Jad DeFanti
Mathematics graduate from University of Rhode Island, with MSc from London Business School. Currently working as Director of Technical Operations at Kiptronic.
| Headline: | Startup Member |
| Skills: | Business, Engineering, Management, Software Engineering |
| Groups: | London Business School Entrepreneurship Club |
| Interested in: | Finding team mates, Meeting new people, Professional opportunities, Recruiting for my startup |
| Schools: | London Business School, University of Rhode Island |
WORK EXPERIENCE
| Employer: | Kiptronic, San Francisco, CA |
| Position: | Director of Technical Operations |
| Time period: | December 2007 - November 2008 |
| Description: | Founded in 2005, Kiptronic provides an ad serving platform for publishers of digital audio and video content. Kiptronic’s Media Service Platform dynamically inserts video and audio ads into digital media for consumption on any device (web pages, iPods, smart phones and laptops) online or offline. Kiptronic customers include MTV, NPR, VH1, The New York Times, CondeNet and The Guardian (UK).
Leader of team responsible for all system and network infrastructure, technical customer integrations, and software build and release management. • Scaled infrastructure to support growth in customer usage by a factor of 10 while improving system availability from 90% to 99.90% • Developed horizontal scaling for the audio and video assembly of digital media and advertisements • Consolidated production infrastructure deployment from two data centers into one and reduced bandwidth costs per megabit by 94% |
| Employer: | Alexa Internet, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, San Francisco, CA |
| Position: | Various positions |
| Time period: | December 1998 - November 2006 |
| Description: | Founded in 1996, Alexa has developed an installed base of millions of toolbars, one of the largest World Wide Web crawls and an infrastructure to process and serve massive amounts of data. Most recently, Alexa has developed the Web Search Platform, which provides customer data mining access to the vast web crawl.
Director of Operations, 2001-2006 Leader of team that managed infrastructure for the Alexa toolbar with 200,000 daily users generating 50 million requests/day and a web crawl that gathered 100 terabytes of web pages every 2 months • Built infrastructure and formed team from scratch, developing system standards, department policies and procedures. Establishment of the department and infrastructure led to 67% reduction in downtime of all customer-facing services. • Presented Alexa’s operational strategies and execution plans to its Board of Directors twice annually. Obtained ‘buy-in’ from Alexa’s Board, which included Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and CIO Rick Dalzell, for strategy and execution of infrastructure deployment • Led team through a successful overhaul of system and network security. This success proved to the parent company that Alexa could operate its computing infrastructure at their stringent network security standards. Jad DeFanti, Page 2 Director of Operations, 2001-2006, continued • Led growth of company infrastructure from 20 to 700 servers. Managed team through four datacenter moves in 7 years. Operated, scaled and managed onsite datacenter, occupied from 2000-2006; selected current datacenter facility for Alexa’s 700 Linux servers; managed relocation of 700 servers to current datacenter facility in January 2006. Operations Manager, 1999-2000 Initial role was as the sole systems administrator for 45 person company. Supported 20 Solaris servers and 45 Windows desktops • Changed company culture to believe that a helpdesk function was necessary and could succeed at Alexa. Convinced non-technical users to utilize IT services; won over technical users to rely on the new IT department • Rationalized existing network and servers by standardized administration databases for all Solaris and Linux systems • Eliminated dependencies of customer-facing services on internal networks, reducing downtime due to internal network changes, activities and problems |
| Employer: | EMC², South San Francisco, CA |
| Position: | Senior Systems Engineer |
| Time period: | December 1997 - November 1998 |
| Description: | EMC Corporation offers systems, software, and services for information lifecycle management worldwide.
• Responsible for several major customer accounts, including Silicon Graphics, Seagate, Quantum and Adobe. Managed deployment of Silicon Graphics’ Oracle financial database using in-house servers with EMC Symmetrix storage and software. |
| Employer: | Invincible Technologies Corporation (ITC), San Mateo, CA |
| Position: | Systems Engineer |
| Time period: | December 1995 - November 1998 |
| Description: | Value added reseller (VAR) of Clariion RAID disk storage, Sun servers and the VERITAS software suite
One of the founding members of ITC’s western region sales office. Sole pre-sales and post-sales Systems Engineer supporting 2 sales professionals covering 10 states. • The western region attained 100% customer retention due to the quality of customer service |
| Employer: | Dynamic Graphics Incorporated, Alameda, CA |
| Position: | Various positions |
| Time period: | December 1985 - November 1995 |
| Description: | Provider of geospatial solutions based on its EarthVision suite of software products.
Manager, Systems Administration, 1989-1995 • Designed and implemented the long-standing file sharing and user authentication setup for this network • Designed and implemented Dynamic Graphics' first Internet connection and the initial network security infrastructure Lead UNIX Software Engineer, 1986-1988 • Reduced the time to complete ports from 6 months to 6 weeks • Promoted to leader of the Unix Porting group |
| Employer: | Decision Graphics Incorporated, Westborough, MA |
| Position: | Software Engineer |
| Time period: | December 1983 - November 1986 |
| Description: | Responsible for software design, programming, bug fixing and testing for a VAX/VMS based CAD system. |
EDUCATION
| University: | London Business School |
| Time period: | 2007 |
| Degree: | Management, MSc |
| University: | University of Rhode Island |
| Time period: | 1983 |
| Degree: | Mathematics, BSc |
INFORMATION
| Hobbies: | Travel, Genealogy, Sport |
