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NAME

Justin Palma

EMAIL

jpalma@hey.com

PHONE

+1 (518) 505-7105

LOCATION

San Francisco Bay Area

01

Hi there! My name is

Justin Palma

I'm a Chief Technology Officer in the San Francisco Bay Area with over 19 years of programming experience, and 12 years of experience managing global teams across 12 time zones developing world-class applications.

I've built and managed apps that climbed as high as #4 in their category in the app store, and have been used by tens of millions of people.

About Me

I'm a Chief Technology Officer in the San Francisco Bay Area with over 12 years of experience managing global teams across 12 time zones developing world-class applications.

I've grown and mentored teams to ship world-class platforms, applications and experiences, some climbing as high as #4 in the app store, some with tens of millions of downloads. I have experience not only in consumer-facing apps but have both personally built and managed teams who have developed operational, business intelligence, as well as big data analytical tools for internal use by over 10,000 employees.

I am experienced in all aspects of engineering management, from recruiting and hiring to onboarding, coaching and mentoring engineers in multiple locations, across 12 time zones.

My focus is on delighting customers by working closely with cross-functional teams, including customer support, product, design, data science, and DevOps, to develop strategy, road maps, long-term goals, and execution plans. I work hard to curate exceptional team culture for maximum efficiency and aspire to create an enjoyable, inclusive workplace for everyone.

With 19 years of programming experience, I mentor my engineers with hands-on technical management in Ruby on Rails, Python/Django, React/React Native, Swift, and Objective-C, and am an AWS Certified Solutions Architect with extensive experience in high-scale application architecture.

A strong passion for innovating and consider myself a 'forever student', constantly learning the latest development strategies in backend, frontend, mobile, and machine learning technologies.

Download Resume

Experience

  • NOV 2021 - PRESENT

    CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER / CO-FOUNDER
    THE VIZEMENT GROUP, INC. - FINTECH - NEW YORK, NY (REMOTE)

    • Currently in stealth-mode.

    2021
  • 2021

    LEAD ARCHITECT AND SYSOPS CONSULTANT & CONTRACTOR
    GAMEON - B2B FAN ENGAGEMENT PLATFORM - VANCOUVER, CA (REMOTE)

    • Vastly improved performance by helping move off of a monolithic architecture, and built a distributed, event-driven architecture, and hardened security.
    • Reduced costs by moving new services to serverless infrastructure.
    • Setup process to drastically reduce response times by setting up event and error notification and logging services and built dashboards with synthetic monitoring to watch performance in all international client's countries.

    Key Achievement:
    Due to the success of GameOn, they were onboarding clients at a very rapid pace. However, each client had a unique authentication system that we needed to integrate with. I architected and built a proprietary, modular authentication system to make it quick and easy for junior engineers to bolt-on custom authentication solutions as new clients onboard.

    Technologies Used:
    • AWS: Lambda/ECR/ECS/VPC with custom networking/VPN
    • Github Actions (CI/CD)
    • Serverless.com
    • Datadog
    • Ruby on Rails
    • Node.js/Typescript
    2021
  • JAN 2021 - NOV 2021

    ENGINEERING MANAGER
    CREDIBLE - FINTECH - SAN FRANCISCO, CA

    • Innovated hiring processes and trained my team to help scale my team from 6 to 12 direct reports across multiple countries. My team crossed three disciplines; Front-End, Back-End and Quality Assurance.
    • Redefined the working relationship between engineering and product to allow constant communication, weekly Q&A, and documentation processes resulting in considerable increases in productivity and unparalleled A/B Testing for improved revenue.
    • Helped establish and define change management, engineering processes and more for SOC2 compliance.

    Key Achievement:
    Because of the competitive hiring landscape, I was given the latitude to help build a loyal team culture. That included a rigorous 1-on-1 weekly schedule, hands-on assistance with individualized career progression paths, semi-monthly social events, and encouraging my team to be the example for ideal cross-team collaboration with engineering and product.

    Technologies Used:
    • AWS: VPC/VPN/EKS/ECR
    • Kubernetes
    • Ruby on Rails
    • React/Typescript
    • Next.js
    • Vagrant
    • Docker
    2021
  • AUG 2020 - JAN 2021

    SENIOR ENGINEERING MANAGER
    SMARTFROG & CANARY - IoT MANUFACTURER & SaaS - NEW YORK, NY (REMOTE)

    • Managed the back-end team of 7 direct reports across multiple countries, focusing on paying down technical debt, upgrading all systems to the latest stable versions, and decreasing system-wide latency.
    • Helped establish a bottom-up engineering culture, shifting focus to the engineers to get buy-in on upcoming projects and priorities.
    • During COVID-19, I helped boost remote company culture with remote social events, games, and more to bring the team closer together.

    Key Achievement:
    I re-built the platform's Sleep Service on Kubernetes with web sockets to boost power efficiency on battery-operated devices by working with the device team to power down all sensors but open a web socket to the sleep server to allow immediate communication while conserving power.

