Richard Anton - Experience

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Complete List of Prior Roles

This is an addendum to my current resume which only goes back to 2007 for the sake of brevity.

Principal Software Development Engineer, Amazon, Seattle, WA Nov 2018 - current

May 2021 - present - Principal Software Development Engineer Amazon

Most tenured principal engineer for Devices, Audio, Video and Amazon Display Advertising (DAVADA) org (hundreds of engineers), reporting directly to Vice President.

  • Drove multiple engineering, reliability, and operational excellence efforts (tooling, process, automation, best practices, architectural improvements) across organization.
  • Provided system design and architectural guidance for distributed systems across different advertising products, ad types, and functional areas.
  • Led ongoing org-wide effort for [re] architecture of publisher facing advertising systems, including ad products for Fire Tablet, FireTV, Freevee, Twitch, live sports, Audio, and Alexa.
  • Established and refined cross-team development processes, including principal engineer design review series, production readiness reviews, CI/CD standards, and RFC process for internal infrastructure customers.
  • Advised my manager and other VP and director level executives on technical decisions related to advertising and publisher infrastructure and products.
  • Helped establish and lead monthly operational service reviews for each director’s sub-organization in overall DAVADA organization.
  • Coordinated efforts between my engineering teams and science teams, especially for IDless advertising and publisher-related optimization, experimentation, and simulation efforts.
  • Acted as liaison between product and engineering teams, representing engineering for in various planning and roadmap exercises.
  • Mentored other principal engineers and numerous senior engineers across Amazon Advertising org and AWS.
  • Recruited, on-boarded, led, and managed a new engineering team responsible for evaluation, prototyping, and integration of privacy preserving advertising standards and browser APIs such as Chrome Privacy Sandbox and Apple Private Click Measurement.
  • Proposed and launched new publisher developer experience group(ongoing).
  • Started a cross team working group focused on improving test coverage and CI/CD practices for publisher technology systems.
  • Participated on behalf of Amazon in several advertising related W3C groups.

May 2020 - May 2021 Principal Engineer - AWS Observability

Principal Engineer for AWS Open Source Observability org, direct technical leader for public preview launch of Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus (from design thru delivery), provided guidance to Amazon Managed Service for Grafana] team, and mentored multiple contributors to OpenTelemetry supporting launch of the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry.

  • Leading engineering across two product teams in AWS Observability organization.
  • Defined technical architecture and high level system design for Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus.
  • Made early architectural decisions for Amazon Managed Service for Grafana.
  • Led various low level designs, such as VPC support.
  • Drove work to address scalability efforts related to AMP and Cortex open source.
  • Gave tech talks to team on Go language programming and site reliability engineering.
  • Helped recruit, onboard, and mentor engineering team members for all three teams.
  • Coordinate with https://cortexmetrics.io/ open source community
  • Coordinate technical decisions and planning across AWS engineering teams and external contractors.
  • Roadmap, annual planning, backlog grooming, estimation, sprint planning along with engineering managers and product managers.

2018 - 2020 Principal Engineer - Multichannel Advertising

  • Led cross-team software system infrastructure improvements in Amazon Multichannel Advertising.
  • Led design of advertising experimentation infrastructure improvements.
  • Provide mentoring and technical leadership as senior engineer across organization of over 190 software engineers.
  • Researched new advertising product (not yet launched).
  • Reviewed significant software designs and architectures across organization, focused on core ad serving, campaign management, and data storage infrastructure,
  • Develop ad serving and campaign management services used for multichannel advertising in Java.
  • Researched, developed, and set technical strategy for Amazon demand side platform used by advertising agencies, traders, and internal account managers to manage advertising campaigns across display ad products.
  • For context on scale, Amazon is rated #3 in digital advertising revenue as of 2019, https://www.geekwire.com/2019/report-shows-amazon-taking-digital-advertising-market-share-google-facebook-duopoly/

