Responsible for everything involved in creating mobile and web app word games: design, development, deployments, operations, budgeting, marketing and advertising. Managed part-time workers and consultants. Games created: Words Across America™ and Plates Across America®.
Responsible for all areas of RVshare's engineering, technology, security, technical strategy and management. This includes software development, quality assurance, system/development operations, marketplace trust, information security and information technology.
Built and led the team responsible for the design, development and operation of the main distributed search and document storage systems in support of legal e-discovery processes. Helped to grow the team size and company revenue by 4X in 3 years. Personally involved in all activities, and at all levels of engineering, planning and management.
- Grew team from 3 to 20 in 2 years;
- part of the core engineer recruiting team;
- part of core team defining and rolling out new, development processes;
- led new employee training and created training materials;
- mentoring younger engineers;
- prioritization of customer support, bugs, new projects;
- improve stability of search platform;
- scaled search and storage platform for 10X traffic;
- team responsible for over $2 million of AWS resources;
- helped define key performance metrics for services;
- assisted with the organization structure design;
- project management responsibilities for platform projects;
- consulted for all feature projects;
- product owner for search platform defining new projects and selling them to business;
- created north star architectures and roadmap planning;
- chief architect and responsible for architectural reviews across engineering teams;
- managed the project backlog;
- gave presentations to the executive team;
- gave company-wide presentations on technology and road maps;
- lead team meetings, conducted 1-on-1 and status meetings;
- hands-on assistance provided to team by serving as main tool builder.
Co-founder of business providing practice management software for nutritionists and other wellness practices. Primary responsibilities included business development, requirements definition and designing/building the company's first SaaS product.
- Designed and developed practice management software;
- tech stack included Python, jQuery, Django, MySQL;
- developed, managed and monitored deployments to AWS;
- selected vendor and reviewed UX designs;
- served as CFO handling main accounting and financial aspects of the business.
I was the creator, architect, product owner and development manager of the Universal Product Catalog Program. This was the system that would normalize retail product data to help organize the company's massive database of consumer generated content.
- Architect and developer for product, brand and category matching systems, tools and processes;
- supported the Sales and Business Development Teams with data analysis and tools;
- created system to measure and monitor client product catalog health;
- consulted on system architectures for numerous internal teams.
I was part of the founding team at Pronto, serving in the role of Senior Scientist and working on data mining and data analysis projects for a comparison shopping engine. As the company grew, I took on more responsibilities and broader roles in technical leadership and management, eventually becoming the Chief Technology Officer. The company became profitable within 3 years of its creation.
As Chief Technology Officer, I was responsible for an engineering team of over 35 people across 6 different departments spanning our technology stack. I over-saw the design, development and launch of two new profitable web sites as well as being principally responsible for creating an entirely new product line.
- Progression of the roles I held at Pronto: Senior Scientist, VP of Search and Data, Chief Architect, Chief Technology Officer;
- as CTO, oversaw six teams: data platform engineering, backend web development, UI development, QA, Operations and Project Management;
- initiated and led the effort for new processes for planning and managing projects, people and budgets to help the company mature from its early startup habits;
- deeply involved with extensive coordination with all our Product, Development, Data Quality, Sales and Marketing Teams;
- drove and assisted in a re-design of the legacy monolith into a service-oriented architecture (SOA);
- oversaw all new software system designs and implementations;
- responsible for creating, managing and inter-team coordination for all search and data platform projects;
- was one the core team of 4 people that designed and built the entire back-end data analysis and distributed processing pipeline;
- the distributed processing pipeline would continually crawl web sites, scrape and extract data, processed dozens of large feed files, then analyzing all the data which spanned over a hundred million product offers from tens of thousands of stores.
- helped design an implement a distributed search platform based on Lucene that served tens of millions of request a day across hundreds of million documents;
- led the web application development team to architect, build and manage a new initiative for adding social shopping features to Pronto.com's web site;
- architect and principle developer of a distributed image serving platform serving 500 million images;
- sole designer and developer of the API and server platform for syndicating our product data to external partners.
I assisted with a research program in the Department of Psychology exploring computational models of decision making as a means to assist people with low-vision in navigation tasks. These models were related to my doctoral thesis work, so I was able to provide the lab with some expertise in the models and their computational challenges.
- This research collaboration led to the award of U.S. Patent No. 7,620,493, "System, Method and Apparatus for Providing Navigational Assistance", co-authored with Brian J. Stankiewicz, awarded November 17, 2009;
- this work also led to two research publications:
"A Low-Vision Navigation Aid Using Ideal Observer Analysis". Brian Stankiewicz, Matt McCabe and Anthony Cassandra. Journal of Vision, 4(8), 895a. August 2004.