    Technologies Used:
    • Kubernetes
    • Web Sockets
    • Python
    • Jaeger
    • Terraform
    2020
  • JUL 2020

    AWS CERTIFICATION - SOLUTIONS ARCHITECT ASSOCIATE

    Earners of this certification have a comprehensive understanding of AWS services and technologies. They demonstrated the ability to build secure and robust solutions using architectural design principles based on customer requirements. Badge owners are able to strategically design well-architected distributed systems that are scalable, resilient, efficient, and fault-tolerant.

    2020
  • 2020

    ARCHITECT CONSULTANT & CONTRACTOR
    STEALTH FINTECH STARTUP - HEDGEFUND / B2B SaaS - NEW YORK, NY (REMOTE)

    • Architected and built full Kubernetes multi-cloud infrastructure for both on-premises and cloud solutions for a B2B SaaS product.
    • Created a big data analytics platform using AWS Glue and Redshift with Python Spark.
    • Created full CI/CD pipeline with Terraform.

    Key Achievement:
    Built Python/Django backend with CLI application to allow customer to run complex batch job processes with AWS EC2 spot pricing to minimize cost.

    Technologies Used:
    • AWS: Batch/Custom Networking/ECS/EKS/Glue/Redshift/S3
    • Docker
    • Kubernetes
    • Python/Django/SQL Alchemy
    • React
    • Redis
    • Terraform
    2020
  • OCT 2018 - AUG 2020

    ENGINEERING MANAGER, HEAD OF SOFTWARE - ACQUIRED
    GATE LABS, INC - IoT MANUFACTURER & SaaS - SAN FRANCISCO, CA

    • Managed Backend, Frontend, Marketing, and User Experience teams and helped double my teams' size with full-time engineers and contractors.
    • Accomplished scaling traffic from 1.3 million to 17.3 million API requests per week while lowering average response time from 300ms to 150ms.
    • Built full Business Intelligence Suite as a side project connecting Redshift, Stripe, Shopify and a read replica of the Production database to have one central web app for employees, customer service and executives to have reports on all aspects of the business, and power live dashboards in the office.

    Key Achievement:
    Successfully managed and built the capability to connect our IoT smart lock to Samsung’s SmartThings in 10 days to help Gate become a featured partner in the 2019 Samsung Developer Conference.

    Technologies Used:
    • AWS: Alexa/Lambda/Redshift/S3/SNS/SQS
    • Docker
    • Heroku
    • jQuery
    • Ruby on Rails
    • Stripe
    • Twilio
    2018
  • JAN 2017 - OCT 2018

    CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER
    BINGEGIVING, LLC - MARKETING SaaS & API - NEW YORK, NY

    • Designed and developed the entire initial platform, including database structure, back end, front end, APIs and multiple iOS demos including Apple Watch.
    • Designed, developed and implemented a custom Apple Watch movement Algorithm to award points to users based on arm movement.
    • Maintained multiple APIs including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook Subscriptions to award points for Users’ actions on the Facebook platform.

    Key Achievement:
    Developed and implemented a custom API log to allow developers to easily access our API, and watch each API call with full error reporting to ensure successful connections with their apps.

    Technologies Used:
    • AWS: EC2/S3
    • jQuery
    • Ruby on Rails
    • Swift
    • Twilio
    2017
  • FEB 2016 - JUN 2018

    CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER
    RBAU KITCHEN, PBC - RESTAURANT SaaS & PoS - SAN FRANCISCO, CA / BALI, INDONESIA

    • I was employee number one, and helped scale and manage my teams to twenty five in frontend, backend, iOS and Android.
    • Designed and developed the entire initial platform, including database, back end, front end, API for iOS, iOS development, and maintained multiple APIs.
    • The iOS app used GPS to ensure coffee orders were completed at precisely the right time the customer would enter the cafe. It did this based on the user’s time until arrival to the cafe and the prep time and number of orders ahead, for the cafe.

    Key Achievement:
    We became #4 in the app store for the Food and Drink category in Indonesia (the world’s fourth largest population just behind the U.S.), beating out Starbucks, Pizza Hut and McDonalds’ apps!

    Technologies Used:
    • AWS: EC2/S3
    • jQuery
    • Ruby on Rails
    • Stripe
    • Swift
    • Twilio
    2016
  • JUL 2013 - OCT 2015

    CEO/CO-FOUNDER - ACQUIRED
    CAR GARDEN, LLC - DEALERSHIP & DEALERSHIP MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE - ALBANY, NY

    • We bootstrapped from the ground up to a team of 14 across multiple disciplines, including a middle management layer.
    • I built a proprietary Dealership OS with Sales Inventory, Front-end marketing channels, Parts Inventory, and Service Management System.
    • My wife and I developed proprietary dealership processes and operations manual on everything from opening and closing, photographing vehicles, and ordering parts, allowing for a smooth acquisition.

