Andre Stechert

Current

• VP Engineering at Virgin Charter
• Technical Advisory Board Member at YorZ

Past

• Principal Architect - Search at Splunk
• Principal Architect, Web Search at Looksmart
• Director of Technology at Looksmart

• Director of Technology at Zeal Media, Inc.
• Member of the Technical Staff at NASA JPL

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Education

• University of California, Los Angeles

Recommended

13 people have recommended Andre

Connections

348 connections

Industry

Internet

Websites

• My Website
• My RSS feed

Andre Stechert’s Summary

I'm a technical group lead who is passionate about building extremely high quality software that breaks paradigms.

I seek situations where, as a team and against all odds, we succeed. I've made many lifelong friends and seen many great leaders forged on this hearth and it's definitely the place to be.

Andre Stechert’s Experience

• VP Engineering

  Virgin Charter

  (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Airlines/Aviation industry)

  May 2007 — Present (2 years 7 months)

• Technical Advisory Board Member

  YorZ

  (Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Internet industry)

  December 2004 — Present (5 years )

• Principal Architect - Search

  Splunk

  (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Internet industry)

  February 2005 — April 2007 (2 years 3 months)

  Created the first proper build system. Did the first ports of the product off of Fedora Core 3. Designed and implemented searchthing, a timestamped full text index optimized for concurrent indexing and querying, replacing the Berkeley DB in the product. The product now scales two to three orders of magnitude beyond what was possible with BDB. Spec'd and implemented internationalized version.

• Principal Architect, Web Search

  Looksmart

  (Public Company; 51-200 employees; LOOK; Internet industry)

  September 2004 — February 2005 (6 months)

  I was responsible for the go-forward technical architecture of the Wisenut search engine, one of the few web search indexes on the planet that has larger than a billion documents and a significant web presence. I continued to be a deep contributor to the Grub distributed computing environment. I served as a standing architect on the BI team for a while.

• Director of Technology

  Looksmart

  (Public Company; 201-500 employees; LOOK; Internet industry)

  November 2000 — September 2004 (3 years 11 months)

  Rolled out zeal.com, an editorial portal for directory management in 34 markets and 13 languages. The system was used by hundreds of employees and hundreds of thousands of community members to manage a directory that was the first tier of results for MSN for many years. Also did a brief stint as the tech lead of the distribution solutions team, revamping and improving Looksmart's distribution software and operations and partner's technical infrastructures (YHOO, INSP, INKT, MSFT, etc.) to facilitate on-time, on-quality data delivery. Currently serving as tech lead for the Grub distributed crawling infrastructure and visiting architect for the Wisenut search engine.

• Director of Technology

  Zeal Media, Inc.

  (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Internet industry)

  March 1999 — November 2000 (1 year 9 months)

  I was the first non-founding employee and director of tech at Zeal.com, helping build the company out of our founder's kitchen. I participated in everything from wiring the office to choosing the software platform to managing operations.

• Member of the Technical Staff

  NASA JPL

  (Government Agency; 1001-5000 employees; Internet industry)

  October 1996 — March 1999 (2 years 6 months)

Additional Information

Andre Stechert’s Websites:

• My Website
• My RSS feed

Andre Stechert’s Groups:

•    PyCon 2008
•    Virgin Group Global [beta]
•    SoCal Python Interest Group