Entrepreneurial Chief Technologist
Greater Los Angeles Area
- Current
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- Chief Software Architect at Global Fitness Media
- Founder and CTO at Lone Star Software Engineering Services, Inc.
- Past
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- VP of Technology at Perfect Market, Inc.
- Director of Software Engineering at Omnilux, Inc
- Consultant at GSS Ltd (Japan) (Sole Proprietorship)
- Director of Software Engineering at ClearMesh Networks
- Consultant at Omnilux, Inc
- Sr Software Engineer at Citysearch
- Sr Software Engineer at PETsMART.com
- Sr Software Engineer at Free-PC/eMachines
- System Architect and Team Lead at North Communications
- Education
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- California Institute of Technology
- St Mark's School of Texas
- Recommended
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13 people have recommended Tony - Connections
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288
connections
- Industry
- Computer Software
- Websites
Tony Payne’s Summary
Engineer and entrepreneur with interests in information retrieval, data mining, web 2.0, large scale deployments and agile development. Before joining Perfect Market, I founded a technology consulting firm catering to start-ups in e-commerce, online media and advertising, information retrieval, information security, and networking. I was Director of Software Engineering at Omnilux, Inc. where I led the development of their network management application. While in senior engineering positions at CitySearch, PETsMART.com and North Communications, I was responsible for rearchitecting numerous systems for scalability, security and maintainability. I received the prestigious Max B. Alcorn Scholarship in Computer Science while an undergraduate at the California Institute of Technology.
Tony Payne’s Specialties:
Engineering management, project management (agile & waterfall), rapid web application development, web application architecture, distributed systems, web services, ajax, scalability, search, business intelligence, data warehousing
Tony Payne’s Experience
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Chief Software Architect
Global Fitness Media
(Internet industry)
February 2009 — Present (6 months)
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Founder and CTO
Lone Star Software Engineering Services, Inc.
(Computer Software industry)
May 2005 — Present (4 years 3 months)
As a trusted software engineering and management consultant, I provide my customers with solid leadership through challenging circumstances. One customer, a security software vendor, brought me in to save a struggling project that was 6 weeks behind schedule and rapidly approaching its release date. I clarified the business requirements, simplified the code and got the project back on schedule.
Another customer, a major entertainment conglomerate, was having trouble with personalities on their development staff. My ostensible task was to build a test-driven development framework, but my biggest contribution was to mend the rift between management and the engineers. Other projects included:
* Consumer-grade website development for Idealab. Delivered soup to nuts in 6 weeks
* Internal tools and test automation development for Idealab and operating companies
* Design, architecture and development of search engine for Norwegian venture group -
VP of Technology
Perfect Market, Inc.
(Internet industry)
June 2007 — January 2009 (1 year 8 months)
From 2 engineers, a pile of spaghetti code and no process, I built teams of exceptional software, QA, data warehouse and systems engineers that operate as a well-oiled machine. My teams consistently juggle long term development projects, extremely challenging research initiatives, weekly milestone sprints and production maintenance while maintaining an extremely high level of quality.
My teams' hard work and creativity has led to significant intellectual property for Perfect Market. I led the patent application process for 4 inventions and personally invented the core technology that saved the company over a quarter million dollars and paved the way for our Series B round of venture capital funding. I also conceived of, designed and implemented the related articles content exchange advertising network that is the foundation of the company's business today. This network enables quick prototypes of yield ranking user interfaces and business models. -
Director of Software Engineering
Omnilux, Inc
(Privately Held; Telecommunications industry)
January 2003 — May 2005 (2 years 5 months)
When Omnilux needed to redevelop its product for standards compliance, they turned to me to make it all come together. I managed a complex team including product managers, software engineers and off-shore consultants and coordinated schedules of hardware, networking, manufacturing and quality assurance teams to make it happen without a hitch.
