Dean Heistad Email & Phone Number

Washington, Dc, Us

I have a passion for animal welfare and flying, and am fortunate enough to combine the two into a niche service providing animal rescue using our airplane to expedite the saving of animals from euthanasia.

Fairfax, Virginia, Us

I'm responsible for QA test automation, DevOps, Security and IT at a small company with fantastic technology vision and people. We're a cloud-agnostic health research company, having successfully launched the national All of Us Research Program using our SaaS platform for research tools.My teams create tools and infrastructure for testing, hosting, securing and maintaining the systems for very large scale, high profile projects and clients.We balance cutting edge technologies with the need for costs, stability, predictability and security.We’ve built a world-class automation framework to test functionality of the systems on browsers and mobile devices or emulators, and deployed this on hundreds of nodes to generate real-world load for performance tuning.We’ve built a FISMA moderate cloud hosted system with renowned partners and technologies to ensure security and high availability of our end-user and internal systems. We’re pushing the envelope with a cloud-agnostic solution to provide a PaaS solution for upcoming clients and partners, aimed at delighting the customer and end user.We’ve instituted Kanban project management for the DevOps and Automation teams, and embed technologists within the dev Scrum teams to support their efforts as well as build and maintain the infrastructure and production systems.We've migrated from cloud-instance infrastructure to Kubernetes orchestrated containerized infrastructure for ease of scaling, cost efficiency and deployment predictability.

Washington, Dc, Us

Responsible for coordinating the technology needs of multiple vendors to create the Life Reimagined ecosystem of web and mobile applications, architecting single-sign-on functionality, setting up and maintaining the operational infrastructure, and creating systems for monitoring the hardware, a dashboard system for the business analytics, QA, operations and customer support staff and infrastructure.Business partners include product, UX/UI/xD personnel at partners, project managers, community managers, tech leads and sr. engineers.AARP business partners include procurement, web project managers, web technologists, usability experts and executive management.

Us

Responsible for early transitions of Lifetuner technology from early development firm to a combined offshore/onshore team and more recently to in-house exclusive team. Working with a Scrum methodology, using Ruby on Rails and the Radiant open-source CMS that we've customized, hosted with a combination of dedicated and cloud infrastructure.Responsible for development and operations teams for Lifetuner, and development and design teams for Education and Outreach division's financial security applications, including Flash, HTML5 and mobile tools for calculating financial scenarios for users. Responsible for creating and maintaining the award-winning AARP Social Security calculator as well as the highly popular Retirement Calculator.

Us

Responsible for the engineering, QA, customer support and other functions for our business and clients. Deployed to client (Livedeal) based in Las Vegas to improve back-office systems for their sales team:* Brought in to refine existing technology platforms, create and integrate new ones to meet the new business needs. * Created a significant platform for reporting and analyzing custom metrics all around the product lifecycle from sales leads, through sales contracts, into the fulfillment realm and into customer support. * Replaced SalesNet with Salesforce* Created a complex Ruby on Rails architecture for the custom reporting system to aggregate all search engine marketing fulfillment data using an Agile methodology to realize benefits early and often was the pinnacle of achievement. * Replaced end of life hardware with new, virtualized, SSD-based hardware, and began the migration away from Oracle to MySQL for additional cost savings. Also worked with a client (AARP) in DC creating a new financial information system for Millennials on the web and mobile.

Paris, France, Fr

Co-Founded Letix as an answer to the law enforcement communities' lack of standards and knowledge when combatting online crimes. Built credit card fraud aggregation system for law enforcement and card issuers to collaborate. Architected using Ruby on Rails, and found and managed volunteer engineering talent.

Following the demise of CampusU, I co-founded Ology with the 2 NY executives responsible for CampusU. In the true spirit of startup entrepreneurship, I was responsible for equipping the founders with technology, and supporting everything from phones and laptops to servers, technology volunteer staff and paid staff. I setup hosting systems, architected the initial stack with a LAMP stack, negotiated and hired an offshore firm to develop the website and interviewed and hired volunteer and paid engineering staff to build the ad-delivery network functionality.Ology is destined to be the premiere advertising company to reach college age kids, through the blog network, vertical ad network and future ad targeting system we devised.

Us

Ramped up media-centric office based in NYC, built websites and facebook applications for college demographic focus. The company's future looked promising until the company ran out of money and laid everyone off. I ended up sticking around after the layoffs to help with the shutdown for a few weeks, and subsequently co-founded Ology.

Operational responsibility for the website and back-end transaction processing systems, including multiple data centers. Enterprise IT, procurement and general startup problem solving fall under my purvue as well.My stint was cut short after the CEO asked to relocate me to California, when I was unable to move.

Washington, Dc, Us

Leading the technology vision and tactics for AARP's web transformation, preparing their website for a much more savvy demographic. Working with the development team to continue refining the technical architecture laid out in 2006, and forging relationships with vendors who will add value to the process or the web offerings.Responsible for internal tools to benefit the editorial team, the membership team, marketing and business leadership.

Consulting for technology makeovers for media & publishing projects.

New York, Ny, Us

Founded Time Inc's web venture for eCompany, which later became Business 2.0. Responsible for P&L and all aspects of the web business from 1999 - 2003, when I left to take a position as technology director for Time Inc's ventures with AOL.

Started the web business of eCompany Now magazine under Time Warner, and subsequently grew the business to profitability in the harsh dot-bomb climate. Left Business 2.0 post acquisition to run the Fortune magazine website and migrate that technology to a scalable, profitable platform.

Us

Started as operations engineer, and subsequently ran the group to interface between engineering and network/systems administration.Formed the international engineering group, and transferred technology to international operations in Japan, UK, Germany and France, as well as domestic technology centers in Seattle, Silicon Valley and Manhattan. Ran the technology groups for a German joint venture, creating the first large scale deployment of Infoseek's intranet search products and developed complete content management system as well as negotiated contracts for design, ad serving and infrastructure.

Bachelors Degree, Computer Science

Bs, Computer Science