We purchased a copy of the Macromedia Director Source code and rewired

the tool to pull content from a network database rather than a local

CD thus creating an early version of a streaming video education tool.

I wrote all the new communication software and changed the code from

communicating with a local disk to communicating with a server. The

researchers at Telcordia were awarded a patent for the method of

sending data ahead of user decision points that facilitated the speedy

delivery of content.

. Built a video/audio conferencing system for distant learning for a

single teacher communicating with up to 3 students thus supporting a

split screen of 4 windows viewable by all participants and an

interface for requesting control to ask questions. Participated in

designing the user interface, wrote the communication layer on top of

Winsock (TCP and UDP), built the user interface for using MFC and

produced the sending and receiving of audio and video using the

Windows Multimedia APIs.

Dendrite November 1992 to December 1993

Senior Software Engineer and Engineering

Manager

. Dendrite builds and sells turnkey laptops with tools for

Pharmaceutical Sales Representatives to manage their sales activities.

. During my first 6 months I created the module that graphed maps with

color-coded zip code boundaries and plotted sales call locations where

you could click and drill down for details on each customer. This was

a Windows based application that used mapping and zip code data bases

from 3rd party vendors.

. During my second 6 months I was promoted to Manager and ran the

development team of 6 engineers.

. Though my mapping application was a native windows application the

remainder of the program was built using PowerBuilder.

Unisys June 1988 to November 1992

Software Engineer and Senior Software

Engineer

. Wrote communication protocol software such an X.21 implementation.

. Designed and implemented an RPC communication layer for Windows 3.0

since none existed at this time.

Manufactures Hanover Trust Company September 1981 to August 1986

Management Trainee and Assistant Manager

. Originally hired into the Operations Division Management Trainee

Program which rotated future managers through different departments

throughout the bank. Promoted to Official Title of Assistant Manager.

Education

Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ BA, Computer Science

Boston University, Boston, MA BS, Business Administration

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