Paul Gibson tst

Summary

Experience in:

  • building, operating, and evolving commercial SaaS systems
  • utilizing cloud technologies, particularly Amazon Web Services
  • modernizing mature software systems and managing technical debt
  • characterizing cost of ownership and leading projects to improve it
  • understanding and applying industry best practices
  • filling the void between Dev and Ops and leading others to do the same

Employment in Silicon Valley has an aspect of investing (via equity). To that end I have gained this experience and perspective:

  • worked for 6 pre-public companies
  • achieved 7 positive exit milestones so far (2 IPOs, 3 acquisitions, 2 private equity purchases)
  • developed an understanding about what matters for growing a company and what doesn't

Experience

Systems and Infrastructure Architect, Bill.com
September 2019 - present, San Jose, CA

Work has consisted of leading and providing technical vision for:

  • Full datacenter exit to AWS, completed early 2024
  • Modernization, particularly containerizing key applications/services and hosting those on AWS ECS/Fargate
  • Using AWS Outposts to host a unique partner workload; exited to regular AWS in 2024
  • Improving CI/CD and the use of pipelines to create and manage cloud infrastructure
  • Adapting BILL's technical offering to be embeddable into key partner SaaS systems such as Xero
  • Building and launching a new offering to better serve large suppliers in the BILL network
  • Lead technical member of M&A team; involved in several due diligence efforts for acquisition candidates

Principal Systems Architect, Financial Engines aka Edelman Financial Engines
September 2014 - September 2019, Sunnyvale, CA
Led Financial Engine's lift-and-shift journey to AWS:

  • Completed all-in on AWS and full colo exit for dev, test, DR, and production as of September 2019
  • Partnered with FE's Analytics Office to migrate from an on-prem Netezza data warehouse to Redshift (completed May 2018)
  • Rehosted production Linux compute to EC2 (completed December 2017)
  • Migrated DR from colocation to a hybrid model using 1 colocation rack and the rest in AWS (completed 2016)
  • Adopted higher-layer managed services such as ElastiCache in favor of run-your-own Redis
  • partnered with FE's Tech Office on a parallel journey of Cloud Native transformation
  • over the 5-year journey reduced total colocation footprint from ~25 racks to zero

SaaS Infrastructure Architect, Intuit Inc.
July 2009 - September 2014, Mountain View, CA
Joined Intuit as part of the PayCycle acquistion.

Worked primarily in Online Payroll and the broader set of Small Business SaaS offerings including Quickbooks Online.

Started the cloud migration by leading the design and led the implementation of a hybrid cloud environment:

  • spanning a lab on Intuit's Mountain View campus and AWS us-west-1 NorCal
  • using AWS Direct Connect
  • which allowed for seamless expansion of the lab into the cloud
  • the experiment with pre-production helped inform how the same approach could be used for DR and production footprints

Principal Engineer - Infrastructure, PayCycle, Inc.
October 2005 - July 2009, Palo Alto, CA
Worked on:

  • performance and scalability work for a Java-based SaaS application
  • Disaster Recovery architecture, design, implementation and production activation for ~2 weeks annually
  • appserver migration from WebLogic to Glassfish to enable >100k/year in license expense savings with no loss of functionality
  • various sub-system upgrades (Quartz, slf4j/logback)
  • migration of app- and web-tier hosting from bare metal to virtualized
  • MFA authentication design

Engineering Manageer - Infrastructure, Calyso Technology
June 2004 - October 2005, San Francisco, CA
Led a small team of engineers responsible for:

  • the Calyso Data Server
  • the Calyso Event Server
  • the data model
  • integrations with 3rd party software partners such as DataSynapse

Staff Engineer, Siebel Systems
June 2003 - May 2004, San Mateo, CA
Joined Siebel as part of the BoldFish acquisition.
Ensured a smooth transition of the BoldFish technology into the Siebel Email Marketing solution.

Architect, BoldFish
May 2000 - June 2003, Santa Clara, CA
Led a small team to implement the BoldFish Express Network:

  • a cloud-based high-volume email sending service used by customers for email marketing
  • implemented seamless integration with the on-premise BoldFish Express Server that integrated with customer databases (typically CRM)
  • utilized a scale-out design for Express Network using JMS and the BoldFish Sending Engine, a high-volume egress MTA

System Architect, wine.com
April 1998 - April 2000, Palo Alto, CA
Joined as employee ~35 when the company was still Virtual Vineyards. Led these projects:

  • move from Berkeley DB to Oracle 8 for the backend database
  • move from on-premise hosting over a T1 to a commercial colocation facility
  • move from virtualvineyards.com domain to wine.com
  • move from Perl/CGI backend application codebase to Java Servlet/JSP running on Apache JServ
  • move to application tier front-ended by f5 BigIP load balancers
  • move from a monolithic application tier on a single Sun E4500 mid-range machine to scale-out on SPARC 5 machines
  • implemented Akamai as a CDN solution

Over this time wine.com grew to a $65M annual revenue run rate.

Engineering Manager - Infrastructure, Sungard Data Systems
October 1997 - April 1998, Mountain View, CA
Worked on post-Infinity-acquisition efforts to bring together three product platforms.
Continued supporting pre-acquistion Infinity customers with the same standard of service they had experienced prior to the acquisition.

Engineering Manager - Infrastructure, Infinity Financial Technology
March 1995 - October 1997, Mountain View, CA
Led a small team focused on:

  • maintaining and evolving the Infinity data model on Sybase and Oracle
  • maintaining an enhancing the DB access layer used by all Infinity code
  • maintaining the build pipeline to produce Infinity product binaries for all supported platforms (Solaris, HP-UX, AIX)

Served as acting Director of Engineering including representing Infinity technology to investment banks involved in the Infinity IPO.

Manager Infrastructure, Cargill Financial Markets Division
April 1994 - March 1995, Minnetonka, MN
Led a small team on these projects to align to overall industry trends:

  • migration from OS/2 to Windows NT 3.5 for trader workstations
  • migration from Token Ring/SNA to TCP/IP for LAN and WAN networking
  • migration from AS/400 toward Unix-based application development

Technical Manager, Prudential Home Mortage
January 1993 - April 1994, Minneapolis, MN
Co-developer of a mortgage pricing engine used by telesales staff to quote realtime mortgage rates to prospects:

  • serverside was built in C and multithreaded using Sybase OpenServer as a framework
  • deployed this server to on premise AIX machines
  • clientside was implemented in PowerBuilder allowing for easy integration with the preferred development tool used by the broader team

Senior Software Engineer, Infinity Financial Technology
November 1990 - December 1992, Mountain View, CA
First engineer hired; worked on:

  • creating C++ foundation libraries
  • implementing the Infinity datamodel on Sybase
  • qualifying 3rd-party technologies such as portable UI toolkits
  • partnering with early customers on adopting the Infinity class libraries and application suite

Analyst, Hewlett-Packard Company
June 1988 - November 1990, Palo Alto, CA
Part of the founding team of HP SPaM which brought supply chain modeling and analysis to HP and the industry in general.

  • reported to Corey Billington
  • worked with Hau Lee to implement analytic models and apply this modeling tool within HP. Hau specified the models and I implemented that design in ANSI C on HP-UX.
  • I learned through this work that I enjoyed software development more than technical analysis and I subsequently turned my career in that direction

Education

Stanford University
M.S. Management Science & Engineering
April 1987 - April 1989

Stanford University
B.S. Electrical Engineering
September 1984 - June 1988

specialization in software

Certifications

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional, 2020 - 2023

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate, 2015 - 2023

AWS Certified Developer - Associate, June 2015 - June 2018

AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate, August 2015 - August 2018