CTO

Vijay Venkatesh

** ******* ****, ******, *** *AU, United Kingdom.

Phone: 508-***-**** Email: j1mp0m@r.postjobfree.com Nationality: USA

SUMMARY

A results-oriented individual with experience in technology and product management seeking an executive

technology leadership role. Track record of building high-performing technology teams and business partnerships,

designing internet-scale SAAS properties, globalizing software, and running devops. Greatly relish entrepreneurial

challenges and launching new operations, creating product, mentoring staff, and the design of highly available web

systems.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Viridis Learning, Inc.

Technology Consultant & Advisor Jan ’12 to July ‘12

Created stealth startup’s product roadmap, application and platform architecture pre-seed funding.

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Prepared platform and engineering budgets, and advised firm for series A funding round.

Pearson

Chief Technology Officer, International Feb ’10 to date

Promoted and relocated to London HQ, to provide and build technology leadership for Pearson’s international and

emerging markets, with remit of global (ex-US) technology strategy, properties and engineering.

• Strategy

§ Create and maintain a yearly budget of $18m (capex and opex budgets). Responsible for M&A

diligence and integration, technology advisory, and forming digital transformation (print to digital)

product models. Strategic planning includes product strategies for emerging and mature markets.

§ Supporting firm’s dual web and mobile technology strategy, using content management and global

delivery methods, selling products to users in any language and country, in B2B and B2C models.

§ Leading Pearson’s platform Globalization strategy, with new localized platforms launched in fifteen

markets. Consulting in a product-management capacity with each business vertical to bring new

product sketches to market.

• Technology

§ Leading software and program delivery on portfolio of business-critical, global software properties

in 18 new markets. Technology stack includes LAMP, Java, Rest-services and Django in a global

public cloud, using agile software development and continuous delivery practices.

§ Defined and co-developed, and rolling out the consistent orchestration and automation of

infrastructure provisioning using RightScale and Chef on hybrid cloud (AWS, Rackspace,

DataPipe), and implementing a ‘A/B stack’ deployment methodology with near-zero downtime.

§ Responsible for engineering leadership on all learning platforms that includes identity management

and authentication, e-commerce, portal and data integration services.

§ Built North American web ecommerce channel for digital products supporting sales of $80 million

per annum. Extending solution to a global, local payment and language ecommerce capability.

§ Lead and direct evaluation and proof-of-concepts on software, ops and testing tools, libraries and

procedures to evolve best practices, software quality, performance and team workflow.

§ Founded International Architecture council, a pan-company sounding board that ensures

consistency for all architectural, tools, build or buy, and implementation decisions.

• Team

§ Created a 30 person engineering team in ten months. Have solid line team responsibilities (12

developers in Phoenix, 75 developers and testers in Poland and 12 testers in India).

§ Managed and integrated Norway-based Fronter, a 70-person product company, post-acquisition.

Improved software practices and operational service-levels, trained product teams on agile, created

predictable software delivery and introduced new loosely coupled product architectures.

§ Instituted agile (scrum) principles, continuous delivery and global engineering concepts into all

product teams and locations, and managed change for product managers and stakeholders.

§ Building organization with a lean startup culture and devops principles. Lead budgeting, recruiting

and inducting activities for the group’s rapid 2012 headcount expansion.

Director, Offshore Engineering & Strategy [Based in Boston] March ‘07 to Feb ‘10

• Created and delivered the global product engineering strategy and set up relationships with vendors, niche

platform partners and a BOT-captive. Cut operating costs by $2.0 M in 2008, and $2.5M+ in 2009.

Staffed global teams, and managed governance, execution. Projects included new projects, sustaining core

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development, maintenance projects and remote infrastructure operations.

Set up eighty-person global software development team, implementing co-development, staff-augment and

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wholly outsourced models.

Director, Engineering & EAI [Based in Boston] July ’05 – March ‘07

• Owned software design and coding to integrate multiple customer properties via use of a portal.

• Responsible for identity management and authentication services, and Comergent ecommerce engine

using Cybersource. (Serving 8M registered users at 50% growth, and $70M in 2010 global sales)

• Owned database design and administration, ESB infrastructure, web service contracts and development,

BPEL orchestration, and performance engineering; Recruited and led twelve person engineering team.

• Led evaluation and selection of software tools and libraries. Owned Tech stack that included Capeclear

ESB, BPEL, WebLogic, Spring, Struts, Hibernate and uPortal.

Manager, Engineering [Based in Boston] May ’04 – July ‘05

• Led Pearson’s first SOA project, for reliable messaging over ESB with distributed transactions and

asynchronous event delivery, supporting 6m users. Reviewed HA, security and network design and all

service contracts and code.

• Led coding and delivery for subscriptions and identity mgmt. platforms. Built integrations and SSO APIs for

external partners. Introduced continuous QA and daily standups as best practices.

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• Managed the teams and platforms for Subscription, Grade management and 3 -party integrations to 2x

capacity.