    Key Achievement:
    I built a full NLP vehicle ad writer. Through a simple form, anyone could upload a car's photos, add mileage, select trims, and the AI would write a unique ad based on the user's inputs, saving hundreds of hours.

    Technologies Used:
    • Ruby on Rails
    • CarFax API
    • jQuery
    • CSS
    • Stripe
    • Square
    • Twilio
    2013
  • JUL 2013 - OCT 2018

    CEO/FOUNDER
    RENTEOUS, LLC - PROPERTY MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE - NEW YORK, NY

    • Designed and developed the entire initial platform for Landlords to more easily manage their rental properties. It handled everything from repair requests, a landlord to tenant chat system, scope based reporting, and multiple APIs.
    • Designed and developed full custom rental property bookkeeping that included intelligent late fee generation and removal.
    • Implemented Stripe Connect Marketplace to allow Landlords to setup their own Stripe account through Renteous and allow them to accept rent payments from tenants in both Credit Card and ACH form.

    Key Achievement:
    Built an NLP chat bot from scratch utilizing a Naive Bayes classifier, a Decision Tree, and Levenshtein Distance (for misspellings). It used keyword matching to be trained insanely fast, and relied on the Naive Bayes classifier to learn over time. It also cross referenced the Oxford Dictionary API to ensure each new word it hadn’t learned yet were being added to the right word class. It remains the most accurate chat bot I’ve used to date!

    Technologies Used:
    • AWS: EC2/S3
    • jQuery
    • React
    • Redis
    • Ruby on Rails
    • Stripe
    • Swift
    • Twilio
    2013
  • NOV 2010 - JUL 2013

    CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER
    BAGOOBA, INC. - SOCIAL NETWORK - NEW YORK, NY

    • I designed, developed and implemented all database, server side code and APIs for the startup’s flagship product; an emotion based social network that included “butterfly effect” ripples through the network, where one user’s extremely good or bad day could effect hundreds of people based on their relationships.
    • Full Twitter and Facebook Authentication, with Facebook subscriptions so Facebook posts could affect user’s ‘moods’.
    • I developed a complex infinite conversation threading system with ability to respond to people inline, privately.

    Key Achievement:
    I developed a complex Avatar Creator with over 60 Billion customization options and unlock-able premium items with multiple emotions and multiple image crops per avatar.

    2010
  • NOV 2007 - NOV 2010

    LEAD DEVELOPER
    DEEP FOCUS INC. - ENTERTAINMENT MARKETING AGENCY - NEW YORK, NY

    • Led, developed and implemented large scale, complex projects in Ruby on Rails, and micro-sites in Flash, and HTML/CSS/JS.
    • Worked on the team to develop AMC’s “Mad Men Yourself” campaign, which resulted in 1MM unique visitors and a 60% conversion rate, and was picked up by major publications like Entertainment Weekly and New York Magazine.
    • Thrived in the fast paced environment working for high end clients such as HBO, Microsoft, EA, MTV, Random House, Nintendo, AMC, Calvin Klein, Weight Watchers, Equinox and more, while being the in-house Social Media API expert.

    Key Achievement:
    During the launch of Microsoft Windows Phone 7, I led development on the Facebook replica of Windows Phone 7’s UI powered by your Facebook Friends list. The launch was the largest media spend in history, at $387MM.

    2007
  • APR 2004 - NOV 2007

    INTERACTIVE DEVELOPER
    MEDIA LOGIC INC. - ADVERTISING AGENCY - ALBANY, NY

    • Developed and implemented multiple applications in ColdFusion, MS SQL and Flash for large clients such as J.P. Morgan Chase, Cornell University and Visa.
    • Developed custom agency billing and time tracking software for Media Logic for ~150 employees to use to reduce time by up to 50%.

    Key Achievement:
    Developed and implemented a full lead cycle for registration and email campaign automation, integral to the Johnson School at Cornell University’s 2007 recruitment efforts, and contributing to a 25% increase in enrollment over the previous year.

    2004
  • JAN 2003 - APR 2004

    SENIOR DEVELOPER
    OVERIT MEDIA, LLC - WEB DEVELOPMENT AGENCY - ALBANY, NY

    • Moved the existing scattered system, to a streamlined, custom Content Management System compromising more then 20 Management Modules to serve over 50 websites. Built both backend and front end code.
    • Developed and implemented multiple large-scale applications in ColdFusion and MS SQL.

    Key Achievement:
    Developed a print management system that enabled printing companies to manage and produce thousands of print jobs per week for multiple printing locations that reduced setup time by 30%, resulting in hundreds of hours saved every quarter.

    2003
Download Resume

Skills

Ruby on Rails

Python / Django

AWS

UI / UX

Management & PM
90%
Engineering
99%
Marketing
85%
Customer Experience
95%
Download Resume