JAMES HARVEY

SUMMARY

23 years experience as a Hands-on Internet Software Engineer and Manager
Bicultural E/J with experience teaching and organizing

Lead, Design, Code:

Near real time backend serving systems for search and advertising
Agile systems, fast iteration for live A/B experimentation with machine learned algos
Back end database, ETL systems, research and data mining/editorial judgement systems
Application architecture, cluster hardware, network, application and environment monitoring/management

COMPANIES Rakuten,Microsoft,Yahoo, Inktomi, Infoseek Japan

AWARDS

U.S. Patent 7,698,331: "Matching and ranking of sponsored search listings incorporating web search technology and web content"

Japanese Language Proficiency Test 日本語能力試験一級 Highest Certification - Certifies 10,000 word vocabulary, 2000 characters, “useful basis for undergraduate study at a Japanese university”, passed 1997

Yahoo! Superstar Award 2008: Recognized for part in delivering fast consistent innovation and revenue in the "Sponsored Search Revenue Support" initiative.

Yahoo! Superstar Award 2005: Substantial cash bonus and formal award ceremony given to select individuals and teams from among the 10,000+ Yahoo employees for bottom line and product impact. Most prestigious award inside Yahoo. Awarded for King Kong Project(see below).

Yahoo! Search & Marketplace Q3 2005 Innovation Award: Award given to best innovators in the 400+ engineers and scientists in the Yahoo! Search and Marketplace Group. Awarded for project which resulted in the patent listed above.

TOOLS

Languages: Go, Perl, C#, Java, C/C++, Powershell, SQL, Javascript, Shell Scripting, XSLT,XML,HTML,php, Python

Operating Systems: Linux, Windows, Cloud Foundry, AWS, FreeBSD

Applications: NGINX, Kafka, Spring Boot, Apache, mod_perl, Visual Studio, IIS, Oracle, MySQL, svn, git, Xalan,rrd,Tibco Rendezvous.

EXPERIENCE

Rakuten Inc, Tokyo, Japan

July 2016 - Present

Role: Principal Applications Development Engineer and Architect

Developed back-end geo information processes and services in Scala, including a geo-ip lookup service that trivially scaled to 400qps. Developed parking search system for Rakuten Parking that found the nearest available spots to a user’s geolocation.
Lead engineer for a new service for near real time Credit Card fraud prevention system (go, kubernetes) . The microservice was a proxy that integrated Rakuten’s in-house real-time credit card fraud prevention system (PayGuard) with external providers of similar fraud prevention systems, allowing a best of breed hybrid solution.
Full-stack engineer, lead engineer and architect for In Vehicle Display Network(IVDN) (Android, Java, go, cloud foundry). IVDN was a project where Rakuten deployed displays into the back seats of taxis. Taxi passengers could interact with Rakuten content, watch advertising, and use the Rakuten Check smartphone app to “check in” via ultrasound to the taxi, earning Rakuten points. Japanese patent applied for as a result of this work.
Building on IVDN, hired team for, architected and built out as a full stack engineer a network of mirrored displays in beauty salons that hosted rakuten content and allowed ultrasonic check-in for points. Deployment involved 70 1.5m displays with Intel NUCs running windows powering chrome-targeted javascript SPA, a display administrator portal coded in Angular, and a go backend.
Lead engineer for Kafka-based messaging system for Rakuten Live! Service. Followers of a Live! Streamer could send comments, emotes and microtransaction presents to the streamer. Streamers were compensated based on how many gifts they received. Done in Java, kafka, Rakuten RAPID framework, deployed on Apache Mesos.

INDEPENDENT CONTRACTOR

Jan 2016 - July 2016

Project: Senior Developer,http://tokeet.com/

Owned back-end web services powering tokeet.com’s vacation rental management site
Platform: Dancer Web Framework with Feersum App Server, NGINX, OO perl using MongoDB

Independently designed and implemented customer administration portal for tokeet’s support team.

Project: Featured Speaker, Shimane Open Source Society http://www.shimane-oss.org/

In Japanese, prepared and delivered 90 minute presentation introducing A/B Test concepts as used at Yahoo, Microsoft to Shimane open source community.
Presentation available. Announcement - Slides - "You are Google's Guinea Pig"

Project: Editor and Translator, NaCL http://www.netlab.jp/

Copy editing and translation checking of Ruby Programming Course materials

MICROSOFT ADVERTISING (adcenter.microsoft.com), Contextual Advertising team. Mountain View, CA

2010 to 2013

Role: Senior Developer

IIS/C# based advertising delivery system web service front end for adCenter contextual advertising
Design, C#/C++/CXX coding of business logic and tests for filtering rules for contextual advertising
Worked as part of team porting multiple components from a legacy custom C++ system to one derived from indexing components of the Bing search engine
Rolled out and debugged live software releases using microsoft’s “Autopilot” cloud management system
Used Microsoft’s internal Cosmos/Scope system(equivalent to Hadoop/Pig) for log harvesting and analysis/monitoring

Role: Designer/Architect

Drove plan for next generation SQL Server based pipeline ETL system
Delivered schemas, prototype for same

Role: Manager for Experimentation Tools team

5 person team. Managed team, performance reviews, career development, scheduling, traffic cop

Built system for large scale traffic replay/simulation and data/metrics collection to test contextual selection algorithms
Managed hardware environments for same(60+ machines, 7+ applications),
Took over all development for current gen data distribution pipeline. Coordinated all this with Bellevue and Hyderabad teams. Traveled to Hyderabad for two weeks training.
Rearchitected/reimplemented contextual advertising editorial judgement system in C#

