Software Leader: Employs a user-experience-first approach to envision, engineer, and launch scalable software designs. Ensures seamless end-user experiences and predictable state management.
2019-12-16 —
Led front-end product engineering for policy and workloads
Highlights
- Created UI product workflows for non-technical users to carry out security tasks without devops intervention.
- Accelerated SaaS and on-premises product line expansion in response to security challenges of shelter-in-place
- Drove React front-end development to support infrastructure and supercluster feature development.
- JavaScript, React, Redux, Sagas, PostCSS, RESTful JSON API
2014-01 —
Founded to guide technology companies from zero to product launch
Highlights
- Sought by Fortune 50 companies and pioneering startups as an independent contributor, leader, and technical owner of innovative applications. Led design and engineering of consumer-facing products with a mobile-first strategy. Served corporate prospects on 3 continents averaging $25B cap and $8B revenue. Successful execution and management led to 175%+ revenue growth YOY.
- Clients include IBM Watson, Clutch Analytics / Windhaven, Bloomreach & Kimbia / EveryAction
- Drove technical advances – Reduced tech debt – Developed new products – Led product differentiation
2015-07 — 2018-12
Developed cognitive Natural Language app to access massive video libraries. Deployed to ted.com. As technical owner, developed a white-label video search application for easy re-branding. Led development, operations, and training. Designed architecture to integrate app with Watson Media platform.
Highlights
- Designed and built a modular pipeline to enrich and index metadata in Elasticsearch.
- Improved page load time & interaction 10x using Redux.js and React.js in a single-page application (SPA).
- Wrote Slack agent using Watson Conversation to interact with video collections.
- Supported $325M product deals with rapid prototypes.
- Served enterprise giants averaging $25B cap and $8B revenue, including top-5 movers in the software, global mass media, sports and news, international broadcasting, and HR industries.
- Saved $150K+ in solution engineering time by originating reusable prototype.
- React, Redux, Scss, Node, Responsive Web Design, client-facing JSON API, Swagger, Travis, Jenkins, CloudFoundry, AWS, S3, Cloudant (scaled CouchDB), microservice APIs, git
2014-07 — 2015-05
Enhanced web application user experience in comparison engine, quote, and purchase, with zero / low touch. Reported to COO.
Highlights
- Helped turn $1.3M loss into profitability within a $14B market.
- Reduced defects per release 84%. Applied best practices to continuously code, test, maintain and release.
- Expedited release of white-label application by providing key components and insights.
- JavaScript, CSS3 / Sass, Responsive Web Design, Node, Ember, Elixir, CouchDB, rules engine, git
2014-01 — 2014-03
Developed ACH (eCheck) and discount code features to payments platform front-end for large-scale events. Reported to CTO.
Highlights
- eCheck saved customers 3% credit card processing fees, which drove payments system adoption.
- Designed discount code experience to win Chicago Marathon deal and drive platform usage.
- JavaScript, CSS3, jQuery, JSON API
2014-01 — 2013-09
Scaled up operations and expanded features to capture new clients while managing 3–10 direct reports globally and reporting to CEO. Developed and optimized front-end flow to accelerate $1.3B / 12M transactions, including a record-breaking $53M day. Directed product engineering SDLC as technical product owner.
Highlights
- Introduced novel, market-disrupting payments technology.
- Engineered revenue-generating user experiences based on business rules analysis and user behavior metrics.
- Grew and strengthened Lean Agile process to collaborate with business stakeholders, clients, and subject matter experts. Met external commitments by tailoring lean software development lifecycle
- Designed and implemented i18n localization and multi-currency solution throughout platform.
- Doubled revenue events YOY; raised millions and converted 1000s of new signups.
- JavaScript, HTML5, CSS3, MySQL, jQuery, RESTful JSON API
2010-08 — 2013-08
Promoted by President to lead software product development. Enhanced shared knowledge of customer needs and product requirements using a whole-company Agile approach. Enabled the organization to surpass growth goals by initiating “social chain giving” workflow, adding peer context to payments and event management.
Highlights
- Broke records generating $14.4M in 17 hours for 900+ non-profits.
- Established continuous improvement based on metrics and user feedback.
- Enforced and validated PCI Level 1 compliance in all aspects of operations and development.
- Contributed to $4M venture raise with technical reviews and due diligence.
- JavaScript, HTML5, CSS3, MySQL, jQuery, RESTful JSON API
2008-01 — 2010-08
Co-engineered secure payments APIs and distributed systems with back-end team. Developed and owned all JavaScript apps.
Highlights
- Portable payments app: Multiplied conversions via proximity to brand & message. Provided highly-configurable user experience paths with conditional questions, scriptable events & complex validation. Powered rapid disaster response with instant fund drives.