Architect & Senior Engineer [Based in Boston] March ’03 – May ‘04

• Designed reliable messaging architecture and web-services standards for two of Pearson LTG’s largest

global properties. Solution saved the company $500,000+ annually in support costs.

• Institutionalized performance optimization for Pearson’s high-traffic global platforms. Developed

performance engineering methodologies for capacity planning, scenario execution, system monitoring and

results reporting. Recruited and scaled a performance engineering team.

• Designed and coded a course management and grade reporting platform, built services for single sign-on

support, roster management, enrollment, class creation and grade integration.

Nervewire, Inc.

Sr. Technical consultant [Based in Boston] July ’00 - Feb ’03

Lifeharbor [Architecture, technical expertise]

Rewrote financial portfolio app in Swing, for a global financial services client. Wrote all the application code

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and migration tests, and configured the database, optimizing for high availability.

Conducted system testing, and scalability and performance engineering, and certified HA performance.

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EquiLend, LLC [Development, integration & infrastructure]

• Custom-built Securities lending platform integrated the world’s ten largest investment banks. Led the

‘Negotiation’, ‘Autoborrow’, and reporting and activity monitor modules, coding all the business logic,

message processing, DB sql and UI presentation layer.

• Developed XML message standards, handling and validation as foundation services. Involved in

conception and design of Securities Lending Markup Language (SLML)

• Helped design the security and network, and plan capacity. Participated in DR/BCP, systems sizing, and

made data center and managed services recommendations.

Johnson & Johnson [EAI architecture]

• Reviewed architecture and design for a WebMethods inter-ERP data integration project.

• Identified and fixed design, security and load risks, and created canonical document templates.

USBank [Infrastructure review & optimization]

• Reviewed and recommended architecture and storage processes. Scope included SAN, NAS, backup and

DASD topologies, storage components and fabric, storage management infrastructure as well as storage-

related governance and policies and procedures.

Nokia [Global platforms hosting & management]

Led global infrastructure strategy for Nokia’s mobile platforms. Presented technical evaluations of, and

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recommendations for, data-center providers, locations, and operations partners across Asia-Pacific.

Computer Associates

Software Engineer [Based in Boston] July ’99 – July ‘00

Built and supported a Java-based monitoring platform for sites using Ecommerce platforms. Product

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collected performance metrics, replayed synthetic transactions and mined usage data. Integrated app with

network operations event-tracking systems for alerts to create automated trouble tickets.

Navisite, Inc. [Sysops, infrastructure]

(Further details available)

Oklahoma City University

Manager, Computer Labs 1997 – 1999

(Further details available)

TECHNOLOGIES

Computer Languages

• Java, SQL, C/C++, C#, ASP.NET, VB.NET, JavaScript, HTML, WML, ColdFusion, PHP, Python

Software and Tools

• WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, Oracle Application Server, JBOSS, Tomcat, JMeter, HP Loadrunner, Quality

Center, QuickTest Pro, WebMethods, IIS, Apache, UML, Clearcase, Cruisecontrol, Jenkins, SVN, Git, CVS,

Visio, Akamai, Atlassian suite, Visual Studio, MQSeries, ADO, CGI, XML, ebXML, SLML (Securities

Lending Markup Language), HP OpenView, BMC Patrol, Remedy, NETCOOL, NetSaint, Zabbix, Nagios,

OpenNMS, Opnet, Memcached, JSF, Struts, Amazon AWS stack, Rightscale, Gomez, SOAPUI, Selenium,

XSLT, Xpath, Spring, Hibernate

Web Services Tools

• JAXP, JAX-RPC, Spring Web services, SOAP, REST, WSDL, UDDI, BPEL, WS-*, WS-RM

Service Oriented Architecture Platforms

• Sonic ESB, Capeclear ESB, IBM WebSphere, Oracle ESB

Platforms and OS

• Solaris, Linux, BSD, .NET, Windows Server, iOS, MacOS, VAX/VMS

Databases

• Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, Amazon RDS, PostgreSQL, MongoDB

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT & EDUCATION

Pearson Management Committee

• Recognized as top-50 employee (in a 40,000 employee corporation) by Pearson’s CEO.

• Represent International interests on Pearson-wide technology council, co-chaired by Pearson CEO and

CIO, to solve company-wide technology, recruiting and business challenges.

Speaking Engagements & Affiliations

• Speaker, JBOSS World Las Vegas 2006; Panel member at Unisys, JBOSS SOA Talks event in Boston

• Member, TiE, The Indus Entrepreneur network

Boston University

• Master of Science in Computer Science [2004]

Oklahoma City University

• Bachelor of Science in Computer Science [1999]

• Graduated cum laude & President’s Honor roll

• Award for ‘most promising Computer Science student’ and finalist for ‘Marshall’ and ‘Senior Man’

PERSONAL

I’ve lived in the UK, US and India. I’ve built software teams in all three locations, and in three other

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countries.

Proficient in English, Tamil, Hindi, Marathi; Written Spanish and French; learning Sanskrit.

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