"Development and Evaluation of a Bayesian Low-Vision Navigation Aid". Brian Stankiewicz, Anthony Cassandra, Matt McCabe and William Weathers. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics. November 2007.
- I also helped by writing some of the software that helped with the research studies.
This was a software development subcontracting job to support a research grant from a European environmental agency. This involved creating a graphical visualization of the dynamic interactions of an underlying distributed agent messaging system.
- The implementation was done in Java and the grant was from the European Commission Joint Research Centre as part of EDEN Inland Water Research Project.
I was brought into a research project as a consultant which was at the intersection of the mathematical models I used in my thesis work and the distributed agent architectures that I was involved with at MCC. My role included research collaborations and software development in the context of a DARPA project involving military logistics and resulted in some published research.
- This research collaboration led to the publication of couple of papers:
"Using POMDP-Based State Estimation to Enhance Agent System Survivability". Anthony Cassandra, Marian Nodine, Shilpa Bondale, Steve Ford and David Wells. Proceedings of the Second IEEE Symposium on Multi-agent Security and Scalability (MAS&S). August 2005.
"Adaptive Defense Coordinator for Multi-agent Systems". David Wells, Paul Pazandak, Mariane Nodine and Anthony Cassandra. Proceedings of the First IEEE Symposium on Multi-agent Security and Scalability (MAS&S). August 2004.
In addition to the typical responsibilities of teaching college level Computer Science courses, I was also responsible for the planning, coordination and building of a new undergraduate computer lab.
- Taught undergraduate classes in computer architecture, computer organization, assembly language, software engineering, mathematical optimization, data structures, algorithms, system administration, Java, C++, Scheme, Perl, Python;
- coordinated with faculty and the University administration for new space to accommodate new furniture and the new server room needed for the new undergraduate computing lab infrastructure;
- planned, coordinated and implemented network and computing infrastructure for new undergraduate computing laboratory using Dell servers/switches and the GNU/Linux operating system configured in a thin-client setup.
I worked on a team responsible for a Java compiler and virtual machine. I led the efforts in testing process and infrastructure.
- Managed the testing and benchmarking teams;
- designed and prototyped a management module for a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) (very early in the JMX standardization process);
- designed and implemented tools for automated testing, benchmarking and performance analysis of JVM.
Taught an evening class for two semesters of the course titled "Analysis of Algorithms". This was a required, third year undergraduate course for the Computer Science degree.
- Topics included in this course were: program correctness proofs, graph theory, computational complexity, propositional logic and proofs, relations, sets, trees, probability theory, induction and recursion, generating functions, asymptotic analysis, game theory, combinatorics, and boolean algebra.
I was a co-founder on this start-up building software infrastructure. We built an API and run-time component that allowed software to be dynamically upgraded with zero down-time.
I joined as the Chief Scientist helping to refine the architecture and be hands-on with the software development team. Soon after, I led the team, assisted with the development of the business plan and participated in the VC meetings in search of our second round of funding.
- Director of Engineering during development of the company's first product, including project and personnel management;
- gave technical presentations and demonstrations to potential strategic partners, investors and the Board of Directors;
- co-author on eight patent applications and three provisional patent applications;
- architect for the company's first product, a development infrastructure for deploying robust distributed applications;
- authored both external and internal technical documentation including: business plan, functional specification, architectural documents and user documentation;
- designed basic architecture for company's second product, a distributed network management system.
I joined a research team working on a distributed agent architecture. I helped conceive, design and implement a number of components of this system as well as participating in related research contracts for DARPA.
- Co-authored a number of research papers:
"Scalable Semantic Brokering over Dynamic Heterogeneous Data Sources in InfoSleuth". Mariane Nodine, Anne Hee Hiong Ngu, Anthony Cassandra and William G. Bohrer. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. September/October 2003.
"Capability-based Agent Matchmaking". Anthony Cassandra, Damith Chandrasekara and Marian Nodine. Fourth International Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents 2000). June 2000.
"Providing Customized Process and Situation Awareness in the Collaboration Management Infrastructure". Donald Baker, Dimitrios Georgakopoulos, Hans Schuster, Anthony Cassandra and Andrzej Cichocki. Proceedings of the Fourth IECIS International Conference on Cooperative Information (COOPIS). 1999.
- designed and implemented research prototypes;
- managed research and development projects, including customer relations management;
- created ontological reasoning algorithms and data structures for agent brokering in peer-to-peer agent system;
- designed an intrusion detection system using peer-to-peer agent system;
- developed a complex event processing engine for DARPA (Rome AF Labs);
- participated in development of a work-flow process awareness engine;
- wrote an agent simulation system for doing comparative analysis of agent brokering algorithms.
