Jim Nist Email & Phone Number

San Francisco, Ca, Us

Columbus, Oh, Us

San Francisco, California, Us

Helping to drive a distributed Engineering organization building the next great hospitality brand. My teams build products that empower the discovery and selection of the perfect Sonder experience for each and every guest, across sonder.com and our other distribution channels. We work hard and smart to make finding and booking the best place to stay a game changing experience.My primary focus has been with the teams that distribute our inventory through sonder.com and our distribution channel partners. I have also owned and managed teams that are responsible for our in-house dynamic pricing platform and tooling that our hospitality operations teams use to manage their workflow. Over my tenure we have balanced building new features with a migration from a single monolith to building and migrating to right-sized services. We are currently leveraging our existing platform to migrate some of core systems to 3rd party solutions via an in-house built middleware.Sonder went public in January 2022.Technologies: Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, NextJS, Python, Go, Java, Elastic Search, Snowflake, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes

Reduced the team by half and streamlined processes while radically increasing productivity and cooperation within the team and with other departments. A focus on a smaller integrated product development team let us innovate quickly on the product and better support features that partners and consumers want while supporting integrations with partner systems. Successfully deploying appropriate technologies for actual business problems has all but eliminated unplanned downtime on a complicated system that provides e-commerce to both white label partner stores and a marketplace.Rebuilt a failing platform over time without business disruption and pushed for and implemented a Data Warehouse and analytics platform, introduced place-based search, pushed the business to integrate both industry-standard legacy Point of Sale systems and cutting-edge RFID gate access and control systems. Internationalized our systems as we pushed into the European market. Radically reduced our hosting and devops costs by choosing appropriate technologies and making internal systems more performant.Technologies: Rails, JavaScript, React Native, iOS, Algolia, Redshift, Looker, D3, AWS, ELK Stack

San Francisco, Ca, Us

Brought in to rebuild a popular web services that was in the failing 3rd rebuild attempt. Existing system was hosted in separate locations (partly AWS, partly hardware co-lo in Atlanta) that relied on 47 databases and was down for 3 hours every other night. New system was built over 7 months and had 1 downtime in 13 months. Reduced monthly AWS spend from $160K to $24K per month while growing the user base from 10 to 12 million members. Oversaw complete rebuilds of iOS and Android native applications on top of both old and new back-end platforms. Championed a data warehouse as part of a platform re-write and built tools to empower data-driven decision-making. Worked closely with Product to design and implement a subscription model and stable platform that continues to support Couchsurfing user growth and year over year profitability.Technologies: Android, iOS, Rails, JavaScript, SOLR, RDS, Redshift, Chef, Looker, Amplitude

Assembled a team that re-built the ecomom site from scratch in 3 months using Magento and Rails working closely with a top-tier creative agency. Pursued data driven decision making and worked hard to foster cooperation across the company to realize the company’s vision. New system supported 70% of the company’s annual sales on the Friday before Thanksgiving.Technologies: Magento, PHP, JavaScript, Ruby, Rails, AWS, Chef

Charlottesville, Virginia, Us

Provided programming support for client projects. Projects included primary responsibility for tests, infrastructure, and shim for C-based API that Key-Square built to control, configure, and monitor a timing chip on high performance networking equipment for Qualcomm. Technologies: Ruby, Rails, Python, Django, Javascript, C

Us

Provided programming and management support for hotelicopter’s hotel meta-search platform. Helped to architect and build back-end systems to integrate hotel property information and provide real-time rates and availability through and web-based APIs and a JavaScript widget backed by Ruby on Rails and SOLR. Built an automated system to validate price and availability parity by scraping our partner’s sites using Webdriver.Technologies: Ruby, Rails, SOLR/Lucene, JAVA, Webdriver, AWS, Mapreduce, Chef

Charlottesville, Virginia, Us

Provided architectural, organizational, and programming support. Helped clients implement Agile Methodologies. Helped local startups develop Ruby on Rails applications including a chemical toxicity analysis tool and a social network graphing application. Projects included a .NET based API that ran on a hardware chemical detector, business rules engines for multiple Government clients, and Drupal sites for an Educational institution and an NSF backed environmental research corporation.Technologies: Ruby, Rails, C#, ASP.NET, Drupal, SOLR

Responsible for the design and development of an Administrative UI and API for the C++ version of Gemstone’s in-memory distributed data caching system. UI monitors real-time data from distributed nodes with ability to track state, view log data, and provide statistics with customizable real-time charts.Technologies: C++, C#, .NET, Windows, Linux, ACE, LBM, Quinn Curtis Real-Time Charting library

San Jose, Ca, Us

Managed a team of 10 technical staff responsible for application development, infrastructure, and client project support. Software developed in-house included data collection tools, electronic document processing and conversion tools, and a web based document review tool to support our Electronic Discovery practice. Built redundant storage systems to house client's data and applicationsTechnologies: SQL Server, .NET, C#, ASP.NET, Access, VBA, C/C++, dtSearch

Hands-on coordination and management of both Network and Development teams including 23 FTEs plus consultants. Built simple systems to take over services being provided by outside vendors, saving over $50,000 per month. Managed application development and interfaced with vendors and service providers. Personally set-up and managed Sun, Windows, and Cisco production network and co-location facility to directly interface with credit card processors.Technologies: Solaris, Windows, Cisco, Oracle, SQL Server, JAVA, J2EE, Weblogic, Commerce-One, Coldfusion

Us

Part of a small SWAT team that developed the initial version of Rhapsody, the pioneering subscription music streaming service. Managed the hardware and network design for the system and served as the development DBA for the Oracle back-end. Built out the UI for searching catalog and creating and saving playlists. Integrated DRM to allow secure streaming.Technologies: Oracle, Linux, Windows, Java Servlets, JSP, Tomcat, Windows Media Toolkit

Us

Re-architected the network infrastructure, application architecture, and technical teams. managed a team of 12. oversaw move to a new office including contractor co-ordination and re-wiring. Oversaw complete rebuild of the company’s web application to reduce downtime and improve maintainability and extensibility. Company acquired by Thompson-Reuters. Technologies: JAVA, SQL Server, Weblogic, Coldfusion

Bfa, Mfa, Fine Art, Computer Science, English

Education record

Master Of Fine Arts - Mfa