Kevin Fink

Current

SVP Engineering at Demand Media

Past

SVP Engineering / Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at WhitePages.com, Inc.
Director of Engineering at DataChannel / Netegrity
Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at N2H2, Inc.

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Education

University of Washington
Harvey Mudd College

Recommended

32 people have recommended Kevin

Connections

282 connections

Industry

Information Technology and Services

Websites

Kevin Fink’s Summary

My passion is solving business problems and creating business opportunities using modern technology. I love building and driving teams of excited, dedicated engineers to create excellent products and services that make a difference (not necessarily change the world, but make someone's day a little bit more fulfilling).

I am:

An experienced problem-solver adept at selecting (or inventing, if necessary) and applying the optimal technology to resolve business problems.

An excellent verbal and written communicator, with extensive and diverse experience ranging from technical architecture talks to business overviews for Congressional committees, and from internal technical white papers to marketing documents.

A confident, credible, and persuasive cross-functional leader, experienced in guiding technology teams into partnerships with business units.

Experienced at: Perl scripting and programming, with special interests in data analysis, modular software architecture, and database-driven websites. Database design and architecture, with hands-on experience with Oracle, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. High-availability website design, architecture, implementation, and operation. Use of XML, XSLT, CSS, HTML, AJAX, and a plethora of other techologies to solve business problems.

Kevin Fink’s Specialties:

Software development, technology architecture, intellectual property protection, project/process management, e-commerce, technology strategy, Perl, Linux, database-driven websites, data mining and analysis, team building

Kevin Fink’s Experience

SVP Engineering

Demand Media

(Privately Held; 201-500 employees; Internet industry)

March 2007 — Present (1 year 10 months)
SVP Engineering / Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

WhitePages.com, Inc.

(Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Internet industry)

December 2002 — December 2006 (4 years 1 month)

* Built world-class Engineering organization from six to 56 employees supporting multiple business lines and a highly available family of websites. Instituted rigorous development methodologies and systems, including Quality Assurance, Build, and Release processes and Development, QA, Staging, and Production tiers.
* Built and maintained family of residential directory assistance search websites used by 10s of millions of users every month. Sites included WhitePages.com, 411.com, and powered the residential directory assistance portions of numerous third party sites, including MSN, SuperPages.com, and YellowPages.com, among many others.
* Built e-commerce and email blind relay system from ground up, including large back-end database of email addresses, extensive security and privacy controls, and integration with third-party billing system.
Director of Engineering

DataChannel / Netegrity

(Public Company; 51-200 employees; NETE; Computer Software industry)

August 2001 — October 2002 (1 year 3 months)

* Led team that redesigned the architecture of the company's flagship enterprise portal software for the October 2002 release, improving stability, supportability, and extensibility.
* Designed next generation of enterprise intranet portal software, due to be released in March 2003.
o Worked with current and potential customers directly and through Professional Services and Product Management to define product requirements.
o Worked with Engineering staff and development partners to design technical specifications.
* Facilitated integration of Engineering staff into larger organization after acquisition of DataChannel by Netegrity.
* Worked with acquiring company to formulate and build new product suite based on integration of existing products. First version of suite was released on-schedule in March 2002.
* Member of architecture review board that oversaw all technology initiatives.
Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

N2H2, Inc.

(Public Company; 201-500 employees; NTWO; Information Technology and Services industry)

January 1996 — June 2001 (5 years 6 months)

* Co-founder and original technologist of start-up that grew to 400+ employees and a dominant share of its market.
* Active participant in N2H2's successful $65 million IPO in July 1999. Wrote the technology portions of the S-1 and presented N2H2's technology to underwriters and potential investors.
* Invented and implemented industry's first server-based Internet filtering system.
* Designed and led implementation of the N2H2 Network, a world-wide network of several thousand filtering servers.
* Oversaw intellectual property issues, including both analysis of competitive patents and technology consulting for the creation of company patents.
* Testified on Internet filtering issues to the COPA Commission.
* Developed and supported technology partnerships with large clients and partners, including Microsoft, Novell, Inktomi, Alteon WebSystems, Nissho Electronics, British Telecom, Education Networks of America, and the US Small Business Administration, among others.

Kevin Fink’s Education

University of Washington

MS, Electrical Engineering, 1992 — 1994

My MS thesis, Computer Simulation of Pressure Fields Generated by Acoustic Lens Beamformers, is available at http://www.fink.com/thesis/
Harvey Mudd College

BS, Engineering, 1988 — 1992