Stephen Ripley's blog

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Resume

sripley@gmail.com | LinkedIn | Twitter

Career Profile

As a passionate believer in the ability of technology to improve our daily lives, I have spent my entire career building great software products and services used by millions of users.

My career has spanned organizations as diverse as starts-ups where we worked out of the founder’s home to Fortune 500 enterprises. What brings them all together is my ongoing goal of building great teams and products while driving value for the business.

Specialties:

  • Team building and retention
  • Adaptive SDLC
  • Technology strategy
  • Technical leadership and mentoring
  • Outsourcing and offshoring
  • Client relations
  • Reporting/BI
  • Technical architecture
  • Requirements analysis, planning, and estimation
  • Hands-on leader
  • SaaS applications
  • A/B/n testing

Professional Experience

CTO, Co-Founder, rentLEVER

Minted

Sr. Director Fulfillment Engineering

RealPage, Inc (NASDAQ: RP)/MyNewPlace

RealPage is a leader in the multi-family housing sector focusing on software automation for property managers. Part of executive team brought over to RealPage after their acquisition of MyNewPlace. Key focus was technology integration with RealPage as well as new product development and customer-facing SaaS application.

VP Engineering - May 2011 - September 2012

  • Responsible for RealPage’s technical integration strategy for LeaseStar division, leading a team of 30+ engineers across multiple product lines.
  • Key technical decision maker and strategist across five different product lines spanning multiple B2C, B2B, and back-office applications.
  • Aligned closely with product team focusing on end user-aligned SDLC.
  • Responsible for reporting and BI systems implemented using Jasper Reports, Google Analytics, and Omniture.
  • Maintained an average 99.89% uptime across all systems including 99.99% uptime for B2B SaaS apps.
  • Oversaw integration of MyNewPlace and RentEngine brands into RealPage LeaseStar brand including building and deployment of php/drupal based platform to EC2.
  • Oversaw development of MyNewPlace onto new technology stack; moving from Struts 1.2.x onto Play/Scala stack.

MyNewPlace

Director of Software Development - March 2006 - April 2011

MyNewPlace was a Trinity Ventures-backed apartment listing service eventually growing into a complete marketing solutions SaaS product for the multifamily industry. As the first onshore engineering resource hired, we built mynewplace.com and its client-facing portal from the ground-up. My initial responsibilities included managing and mentoring an offshore team while actively contributing to core infrastructure and individual projects. I worked closely with a cross-functional senior management team to grow the company to nearly $20 million in annual sales and over 5,000,000 unique visits per month leading to MyNewPlace’s acquisition by RealPage.

  • Built engineering team from 1 to 20 engineers maintaining a nearly 3 year average tenure.
  • Primary owner of offshore relationship; acted as technical liaison between product and technology teams.
  • Acted as primary engineering architect while contributing significant chunks of code to production code.
  • Drove initiative to onshore development due to ongoing quality and time-to-market concerns.
  • Oversaw development of iOS and Android native apps.
  • Instituted code coverage and build reporting system driving coverage from 10% to over 80% in key modules.
  • Introduced SCRUM/Agile methodology to team of 30+ engineers and product managers. Methodology included estimation model that improved accuracy of estimations from +-100% to +-30%.
  • Instituted and built automated build process using Hudson.
  • Automated customer sales cycle by integrating proprietary back office with Sales Force.
  • Re-architected order and billing systems decreasing time to integrate new products into accounting system (Microsoft NAV) from 1 month to less than a single day of engineering effort.

Wells Fargo

Technology Lead, Private Client Services - September 2004 - March 2006

  • Led team of engineers responsible for integrating Trust and Brokerages sides of business onto a unified platform.
  • Lead engineer of SSO solution using JAAS against ActiveDirectory
  • Worked directly with VP of Research to create “tearsheet” database used by 50+ investment analysts; Developed using Java, Struts 1.x, WebLogic, and Streamlined creation of “tear sheet” application using Java, Struts, and Tomcat DB2.

Sr. Software Engineer, Internet Services Group - September 2002 - August 2004

  • Worked closely with product team to create session sharing privacy rules for customer service app.
  • Automated deployment of customer service app from dev and QA into production environments.

Homestore/SpringStreet

Engineering Manager - May 2000 - May 2002

Homestore (now Move.com) acquired SpringtStreet in 2000 and went out to IPO later that year. Homestore was involved in all verticals related to real estate with their largest brand being Realtor.com.

  • Managed team of 20+ engineers working closely with product management to introduce features and products to SpringStreet.com.
  • Oversaw committee of cross-functional team responsible for establishing and guiding SDLC. Introduced concept of use cases as key medium by which new features were introduced.
  • Oversaw integration of rent.net into SpringStreet ATG Dynamo app from BroadVision. Integration was completed on time and under budget. Combined site became top national apartment listing service.
  • Introduced CruiseControl as 1st automated build framework streamlining build and reducing human build effort by over 90%.

AllApartments/SpringStreet

Sr. Software Engineer - October 1998 - April 2000M

Kleiner Perkins backed internet apartment listing site ultimately acquired by Homestore (now Move.com) in 2000.

  • Lead developer responsible for porting app from NetDynamics to ATG Dynamo.
  • Lead engineer of Java applet driving core apartment search conversion funnel.
  • Ported build script to ant decreasing build time by 400%.

Omix

Software Engineer - June 1996 - September 1998

Responsible for integrating new clients onto proprietary eCommerce platform written in Perl and C. This was back in the day before cookies so state management was a big issue solved by a C proxy. Wrote Java 1.0 desktop app for Real Estate industry using Marimba push technology and Cloudscape distributed database and Oracle.

Education

  • BS Economics, University of San Francisco
  • AA Culinary Arts, California Culinary Academy
  • Languages: Conversational and written German and Italian