Staff Software Engineer/Tech Lead/Manager, Google, Kirkland, WA 2013 - 2018

2016 - 2018 Staff Software Engineer at Google

2013 - 2016 Senior Software Engineer at Google

  • Tech lead of ads frontend advertising SRE team, (first Ads Frontend Advertiser, later Ads Frontend UI).
  • Managed ads frontend SRE team for two years.
  • Managed Releases and Rollouts team for one year, designing, developing and maintaining software products for controlling and orchestrating automated software deployments built with Python, Go, JavaScript, and AngularJS.
  • Built web interfaces for internal products in AngularJS, Polymer, and Django.
  • Led overall design of crash collection, analysis, and reporting system in use across production servers at Google. Implemented collection service in C++ for collection of core files and heap dumps. Contributed to web UI (Go, JavaScript/Polymer).
  • Developed portions of monitoring dashboarding system adopted across company. Designed merger between time series query backends for two different dashboard systems after decision to merge teams and products.
  • Led regular design review series for larger ads frontend team.
  • Set vision for production platform used to standardize and automate operational and production concerns for ads frontend systems used by advertisers and publishers.

Sr. Software Development Engineer, Amazon, Seattle, WA 2009-2013

2009 - 2011 Software Development Engineer (SDE II) Display Advertising Frontend

2011 - 2013 Senior Software Development Engineer Kindle Advertising Products

  • Successfully delivered display and mobile advertising products by designing, developing, and maintaining web services for ad delivery and tracking as well as building interactive online advertising experiences.
  • Provided leadership to other developers by serving as scrum master and consulting on software design and operational best practices.
  • Crucial to launching Kindle with Special Offers product line by designing and developing multiple major server side components and providing operational support during internal beta and during and after launch.
  • Mentored other developers and aided extensively in recruiting and interviewing developers for team and advertising organization as a whole.
  • Designed, developed, and maintained web services to deliver advertising to Kindle devices and process click through actions from device using Java, JMS, Spring, and Hibernate.
  • Built numerous custom display advertising solutions for advertising partners, and helped develop in-house event driven rich media framework using ActionScript and JavaScript as well as jQuery
  • Built rich media advertising experiences for Amazon display advertising using FreeMarker, JavaScript, ActionScript, HTML, and CSS.
  • Helped design and build online event tracking service used across company as part of a cross team initiative.
  • Integrated advertising placements with Amazon retail website using Perl and Mason.
  • Led efforts to automate testing of Javascript and FreeMarker used by display advertising using HTMLUnit and QUnit.
  • Built tools and web interfaces for ad scheduling work-flows used by account managers, graphic designers, and ad operations using Tomcat, Spring MVC, and JSP.
  • Led design, development, and launch of web site for voting on the most beautiful advertisements (AdMash).

Sr. Software Developer, Cyber Operations, Inc., Pelham, AL 2007-2009

  • Project Manager for ACL Compliance Director, a system for managing network security policies of routers, switches and firewalls.
  • Developed C++ authentication library compatible with TACACS+, Radius, and LDAP.
  • Developed core C++ and JavaScript code for AJAX enabled web applications.
  • Performed Linux server administration for web, mail, domain, authentication, and file storage services.
  • Configured and maintained network devices including Cisco routers, Cisco ASA firewalls, Juniper routers, and Netscreen firewalls.
  • Managed support for customers of all network policy related products including the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
  • Prepared presentations, online advertising, direct mailings, and authoring original technical articles for marketing campaigns.

Team Leader, US Army, Fort Lewis, WA and Iraq 2003-2007

  • Leader of team which installed and maintained voice and data networks for other organizations. Worked directly with customers to provide quality of service, and trained and mentored subordinates.
  • Led team to connect subscribers to new permanent fiber optics network in Mosul, Iraq.
  • Performed quality of service checks while supporting 317th Maintenance and 126th Aviation which resulted in a 98% call completion rate.
  • Chosen as NCO(Supervisor) of the Month.
  • Member of line-of-sight radio terminal team which operated in conjunction with a switching team to provide voice and data connectivity to subscribers.
  • Provided communications for medical evacuation unit with no missed evacuation requests in Balad, Iraq.
  • Supported over 70 network users for 84th Engineers in Balad, Iraq
  • Helped install 4000 meter fiber optic ring in Al-Qayyirah, Iraq serving over 400 subscribers.
  • Chosen as battalion Soldier(Employee) of the Quarter twice.

