Rob Black Email & Phone Number

Los Altos, CA, US

San Francisco Bay Area

• Responsible for all technology development, technology manufacturing, internal technology systems, and cloud applications at an IoT company providing products for the retail and retail-banking sectors.
• Created scalability roadmap by modelling and lab-testing variety of brainstormed approaches.
• Managed and contributed to development of the new product hardware (including case and electronics), embedded software (C++), cloud services, and web-app. Planned and implemented manufacturing and QC processes.
• Structured discussions with the rest of the management team to create a new product to make it easier for retailers to carry out market-research surveys.

• Provided technical and management skills for a variety of clients.
• Led a multi-stage cloud migration project for a medical school to take academic-written Python tools and make them accessible to research students. This involved converting them to internal web-based tools using Django.
• Managed recovery of a hacked Drupal website for a medical school, including extraction and decontamination of the data as well as creation of the data-structure of a replacement website.

San Francisco Bay Area

• Responsible for technology development for a pre-funding startup adding patented contactless e-Receipt capabilities to legacy Point of Sale systems.
• Developed and demonstrated to investors a fully working prototype adding e-receipt capability to legacy retail cash registers using a mixture of internal and external resources. The system was comprised of electronics.
• Hands-on involvement in everything from financial modelling to CAD / CAM, PCB layout, and writing embedded C++ USB drivers
• Coached the CEO in Lean Startup.
• Developed a training and experience program for technical and design interns.

San Francisco Bay Area

Founded a startup to develop tools to help companies rapidly build secure extensible IoT solutions. I created the company, interviewed potential customers to understand their needs and worked with suppliers to develop the first version of the technology.

San Francisco Bay Area

• Co-founded a startup producing automation technology for the agriculture sector to improve yield, taste.
• Created a distributed Linux/Java/MySQL-based Minimum Viable Product hydroponics control system with custom electronics.
• Put in place management structure and processes to support board-level decision making.

San Francisco Bay Area

In-team Lean Startup coach for co-founders in a pre-funding water infrastructure automation company.

San Francisco Bay Area

• Technical lead and a co-founder for a Lean Startup team taking part in the NSF I-Corps Summer 2014 cohort. This was a 9-week intensive hands-on course to take a real new business (codenamed JobSpeed) and take it.
• Personally interviewed more than 50 customers to verify product-market fit.
• Built financial models and prototypes to validate the business idea and calculate likely margins and market size.

San Francisco Bay Area

I helped people bring their website ideas to life using Drupal.

London, United Kingdom

• Responsible for strategy and direction for a range of software suites across audience measurement for Television, Radio and Internet.
• Managed development of future product roadmaps through creation of working groups bringing together hardware, software, sales, business development, and operations stakeholders.
• Layered aspects of OGC Program Management and PRINCE2 Project Controls over existing Agile methodologies to achieve more predictable delivery on large projects and better program reporting while keeping the culture.
• Acted as Kantar Media’s technical representative to the committee planning the television ratings for the 2012 Olympic Games on behalf of the UK government.
• Worked with software architects and senior technical representatives to better align software architecture of different software groups after merger between WPP (of which Kantar Media was part) and TNS.

London, United Kingdom

• Managed a department of software engineers developing scalable distributed software for producing television ratings and managing maintenance of in-house-designed hardware.
• Grew a department of five people reporting directly to me on two niche products into a large structured department working on a suite of more than a dozen products used to generate broadcast-media ratings representing.
• Drove development of server KPIs and health-check dashboards to reduce outages by a factor of more than 4.
• Introduced agile methodologies (mainly XP and Scrum), reducing release times by a factor of about 6. Also evaluated PRINCE2 and RUP, with mixed results.Keywords: Big Data, Program management, PRINCE2, Scrum, XP, Agile.

London, United Kingdom

C++/Linux/SQL programmer in an R&D team developing technology for measuring television ratings.

London, United Kingdom

• Worked as a consultant on a mixture of internal and external web-related projects.
• For a web-hosting company, created and managed their IT department until a permanent manager could be hired.