My Role

Principal technologist brought into a benefits administration startup that had to deliver a configuration-driven web benefits administration platform in 120 days, or the startup would fail. Successfully sequenced functionality to deliver the web experience needed for internal & external customers and implemented data exchange systems so tens of thousands of employees received their benefits on time.

Hired as the permanent CIO reporting to the CEO. Responsible for Product Development, IT Operations, and Systems Integration (responsible for daily data exchange with customers and vendors).

Executive Leadership Achievements

• Hands-on leadership of all company technology from its initial startup to sustained profitability with over 15 million in annual revenue from technology services.
• Managed technology staffing and budgeting with a day-one contractor team for all IT & software development needs, then transitioned to a long-term, sustainable balance of employees and contractors.
• Established success criteria for processes and procedures and worked with the team members to continuously improve configurations management and development processes to ensure the teams delivered the best results consistently over time.
• Collaborated with the CEO and COO to drive business strategy at the corporate level. Interim Chief Operating Officer for four months.
• Collaborated with the VP of Sales and CEO during large account sales, demonstrating the system to our largest prospects, emphasizing the depth of our technical expertise and ability to deliver on our commitments.

Technical Leadership Achievements

• Directly lead development, participating in all aspects of coding & delivery, of initial SaaS product in under 120 days from project start to first production customer use at scale.
• Developed a specialized version of the core product to support Wal-Mart, handling benefits administration of over 1.3 million employees enrolling over 14 days, a record in the industry at that time.
• Created product delivery cadence of four updates per year with automated build, testing, and deployment – before CI/CD became an industry concept.
• Principal architect of the system, overseeing its expansion from inception to over 1.5 million lines of code, 220 SQL tables, and a state-of-the-art SOA business transaction layer.
• Led IT operations team to build hosting environment, scaling from six servers and one rack in year one to up to 60 physical servers, an extended SAN with several storage arrays, and fully redundant high-performance network, firewalls, hardware load balancing hardware.