- Advocacy workflows: Empowered users to achieve geometric expansion via viral advocacy. Enabled users to reach the very edges of their social networks through personalized forms.
- Accessory modules: Developed pluggable apps for recurring payments, reporting, and team member lookup.
- JavaScript, presenter-first MVC pattern, dependency injection, CSS3, jQuery, RESTful JSON API
2007-02 — 2007-09
Engineered solutions for social publishing platform customers Condé Nast, Hearst, and Gannet.
Highlights
- JavaScript social media widgets, JSON API & CSS. Debugged server and client. Windows servers with Berkeley DB backend.
2006-02 — 2006-06
Constructed internet collaboration software lauded by CNET, TechCrunch, and MIT Technology Review.
Highlights
- Built responsive web app features to empower non-technical users to create topic-based communities.
- JavaScript, CSS, XHR, RESTful APIs
2000-01 — 2005-12
Positioned startup for $30M acquisition by engineering consumer UX and pitch prototypes.
Highlights
- Rapidly designed and developed front-end for video search.
- Co-authored world standard RSS Media 1.0 with Yahoo!
- Developed world’s first mobile media search.
- Devised a click path recording system to capture user behavior and relevance feedback.
- Cut ramp-up time for content partners MSNBC, CBS News, Marketwatch, NPR, and Reuters.
- HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JSP, Servlets, XSLT transforms, XML feeds.
1998-01 — 2000-01
Creative Development Group
Highlights
- Developed web applications to market an 800K product inventory through auction and negotiation platforms.
- Auction platform (Patent US7024376)
- Negotiation platform (Patents US7756772, US6035288)
University of Illinois at Chicago —
Courses
- Thesis: Computer-based training for health concepts.
- Research: facial recognition & age-progression
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign —
Courses
Method of Sizing an Embedded Media Player Page
This invention relates to media players for playing media files, such as audio and video files, and more particularly to embedded or wrapped media players.
Method of Disseminating Ads Using Embedded Media Player Page
The embedded media player page instructs the media device to request an advertisement from an advertisement server for display in the embedded media player page.
Methods & Systems for Collecting Data for Media Files
A method of collecting data in connection with the retrieval of a media file includes the steps of transmitting to a media device an embedded media player page for playing the media file and transmitting a media file identification message to a log server.
Systems and Methods for Rendering Content
A method of displaying video data using an embedded media player page, using frame dimensional data from a database
Method of Collecting Data Using an Embedded Media Player Page
A method of collecting user video playback events and metadata
Front End Engineering
- JavaScript
- GraphQL
- React
- Redux
- ES6
- ES7
- Node.js
- HTML5
- Sass
- CSS3
- HTML5
- Semantic markup
- a11y
- i18n
Software Architecture
- JAMStack
- Microservice
- API contract design
- Normalize API endpoints
- Encryption at rest & in transit
- PCI-DSS
- GDPR
Performant Progressive Web Applications
- Modular design
- Reduce request round-trips
- Lighthouse PWA audits
- CPU profiling
- Network profiling
- Code-splitting
- CSS3 pruning
- Image optimization
- Responsive Web Applications
Software Leadership
- Strategic decision-making
- Coaching & mentoring developers
- Consensus building
- Roadmaps for product development
- Brainstorming & ideation that lead to customer-critical features
- Creative problem solving
Full Software Product Life Cycle
- Requirements gathering
- Creative problem-solving
- Experience and flow design
- Continuous release
- Testing: Jest, Chai, Sinon, Mocha, cross-browser matrix
- Updates: Renovate Bot, CVE alerts
Frameworks, generators, build tools
- React
- Redux
- Create-React-App
- Gatsby
- Node.js
- Webpack
- Babel
- PostCSS
- PurgeCSS
- yarn
- npm
Monte is a great development leader. He's a collaborator who really pushes the team to think about the greatest outcomes and not just the tasks at hand. His technical skills are second to none - when we worked together he build core pieces of a can't fail, billion dollar payment processing platform. So he is invaluable either as an individual contributor or as a team lead and that breadth of ability is rare.
— Thon Morse
Monte is not just a fantastic and precise tech lead but also an inspiring person. He consistently demonstrated a strong work ethic at IBM plus a commitment to success. He is extremely enthusiastic about his work which is infectious. Besides being a joy to work with, Monte is a take-charge person who is able to present creative solutions to complex problems and communicate the benefits to the company.
— Xinyun (Victor) Zhao
Monte is a great User Experience Engineer. He has a solid understanding of APIs, application level business rules, and display logic. He implemented multiple features. He's confident in his abilities and quite willing to ask questions extending his expertise further into the system architecture. He will be an invaluable asset to any development team.
— Simon Gershey
Monte does a great job of translating executive input to quickly create useful protoypes and demos.
— Karen Howe