To assure my engineers always had the clearest possible direction, I worked closely with business teams to make sure that requirements were clear and concise, even writing several product requirements documents. I translated each PRD into engineering specifications that made design, development and integration painless.
* Successfully groomed promising engineer into a team leader
* Continued hands-on development while taking on project & software management -
Consultant
GSS Ltd (Japan) (Sole Proprietorship)
(Sole Proprietorship; 1-10 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)
September 1999 — March 2005 (5 years 7 months)
Data processing applications; system engineering; web. Clients include several major Japanese hospital groups, jewelry trading firm; C#, C, Perl
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Director of Software Engineering
ClearMesh Networks
(Computer Software industry)
2002 — 2005 (3 years)
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Consultant
Omnilux, Inc
(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Telecommunications industry)
July 2002 — January 2003 (7 months)
Designed and developed network management software for free space optics (wireless) meshed network; C
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Sr Software Engineer
Citysearch
(Public Company; 51-200 employees; TMCS; Internet industry)
April 2002 — July 2002 (4 months)
Search algorithm design, development and optimization; mod_perl development
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Sr Software Engineer
PETsMART.com
(Public Company; PETM; Retail industry)
April 2000 — April 2002 (2 years 1 month)
As a senior software engineer at PETsMART.com, I worked assiduously to rid the system of the bugs and performance problems that had become accepted as the normal price of doing business. I fixed connection leaks, deadlocks and database queries, integrated a new application server and implemented apache modules to bring performance up to my standards. In the process, I reduced the time it took to check out from 30 seconds to 3.
* Led engineering effort on system re-architecture project to abstract our system to support multiple brands, which we completed in 5 weeks. This enabled us to bring another brand, a multi-million dollar asset, onto a modern, user friendly platform, essentially salvaging it.
* Developed high-speed content management, rendering and recommendation system. Saved over half a million dollars
* Developed package management and release system in 1 week. Saved hundreds of hours of mistake-prone work for engineering team -
Sr Software Engineer
Free-PC/eMachines
(Privately Held; Computer Hardware industry)
August 1999 — April 2000 (9 months)
At Free-PC, later purchased by eMachines, I developed a distributed system for analyzing large volumes of data. Using that system, I performed analytics that gave the business early warning on fundamental flaws in the business model, buying time to make urgently needed changes.
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System Architect and Team Lead
North Communications
(Computer Software industry)
May 1998 — August 1999 (1 year 4 months)
Assigned to a project in crisis as an auxiliary resource, I used my spare time at North Communications to analyze and solve a pervasive architectural flaw in the way we were developing HTML applications. I invented a library analogous to today's Prototype javascript library and created a way to develop procedurally in what previously had been a strictly sequential development environment. This breakthrough, along with my initiative, catapulted me to a team lead position on a complete rewrite of the product, which we finished in 6 months to version 1.0's 18 months. We received our first customer sign off before version 1.0.
* Identified and solved security flaw that would have enabled janitors to remove cash from ATM machines
* Led team of software engineers, HTML authors and web producers to implement automated teller machine
Tony Payne’s Education
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California Institute of Technology
none , Computer Science , 1995 — 1997
Awarded prestigious Max B Alcorn Scholarship in Computer Science
Awarded prestigious Edward C Posner undergraduate research fellowship- Activities and Societies:
- Captain: Varsity Soccer Team,
Member: Athletic Council for Mentoring and Education
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St Mark's School of Texas
7-12 , N/A , 1989 — 1995
Valedictorian, Class of '95
- Activities and Societies:
- Cum Laude
The ReMarker (Editor in Chief)
Additional Information
Tony Payne’s Websites:
Tony Payne’s Interests:
High performance driving (autocross, HPDE), guitar, number theory
Tony Payne’s Honors:
Valedictorian, St. Mark's School of Texas
Tony Payne’s Contact Settings
Interested In:
- career opportunities
- consulting offers
- new ventures
- job inquiries
- expertise requests
- business deals
- reference requests
- getting back in touch
