Ian Kallen

Internet industry

October 2010 – February 2012 (1 year 5 months) San Francisco Bay Area

Cloud infrastructure, back-end and iOS client development for Blockboard's hyperlocal social application and service. Work is focused on the product, developing service APIs, third party API integration, system automation and data gymnastics. Acquired by Klout.

Marketing and Advertising industry

March 2009 – October 2010 (1 year 8 months)

Highly experienced innovative wrangler of bits, ideas and people to develop web scale data acquisition, analytics and search applications.

Working with early stage start-ups on cloud computing, agile development with Python, Django, Ruby, Rails, Amazon Web Services infrastructure, scalability, configuration mgt & automation, Cassandra, MongoDB, Hadoop, Zookeeper, full text search integrated with rails, sharded solr implementation, database analytics, MySQL tuning & scaling, application performance analysis & fixes, Twitter Streaming API client & data workflow and technology strategy.

Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Internet industry

April 2004 – March 2009 (5 years)

Led efforts infrastructure stabilization, growth, architectural planning, project planning, vision articulation and software development.
Performed system analysis and design of an evolving and rapidly scaling infrastructure characterized by high write and query rates. Architectural and code refactoring for continuous system improvement. Introduced caching (memcached), messaging (spread) and asynchrony (queues/workers) to create smoother scaling applications.

Built statistics frameworks for content analysis, content archiving and query frameworks, localizable web interfaces, service oriented architecture (RESTful, later used thrift) and fraud ("web spam") detection systems.

Led team to rewrite of the data acquisition pipeline resulting better data quality, better operational visibility and easier feature extensions in the ping handling, crawling, parsing, persisting and indexing of web data. Used unit testing and continuous integration to create a development culture of quality and accountability. Another outcome of the rewrite: an order of magnitude reduction in the number of machines required to persist crawl information.

Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Computer Software industry

February 2001 – March 2004 (3 years 2 months)

Shepherded full product life cycles, rendered development projections, led engineering teams three to eight engineers (worked solo at times too!) as well participating in Covalent's strategic planning.

June 1999 – January 2001 (1 year 8 months)

Architected network, technical operations, software and integration for Web delivery, online applications, content management, workflow, publishing, security and other systems.

Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Online Media industry

February 1996 – June 1999 (3 years 5 months)

Founded technical operations and developed systems for content management, online applications, systems automation, traffic analysis, ad server architecture, performance tuning and security management.

GameSpot was acquired by ZDNet which was acquired by C/Net, C/Net was acquired by CBSi. GameSpot is now CBSi's game channel, ranked in the top 200 of Alexa traffic rankings.

Privately Held; 201-500 employees; Information Technology and Services industry

November 1995 – February 1996 (4 months)

Contractor at Oracle Corporation - Server Technology Division (Redwood Shores). Supported large Unix development environment performing OS migrations, back-ups and restorations, Sun Sparc hardware maintenance, and systems automation.

1994 – 1995 (1 year)