Jack Kora Email & Phone Number

Chicago, IL, US

Chicago, IL, US

• Led brainstorming, evaluation, and implementation of 10x business growth initiative.
• Led company’s continuous improvement in organizational structure and operational efficiency using Entrepreneurial Operating System.
• Introduced new organization-wide interview process based on the company values.
• Closely worked with product and sales to prioritize project priority and deadlines, which has directly led to new customer acquisition.
• Reduced project release times from 4-6 months to consistent major feature releases every month.
• Expanded the engineering team and revamped the team culture to achieve greater team cohesion.

Eindhoven, North Brabant, NL

• Led product definition of three deployment and operational orchestration platforms and managing three development teams in Chicago, Boston, and Berlin.
• Reduced communication overhead for engineers by 1.5 hours per day through reorganization.
• Improved the quality and speed of delivery by creating a consistent and focused product definition and revamping development process.
• Raised customer satisfaction and platform adoption by closer customer engagement and prioritization based on customer feedback.

Chicago, IL, US

• Senior manager over the organization that built the Digital Mortgage, an industry leading online mortgage product.
• Worked with business stakeholders on continuous improvement of tech/business collaboration and adoption of agile methods organizationally.
• Launched a company-wide employee recognition program based on core company values.
• Led the departmental transition from.NET to polyglot Linux-based microservices and AWS architecture.
• Led the adoption of DevOps culture, methods and operational tool chain.
• Was actively involved in sourcing candidates and promoting Guaranteed Rate engineering.

• Led organizational DevOps adoption and Continuous Delivery team in developing and introducing new approaches, processes and tools around building, publishing and deploying software.
• Led the company through a global migration to a new source control system.
• Oversaw the panel responsible for choosing and leading the adoption of a new application deployment system.
• As the manager of the Quality Engineering team, overhauled the company’s functional and performance testing strategies and product portfolio to refocus on the decentralized DevOps model.
• Managed an offshore Production Support Team that ensured the quality of all production deployments.
• Mentored Team Leads to help them grow professionally as managers and leaders in the organization.

• Given responsibility for the completion of a full re-design of Orbitz Hotel backend to support new and emerging industry business models. Responsible for ensuring that the new design is flexible enough for future.
• Currently leading company-wide DevOps effort to automate all operational configurations and software deployments.
• Kicked off and currently overseeing a workgroup tasked with redesigning currency exchange handling for the entire Orbitz Worldwide system. Success determined by a decrease in errors and demonstrably increased.
• Conceived and led successful company-wide change from large monolithic bi-monthly releases to smaller decoupled bi-weekly releases independently done by each team.
• Efficiently orchestrated the team’s move to Agile project management

• Interfaced with external clients in sales, feature requests and maintenance meetings as the technical representative of Orbitz Web Services product.
• Led the development and launch of a brand new Web Services platform set to replace two legacy ones.
• Launched two new major search & book Web Services clients – Southwest Airlines and Affinion Group.
• Planned and executed complete cut over and retirement of a legacy Web Service solution.
• Was responsible for operations of two high transaction web service solutions with 2.5 million transactions a day, 32 production servers and 80+ clients.
• Introduced and converted the team to Agile project management which was followed by organization-wide transition a year later.

• Led the development of all Hotel servicing (booking, cancel, refund, etc) back-end functionality.
• Validated and approved requirements and architectural designs of new projects and features.
• Developed in Java under Linux utilizing popular technologies like Spring, Hibernate and JMS.
• Profiled for performance optimizations and ensured proper level of logging and monitoring in the production code.
• Performed traffic and system capacity estimation and ordered new hardware when required.
• Trained and mentored junior and other developers.

• Designed and developed new major vacation packaging products - Air+Hotel, Hotel+Car and Air+Car+Hotel.
• Migrated Cheaptickets.com from its legacy implementation to newer Orbitz.com platform for all vacation packaging products.
• Participated in the effort to build white labeling on Orbitz.com platform.
• Responsible for performance, logging, monitoring and optimizations.

• Developed front and back-end functionality using Java under Linux for Orbitz for Business brand.
• Ensured proper level of production performance.
• Participated in 24x7 production support and maintenance.

North Hills, New York, US

• Redesigned and implemented financial month-end jobs. Decreased running time from 30 hours to 15 minutes.
• Designed, implemented and supported SQL stored-procedures, queries, triggers and SQL jobs.
• Developed application front-end and business logic using VB6.
• Performed in-house network and domain administration and support.

US