YAHOO! SEARCH, (www.yahoo.com) Santa Clara, California

2005 to 2010

Role: Search Marketing Experimentation Engineering Manager

Led 10 member team working on engineering live A/B control treatment experimental tests of sponsored search result matching technologies, ranking functions and page placement technologies for Yahoo! Sponsored Search. The position requires a unique blend of engineering, scientific, systems/operational knowledge, and product involvement in the search space.
Worked with Product Managers, Site Operations, Quality Assurance and Research & Development Scientists to schedule, design, implement, launch, monitor and enhance trials for above.
Led engineering effort that launched a machine learned ranking function for Yahoo! Sponsored Search that incorporated bid, clickthru and other data in 20+ international markets.
Conceived and wrote framework for prototyping of experimental ranking code that resulted in repeatable experiments, plug-and-play launches to production code for live testing, and a reduction of the QA test cycle for live A/B testing from eight weeks to one week.
Played leading role in effort for an architectural revamp of the mod_perl based sponsored search serving proxy layer that radically parallelized the application in response to the new computation intensive demands of feature extraction for machine learned ranking algorithms.
Managed team, requirements, and schedules and did lots of hands-on coding to implement many new features in the proxy layer under tremendous deadline pressure from Panama project.
Managed and did design through several iterations of our production and experimental systems,

constructed a rich radically configurable annotator framework for query time optimization, pricing, filtering and click prediction production usage and experimentation
75+ code launches
a multi-year effort to port 6 years of legacy perl server development to C++

Trained up, defined procedures and experimentation engineering strategy for R&D teams in Bangalore and Beijing to work with California based teams as equals

YAHOO! SEARCH, (www.yahoo.com) Sunnyvale, California

2004 to 2005

Role: Search Marketing Relevance Engineer

King Kong project - Worked on a small core team that conceived, prototyped and launched a new matching technology leveraging Yahoo! Web Search Technology to generate high quality additional sponsored search matches from existing search traffic. The project added tens of millions of dollars of additional revenue to Yahoo!'s bottom line when launched. This work led to a company internal impact recognition award, an internal innovation recognition award, and a patent application, still in process.
Wrote perl/php/rrd based monitoring system to track health of the system above.
Prototyped and implemented features for malformed document ("cruft") detection of paid inclusion documents by implementing an perl http proxy that was called by the Yahoo! Web search crawler when fetching paid inclusion content. Implemented best "cruft" features in Yahoo! search indexer pipeline in C++.
Concluded successful security audit of externally facing web applications from previous position with Yahoo! Paranoids security audit team.

INKTOMI, (www.inktomi.com) Foster City, California

2002 to 2003

Role: Software Engineer, Search Advertising Group

Built paid inclusion contract database management web application and UI using OO Perl, HTML::Mason, DBI, mod_perl and ssl under Apache. Application includes authentication, sessions, perl object interface to Oracle database, table and trigger design, and object security framework.
Managed paid inclusion partner content feeds in XML,XSLT, Xalan,Perl and Bash (FTP,LWP,XML::Parser).
Prototyped search engine relevance features in Python.
Implemented and tested Japanese-language paid inclusion feeds.

YAHOO! FINANCE, (finance.yahoo.com) Sunnyvale, California

1998 to 2001

Role: Software Engineer

Designed, implemented and maintained back-end feed and multilingual HTML page generation systems in Perl, Make, and Shell.
Developed web applications with Apache and C++/C.
Built Tibco Rendezvous based system for quote feed monitoring and escalation.
Coded CGI interfaces to MySQL in Perl/C.
Installed and configured Apache, MySQL.
Designed, maintained and optimized MySQL databases.
Designed feed formats (CSV, XML, fixed width) and coordinated delivery (FTP, HTTP, email) with Yahoo partners.
Mentored new hires in Yahoo procedures and development methodology.
Point of contact for producers and content partners.
Communicated technical concepts to non-technical salespeople.
Worked extensively in FreeBSD and Linux with open source development tools.

INFOSEEK JAPAN (Digital Garage Inc.), Tokyo, Japan

1997 to 1998

Role: Software Engineer / System Administrator

Designed and wrote news site system in Perl
Localized "Infoseek Desktop" to Japanese (double-byte) in C++.
E<->J Interpreter/liaison for IBM web effort at Nagano 1998 Olympics.
Managed internal banner advertising System.
Wrote scripts to automate system/e-mail tasks.
Configured machines and installed software using FreeBSD, Solaris, and Win95.
Coded HTML layouts using custom template system.

SHIMANE PREFECTURAL GOVERNMENT, Japan

1996 to 1997

Role: Coordinator for International Relations (JET Program)

Worked Full Time in a Japanese-language only environment
Planned and organized community events.
Researched and authored town home page in English and Japanese.
Wrote monthly town newsletter column in Japanese.
Promoted goodwill through speeches in Japanese to community groups.
Taught adult English class.
Translated tourism promotion materials, correspondence, et al.

MATSUE TECHNICAL HIGH SCHOOL, Shimane, Japan

1994 to 1996

Role: English Teacher (JET Program)

Team taught full time at technical high schools.
Designed lessons plans, moderated English club.
Researched and wrote articles for school and Shimane publications.
Translated material for home pages from Japanese to English.

BIRINYI ASSOCIATES, Greenwich, Connecticut

1993 to 1994

Role: Market Analyst

Analyzed markets and individual stocks and wrote computer programs to do so using Excel macros, ObjectPAL, and C.
Planned and implemented long term research on international markets and on intra - day volume of the NYSE.
Tracked program trading, performed chart and money flow analysis.
Communicated with institutional clients, made stock recommendations.

EDUCATION

Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME - B.A. Magna Cum Laude Computer Science, May 1993