Rama Roberts
altbit AT gmail DOT com
(An always up-to-date version of this document can be found here: http://ramaroberts.com/about/rama )
Thirteen years of development experience in high volume web services.
Five years of engineering management/team lead experience.
Proven ability to substantially contribute to all aspects of the product development life cycle from evaluation and design through build, integration, deployment and enhancements.
Thorough understanding of the entire stack: OS, network, containers, DB.
Extensive background in implementation and customization of third-party solutions as well as in-house application development.
Proficient in a broad range of technologies including: Java, Perl, shell, MySQL/Oracle. Working knowledge of XML, C/C++, Python.
Effective at working across organizations as well as
geographically distributed teams.
January 2009 - current
Architect and
Engineering Team Lead
Web Engineering
Sun Microsystems
Inc. Menlo Park, CA
Primary function is "smoke jumper" - quickly solving business or technical problems/needs via rapid software development and/or enhancement implementation. Involvement in projects is an "on-call" basis, ranging from complete ownership of application development to technical consulting for teams needing help beyond their expertise. Secondary role is leading implementation of new technologies and processes to improve Web engineering team practices. Key project contributions include:
engineering lead for social web properties
advisory role on Sun's Cloud Portal development and deployment
javafx.com site launch
assisting in build-out of next generation data center using Xen
planning our data center move and consolidation
numerous 3rd party hosting/integrations
Highest performance rating among my peers in annual review.
July 2006 – January 2009
Senior
Engineering Manager
Social Software, Web Engineering
Sun
Microsystems Inc. Menlo Park, CA
Managed the engineering teams responsible for all of Sun's key social platforms, as well as the search and developer web properties.
Responsible for building and running the engineering team driving Sun's public-facing web applications in the social software space. Chartered with rapid development of new services that are enterprise quality, and encouraging the adoption of these services across the company. Applications include:
wikis.sun.com, Sun's first shared public/private/partner wiki, seeing 30% growth month over month
blogs.sun.com with over 8k bloggers (25% of the company), including the CEO
forums.sun.com has 990k users who have posted over 4 million messages
mediacast.sun.com public facing Sun multimedia site- like YouTube for Sun
planets.sun.com feed aggregation tools
Contributing member on the organization-wide architecture review council, responsible for the review of all new projects, application designs and software and deployment architectures, and establishment of best practices/application standards for 140+ member engineering team.
Engineering Lead for ad server application which has served over two billion impressions to date.
Highest performance rating among my peers in annual review.
Jan 2005 - July 2006
Senior Staff Engineer
Enterprise Ecommerce
Sun Microsystems Inc. Menlo Park, CA
Lead architect/engineer in a massive Sun-wide initiative to
replace and expand Sun's ecommerce capabilities. Contributions
included:
technical evaluation/selection of base software platform
Led the mixed in-house and professional services engineering team
coordination with multiple business units and technical teams to help ensure requirements were technically feasible and application integration dependencies were understood and incorporated into roadmap
implementation and deployment of Phase I of the new platform which encompassed an integrated storefront on Sun's corporate web site.
Feb 2003 - Jan 2005
Staff Engineer
Web Platform Engineering
Sun Microsystems Inc. Menlo Park, CA
Responsible for the design, development and deployment of new
web offerings. Accomplishments included:
Implementation and deployment of an enterprise Ad Server, a PHP database driven ad server responsible for serving banners and other content across all major Sun Web properties. 1.6 billion impressions to date.
Design, architect and deployment of jcp.org. Led the engineering rewrite of the Java Community Process site. Responsibilities included requirements gathering, DB schema design, and development of MVC based architecture using servlets/JSPs.
Served as a member of the "SmokeJumper" team, responsible for short-term, high-profile, fast-turnaround development projects, usually commissioned at the executive level.
Dec 1998 - Feb 2003
Software Engineer
(MTS-3/4)
Javasoft
Sun Microsystems Inc. Cupertino,
CA
Responsibilities encompassed architecture and services
development for Sun's high-volume developer sites, including the Java
Developer Connection (JDC), Wireless Developer Site, Dot-com Builder
and Solaris Developer Connection.
Served as a key engineer on
the original development team responsible for designing site
infrastructure and services to be scalable and fail-over ready for
optimal uptime. Efforts supported the growth of Sun's online
developer offerings from a single site with 100K users, to seven
targeted sites with over 2.8 million registered users.
Specific
accomplishments include:
CodeDrop: Designed and built a community file sharing mechanism for open source applications and code used across Sun's developer web sites.
Customized Content Management and Publishing System: Designed and developed a custom, secure content management and publication system used for staging, approvals and publishing of Sun's sensitive external Web communications (corporate earnings and acquisition announcements).
User Authentication Service: Created the user authentication/authorization/ACL management system used by all Sun Developer Connection sites.
Jan 1997 - Nov 1998
Software Engineer
(MTS-1/2)
SunService
Sun Microsystems Inc. Mountain
View, CA
Contributed to the development of SunReMon (later
evolved into (SRS) Sun Remote Services) and Remote Dial-in Analysis
(RDA), a suite of automated diagnostic tools capable of identifying
and alerting administrators of hardware and software status states
remotely. Responsible for:
development of the remote connectivity monitor which provided a terminal on the server over a secure network, designed as an applet front-end and a C back-end.
installation process, written in Bourne and designed to call Solaris system features on headless remote systems.
May 1996 - Dec 1996
Programmer
Radian International, LLC. Sacramento, CA
Designed and
built custom n-tier information management systems. Served as task
leader on the implementation of a custom IDE used to port legacy code
to Power Builder on Windows NT.
April 1995 - Aug 1996
Consultant, Technical
Support
Information Technology CAP Davis, CA
Provided
technical support and consultation on all computer platforms for the
26,000 affiliates of the university community. Worked on Web page
design; Bourne and perl scripting; and system administration.
B.S., Computer Science (CS/CSE), 1996 University of California, Davis.