Consultant, KwikPop, Lighthouse Point, FL, 2003-2007

  • Converted proprietary futures trading system for MetaStock platform to run under several other platforms, including eSignal, TradeStation, NinjaTrader, AmiBroker, and Sierra Chart.
  • Developed trading platform integrations in C++, C#, EasyLanguage, JavaScript, and other programming languages.
  • Developed subscriber database and online license verification system enabling client to use a subscription pricing model.
  • Developed core dynamic loaded library which contained all the logic for each version of product allowing rapid development of versions for five charting software platforms.

Sr. Quantitative Analyst, Alpha Trading, Juno Beach, FL 2002-2003

  • Implemented automated futures trading strategies while working alongside quantitative technical analyst.
  • Developed custom software in C++ for realtime execution and historical backtesting of futures trading systems to overcome gaps in commercially available software.
  • Worked on the development of quantitative trading systems for the S&P 500 futures contract and the 30-year U.S. bond futures contract.

Founder, MadLogic, Jupiter, FL 2002-2006

  • Developed multiple software utility applications for Windows.
  • Developed MadCalc, a graphing calculator application for Windows that supports rectangular, parametric, and polar plotting, saving the produced graphs as bitmaps, and allows for complete control over scale and color of graphs.
  • Developed CSVExport, a utility to allow TradeStation to export trading symbol data for analysis in other programs.
  • Developed PerlSafe, a product to create binary executables from Perl scripts
  • Designed and created company website

Software Developer, Intelliquant, LLC, West Palm Beach, FL 2002

  • Designed and developed automated stock options arbitrage system in C++.
  • Optimized performance of system so that it could scan over 30,000 options on five American exchanges in real-time.

Software Engineer, Cyber Operations, LLC, Jupiter, FL 2000 - 2002

  • Lead development efforts which successfully turned around two troubled ongoing software products.
  • Developed Xtream Management System (XMS) for distributed, parallel lossless data compression.
  • Helped optimize XMS, more than doubling the overall system speed.
  • Reduced memory overhead of the most intensive XMS compression algorithm by half without any loss in compression.
  • Led development of ANT, a denial of service protection system.
  • Made contributions to Vector video streaming software, especially Windows client code.

Founder, BoxTop Software, Starkville, MS 1995 - 2009

  • Led development of Macintosh platform products and coordinated cross-platform development of Windows products. Lead developer of GIFmation, PhotoGIF, and ProJPEG.
  • Managed and mentored four other software developers.
  • Developed product named a 1996 MacUser Eddy Award Finalist in the Best New Production Tool class
  • Set in place coding standards and guidelines for other developers.
  • Developed, marketed, and maintained four Photoshop plugins and two standalone applications for optimizing web graphics using C/C++.

Education

  • MS in Computer Science (in progress) Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, 2020-Present.
    • Expected graduation May 2023
    • Cumulative GPA thru Fall 2022 is > 3.9.
    • Coursework focused on Computer Graphics, Computer Vision, Deep Learning, Machine Learning, and AI.
  • BA, Bachelor of Arts, Computer Science from Thomas Edison State University 2018
  • AS, Associate of Science from Excelsior College 2008
  • Previously attended Wood College, Mississippi State University (Computer Engineering)
  • Professional Leadership Development Course, US Army 2005
  • National Merit Finalist

Accomplishments and Affiliations

  • US Patent # 7,246,177, System and method for encoding and decoding data files
  • Served as a Sergeant in the US Army 51st Signal BN and US Army Reserve, 324th ITSB
  • Decorated veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom

Certifications

  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate