Experience
2023 — Now
2023 — Now
New York, New York, United States
Tech Leading significant parts, contributing to others, of MSA and MSFT response to Privacy Sandbox.
• Lead on Xandr design, architecture, and plan for how to handle new Sandbox APIs and death of 3PC. Deep onboarding onto Sandbox and working with industry, designing end-to-end plans for Xandr, aligning across all Xandr teams (both technical and product), and driving project forward by leading engineers in their work.
• Worked on IAB ORTB spec for integration of Sandbox and ORTB. Got group together, initiated first proposal, worked along with rest of team to move it forward.
• Ads side main contributor to MSFTs next version of Parakeet, to be published soon.
• Contributions to MSAN platform plans.
2022 — Now
New York, New York, United States
This is really a continuation of the previous job, our official designation changed in June 2022 to MSFT. From this period highlights include:
Highlights from this period include:
• Tech led the US Privacy initiative across Xandr, including designing the end-to-end changes, spec'ing out changes in each impacted system, working with product and tech leads of other teams to shape and then guide implementation, working with product and lawyers to ensure compliance, and finally guiding testing and rollout.
• Managing the transition of our group from the Xandr (really AppNexus) culture into Microsoft, including helping design our new team structure, integration plans, vision, roadmap, and feeling management.
• Part of the "tiger team" that helped design and in one case implement Privacy and other solutions for Netflix.
2021 — 2022
New York, New York, United States
The Audience and Identity Team at Xandr owns the backends and some frontends that power critical features in Ad Serving used by buy and sell side clients to meet their needs. Our systems power different advertising features including targeting, capping, attribution, identity management, and data sharing. We have systems in the Auction Path which serve anywhere from 200K to millions of requests per second with strict latency requirements against large serving data, as well as offline processes that create some of the data structures used in the auction.
My initial role was to hire and build the Identity Team of 6 including an EM to lead the team, become the SME for Identity and Privacy, and work across product and other engineering teams to respond to the (since delayed) cookie apocalypse .
My job included people leadership, tech leadership, and in some cases project leadership. I was able to delegate most team leadership to our EM.
Highlights from this period include:
• Building the team and helping engineers, including the EM, grow his skill set and career, leading 2 team members to promotions.
• Specing out changes across the Xandr Platform to accommodate new Identity Types and leading the project to completion, including coordination, working with product and tech leads on shaping, testing, and implementation for our specific team.
• As part of previous, guiding our Senior Engineers in building the Auction Identity Resolution solution for industry-wide changes in the Identity space.
• Led the team in migrating our Identity Graph as needed for the MSFT acquisition.
2019 — 2021
New York, New York, United States
This began as a continuation of the previous role as we were acquired by AT&T and became part of one
of their business units called Xandr. My title and role did change over time as described below.
Managing the Data Delivery, Data Platform, and Digital Data and Reporting teams. For a period this included directly managing 2 and then 3 teams, eventually shifting to building the teams and managing them through team leads or EMs. The teams included a group in Texas who we integrated into the AppNexus/Xandr culture and technology.
The job of the Data Delivery Team was to maintain and expand our Data Delivery Platform, which allowed internal product teams to build out data sets to deliver to clients in a safe and reliable way. The Data Platform team owned the Hadoop infrastructure and data processing components and libraries. Our Digital Data and Reporting team owned several key data sets for finance and product.
Highlights from this period include:
• Significant team building: building the Data Delivery Team from 2 to 8; starting the Digital Data and Reporting team; managing the integration of one our teams from DirecTV into our larger data group; developing and handing off these teams to leads.
• Reporting 2.0 leadership and failure (happy to dive into this if you're interested).
• Transitioned our real time UI reporting from Vertica to Memsql.
• Started and moved forward the transition of data sets from Vertica to Snowflake.
• Managed the building of our test suite for our data jobs.
2015 — 2019
New York
The DDE team was responsible for the systems which deliver analytic data to our clients, including our Reporting UI that is responsible for 25% of all UI traffic, our API which handles creating reports for delivery to clients (processing ~600K report requests per day), and administration (along with our DBAs) of our Vertica clusters that power the API. We are also responsible for providing our internal clients (Product Engineers) with a Platform on which they can build Reports for delivery to external clients without taking on operational burden, ACL concerns, etc.
Highlights from this period include:
• Developed the vision for our Data Delivery Systems as a platform, creating a roadmap to accomplish that, and worked with our and partner teams to move that forward.
• Led and worked on "BMW", a set of systems to provide a challenging set of requirements for complex but fresh views of federated data from across our system. This included leading the team in building out our Derived Objects and replication system, changes to the query and storage layers to support nuanced timezone and timewindow features, changes to data storage in Vertica to ensure performance.
• Designed and led the improvement of our deployments to include segmenting of traffic so we could do phased releases to a small percentage of our less important clients.
• Led the improved integration of Reporting with the data pipeline to ensure data continuity and validation.
• Managed the transition of our UI from a legacy app to React/Redux app that could be built on by our client teams.
Education
New York University
n/a
2007 — 2008
Wheaton College Massachusetts
Bachelor's degree
2002 — 2006
Wheaton College Massachusetts
Bachelor's degree
2002 — 2006
Wheaton College Massachusetts
BA
2002 — 2006