Engineer Software
Resume:
Ben Tilly
******@*****.***
OBJECTIVE
Outstanding developer with 10 years of experience and a strong record of success seeks a new
position where he can make a major impact.
AREAS OF EXPERTISE
A/B testing replaces guesswork with using statistics to measure the impact of website changes.
I have directly or indirectly helped a half-dozen companies implement A/B testing. All
improved key business metrics by at least +20%. See my 2008 OSCON tutorial at http://
elem.com/~btilly/effective-ab-testing/ for more detail.
I am an internationally recognized Perl expert with contributions to the Perl core, CPAN
modules and activity on technical forums. I am on The Perl Foundation s Grant Committee
and was the technical editor for Learning Perl, 3rd edition [ISBN: 059*******], etc.
Reporting is the art of extracting relevant information out of data. It includes tasks as diverse
as nancial reporting, business intelligence, click stream data mining, and maintaining data
warehouses. I have done all of these, and have a deep understanding of how to manipulate
large data sets.
I have experience with many technologies. I have programmed in over a dozen languages,
including Perl, JavaScript, Python, PL/SQL, Ruby, C and Java. I am experienced with web
technologies like Apache, XML, HTML, CSS. and CGI. I have used Sybase, Oracle and
PostgreSQL extensively, I am comfortable with Windows, Unix, Linux, and OS X. I have
years of experience with CVS and Subversion. I have extensive experience with Perl-speci c
technologies such as mod_perl, Mason, Template Toolkit, DBI, Inline::C, object relational
mappers such as Rose::DB, etc.
I have many other strengths including strong analytical and mathematical skills, good work
ethic, strong troubleshooting skills, an outgoing personality and an upbeat attitude.
EXPERIENCE
Site Reliability Engineer, Google, Santa Monica, CA Jan 2010 - Jan 2011
I worked at Google as a Site Reliability Engineer. Site Reliability Engineering is a cross
between software development and system administration. SRE is an internal service that is
offered to teams building applications. Their assistance can be anything from consulting on
how to reduce production issues to completely taking over production support for a product.
As a Site Reliability Engineer I:
Brought a back end service under SRE support. For this I had to audit the service, rewrite
their monitoring, rewrite their playbook, document how everything service worked, and teach
the rest of my team about the service. In the process I discovered and xed dozens of bugs.
Developed a unit test framework for scripts used inside of an internal reporting framework.
This sped the development of reports and improved their reliability.
Modi ed the interface for silencing alerts to make it easier to silence alerts to a particular
date. This improvement helps everyone at Google who has to answer pages.
Principal Software Engineer, Oversee.net, Los Angeles, CA April 2009 -
Dec 2009
At Oversee I worked on a website called LowFares.com through a period of rapid growth. At
LowFares I:
Helped develop multiple versions of the site to nd a version that met Google s standards and
helped the business to grow.
Found and xed major problems in important cron jobs. One of the bugs caused them to
lose track of 2/3 of their activity data. My rewrite xed this, and took steps to make sure that
future problems would be noticed more promptly.
Added several advertising feeds to the site.
Played an important role in a number of process improvements, such as the introduction of
mandatory code review.
Reporting Architect, Pictage, Torrance, CA June 2007 April 2009
Pictage assists photographers. Photographers photograph an event, upload it to Pictage, and let
Pictage take care of ful lling orders and marketing to their clients. While I have been at Pictage
the company grew 35% in 1 year to ~ $35 million/year in revenue. At Pictage I:
Introduced A/B testing. This has improved consumer revenue/event over 25% so far.
Replaced the system by which we generate email lists. This has helped us introduce very
effective targeted email campaigns to drive speci c user behavior.
Created a reporting system and many reports for internal use. A web interface allows each
report to parametrize back end templates in many ways.. Users can then build complex
spreadsheets that use these reports as a data source and will update with a refresh. These
spreadsheets are used through the company for purposes ranging from daily monitoring of
the business, identifying problem orders, building forecasts, auditing nancial systems,
compensating sales people, and identifying best practices for photographers. This has
replaced the previous limited, complex and slow ad hoc reports, creating common data
de nitions across the company.
Senior Software Engineer, Rent.com, Santa Monica, CA Aug 2003 - Jan 2005
Senior Reporting Engineer, Rent.com, Santa Monica, CA Feb 2005 - May 2007
Rent.com helps people rent apartments. Rent.com gets a nder s fee from the apartment owner
and then passes $100 to the renter. While I was there revenue grew from $20 million/year to
$80 million/year. with a pro t margin of around 30%. At peak times the site delivers over a
million pages per hour using a dozen commodity web-servers. It was sold to eBay for $433
million in Feb, 2005. My projects at Rent.com included:
Researching and implementing A/B testing. The rst successful A/B test grew revenue by
40%, and continued website re nement through A/B testing became an ongoing source of
incremental growth.
Creating tools to streamline the acquisition and management of af liates. Af liates are a
major source of website traf c, and so were critical to the growth of Rent.com.
Helped with the design and analysis of our targeted renter phoning project, then did most of
the implementation. This created a substantial revenue increase.
Solving several website performance and scalability issues that were inhibiting growth.
Developing and extended many reports for both internal and external use. Sometimes I had
to create complex summary tables in the data warehouse for these reports.
Performing oneoff analysis of large data sets as needed.
Senior Programmer, Trepp LLC, New York, NY Oct 1998 - Apr 2003
Trepp LLC creates and maintains models of bonds which are backed by loans on commercial
real estate. When I arrived they had a limited desktop client, ~20 users, about $1 million/year in
revenue, models for about 100 bond deals, and were at risk of going out of business. When I left
they had doubled in size, added new products such as interactive Bloomberg and web
interfaces, revenues were $15 million/year, they had over 5000 users, models for around 400
bond deals, and their main competitor was going out of business. Among my responsibilities
were:
Data delivery. Trepp s purpose is to deliver accurate data, but had daily failures requiring
manual intervention when I started. By the time I left the system reliably and promptly
delivered far more data to a far more complex set of products.
Helping nancial analysts by building tools to streamline their work ow.
Testing and introducing new technologies and infrastructure. Open source technologies that
I introduced included Linux, Apache, VNC, Samba, and rsync. I set up and con gured the
development machine and repository that was later used for web development.
Evaluating new product opportunities, particularly on the web. My involvement ranged from
co-developing our pilot website to implementing large portions of our nal website to
mentoring other developers were were less experienced with Perl and web technologies.
Consultant, Tigris, New York, NY Nov 1997 - Oct 1998
Tigris was a small consultancy that specialized in developing applications that were used in
supply chain management. While I was there the company had about 20 people. While there I:
Was asked to learn Perl then teach it to my fellow consultants.
Wrote a desktop reporting application for internal use within Bristol-Myers Squibb. No
application in the history of Tigris had been used by more people, or required less support.
E D U C AT I O N
1988-1992: B.S. in Mathematics, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC.
1992-1994: M.S. in Mathematics, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
1994-1997: PhD work in Mathematics (no degree), Dartmouth College, Hanover NH
R E L AT E D A C T I V I T Y / I N D U S T R Y PA R T I C I PAT I O N
Author of multiple patches in Perl and other open source projects
Member of The Perl Foundation s Grant Committee
CPAN directory: http://search.cpan.org/author/TILLY/
Taught tutorial on A/B testing at OSCON 2008: http://elem.com/~btilly/effective-ab-testing/
Co-author of A Refutation of Metcalfe s Law, see http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/
metcalfe.pdf
Technical editor for Learning Perl, 3rd edition [ISBN: 059*******]
Taught tutorial on how to keep Perl maintainable at LinuxWorld 2000
Active on multiple technical websites and mailing lists
Contact this candidate