Sr. Technical Program Manager

CHARLES FORDYCE

PO Box ***** Bainbridge Island, Washington 98110 360-***-****

**************@*****.*** https://www.linkedin.com/in/charles-fordyce

SUMMARY

An innovative, results-driven, and resourceful product architect with vast experience in consumer accounts, troubleshooting and testing, implementations, design and development, technical writing, reporting, document management, quality assurance, end user support, software development, training and mentoring, and programming. Additional proficiencies include strategic planning, project coordination, applications management, and data center operations. A forward-thinking, pioneering, proven performer who empowers an organization to develop creative solutions while maximizing workflow processes, ensuring highly efficient operations, and achieving goals and objectives.

EXPERIENCE

COMCAST TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS, Seattle, Washington

Sr. Technical Program Manager (Product Architect), 2018-2020

Wrote design specifications for consumer-facing products and business analysis/user journeys for new products and features. Researched IETF, ISO, and other standards documents to ensure compliance/near compliance of new features. Provided video playback of Live, VOD HLS, and DASH on desktop and mobile browsers integrating client-side and server-side advertising providers via IAB VAST, VMAP, and VPAID standards. Designed player accessibility features including keyboard controls and shortcuts, screen-reader labeling, high-contrast color scheme, and color-blind control highlighting. Developed APIs and user interface menus for audio and text tracks.

Oversaw user profile settings such as user name, content ratings, avatar, and PIN protection for members of household for consumer accounts and personas. Created administrative and end user account and persona APIs, using OpenAPI-Swagger. Directed identity and access management for core component of microservice and application stack. Designed administrative and subscriber login applications, API adapters, and retrofit guides to enable federated authentication and single sign-on, using OAuth2 and OpenID Connect protocols via product offerings from Okta. Integrated external identity providers including Microsoft Azure Active Directory and Okta Universal Directory.

Designed Consumer Accounts and Personas features and APIs, securing $28MM in new business contracts.

Designed closed captions features that exceeded the FCC's CVAA requirements.

Designed keyboard navigation and screen reader features that exceeded Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, Level AA, and Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) best practices.

Designed Single Sign-On (SSO) solution to integrate B2B customers with Comcast tools.

Sr. Manager, Software Development, 2012-2018

Led team of 15. Managed three product dev teams producing multi-tenant, video-on-demand SAAS product offerings. Provided content operators with ability to schedule and record live stream for further processing, put stream online, and rewind. Implemented product composed of RESTful services in Java, using Spring, Hibernate, and MySQL running on CentOS. Directed functional and integration test plans and automated tests written in Confluence and implemented in Groovy, Java, and TestNG.

Supervised remote media processor (RMP) middleware application touching thousands of video assets per day. Led operations including server-to-server file transfers over protocols, Aspera, S/FTP, Akamai HTTP, AWS S3, video transcoding and packaging, DRM protection, and quality assessment. Established software using C# and Spring and running on Windows Server as well as functional and integration test plans and automated tests written in Confluence; implemented in Groovy, Java, and TestNG; and run on CentOS.

Oversaw task and file management services including collection of two RESTful services creating and defining file manipulation and movement, media transcoding, and publishing tasks to be completed by RMP. Completed services in Java, using Spring, Hibernate, and MySQL running on CentOS. Directed functional and integration test plans and automated tests written in Confluence and implemented in Groovy, Java, and TestNG.

Interviewed and hired a team of four software engineers in Denver, Colorado.

Built a team of 11 software engineers in Seattle, Washington.

Built content-processing on-prem and cloud data centers that produced millions of minutes of streaming content per day for Fortune 500 customers.

Manager, Software Development, 2009-2012

Oversaw release coordination of RESTful Java services providing media metadata, subscription-based entitlements, and DRM services to Fortune 500 customers including News Corporation, Comcast Xfinity, NBC, Time Warner Cable, and Disney. Coordinated integration and regression testing of web services supporting TV Everywhere and consuming data service endpoints and DRM digital media player with partners including Fancast and Comcast/Xfinity for HTML and Flash media consumer interfaces.

Directed team of nine SDETs across five product dev teams. Assisted with managing functional, performance, and integration testing. Developed automated test harness for Player Development Kit (PDK) HTML5 and Flash video players in concert with third-party authentication, DRM, and content delivery solutions from AWS, Adobe, Microsoft, and Akamai as well as social media integration with Facebook and Twitter.

Interviewed, hired, and trained four SDETs.

Managed testing and releases of dozens of B2B and B2C microservices, including IAM, video player, live stream recording and playback, electronic programming guide, and DRM licensing.

ADDITIONAL EXPERIENCE

AMAZON.COM, INC., Seattle, Washington, Manager, Software Development, 2006-2007. Supervised team of six producing performance test automation tools and automation solutions for quality assurance teams representing retail website applications in Perl, C/C++, and Java. Oversaw test automation tools composed in C/C++, Java, Perl, and JavaScript. Created test case management database, test case execution engine and supporting web applications, and API, unit, and performance test harnesses. Managed hiring, annual performance reviews, compensation management, annual feature planning and budgeting, and Agile project management. Led 15 teams in Seattle and Europe through major data center migration from Virginia to Dublin, Ireland.

Lead, Software Development Engineer in Test-Personalization, 2004-2006. Built testing and performance applications for n-tiered personalization software. Led team of six developers concurrently working on 15 projects, including unit and API tests, load and latency measurements of APIs and UIs, build verification tests, and website content and functionality exercises. Implemented Waterfall and Agile project management, annual feature planning, mentoring, and candidate interviewing. Created testing tool, using proper software development lifecycle, and wrote automated test cases. Communicated with program and product managers and developers. Coordinated testing schedules and bug triage and conveyed clear requirements for testers and code reviews.

Software Development Engineer in Test, 1997-2003. Developed new testing tools in response to company's needs, resulting in regular promotions. Gained experience in front-end and back-end testing. Ensured quality of content and functionality and maintained scripts written in Perl, testing order creation process. Wrote hundreds of automated test cases in C++ and automated tests to exercise website functionality and content for daily releases of U.S. retail website. Created applications in Perl with heavy use of regular expressions.

CERTIFICATIONS

AWS Solutions Architect, 2020

Scrum Master, 2006

University of Washington, C++ Programming, 2002

University of Washington, C Programming, 2000

TECHNICAL SKILLS

Software: AWS, OAuth2, Docker, Kubernetes, Elemental Conductor, Transcoder, vSphere, Linux, Windows

Programming Languages: C/C++, Python, Java, JavaScript, Bash, Perl, PowerShell, Make

Development Tools: JetBrains IntelliJ, JetBrains PyCharm, VS Code, Apple Xcode, Emacs, VIM

Databases: MySQL, MongoDB, Dynamo DB, Berkeley DB

AFFILIATION

Real Estate Association of Puget Sound

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