John Van Stralen Email & Phone Number

Mountain View, California, United States

For Samsung’s digital advertising business unit. addressed DSP performance issues for underperforming ads by using Machine Learning and A/B Testing to optimize ad placement and ensure the right ad was presented to the right person at the right time. - Identified inconsistencies about how Samsung Ads were displayed across the product line of 100+ TVs. Secured advocacy for the C-Suite to remedy the issue, collaborating with engineers worldwide to eliminate the inefficiencies and optimize the system. Leveraging machine learning (ML) and A/B testing results, found the most optimal content, lifting impressions by ~30%, adding a gain of $75M/year to top line revenue.- Managing 90+ global engineers spread across multiple Scrum teams. Recognized for the ability to promote engagement, thereby increasing employee retention. Worked with the teams to build out the “Definition of Done” guarantee project consistency.- Improved system uptime, once a critical issue, to a 99.99% uptime rate after initiating major design and product updates.- Collaborating with Product and Sales teams, planned and implemented improvements in the Samsung Ads product offering that yield significant rate of return (ROI).- Successfully reversed downward employee morale trend through creating employee engagement concepts as well as actively promoting achievements within the organization. Result was that numerous staff members were promoted to managerial roles / roles of increased accountability.- Planned and introduced new digital advertising platforms and products, teams with business side teams as well as other engineering groups to ensure product viability as well as that the proper privacy rules were in place.- Collaborates with other global technology leaders across several department to plan and design new software and hardware architecture, project planning, front and back-end engineering as well as to institute SOPs and KPIs as related to cross-regional sites.

San Francisco Bay Area

Transformed Engineering team from 5 seed Engineers to a 60+ Engineering team that rewrote a proof-of-concept TV content recognition system into a cost-effective, scalable and reliable product offering. Managed both development and operations. Improved uptime to better than 99.99%. Team and product improvements set the company up for acquisition by Vizio in 2015. Teams based in San Francisco, Texas and Bulgaria.Inscape Data Services provides automatic content recognition (ACR) in SmartTV sets using a very lightweight client that communicates with our cloud-based systems to detect exactly what video is playing in real-time on the TV. Our technology is Python and C-based for speed and scale. We're building a highly scalable and distributed cloud on Amazon AWS for Data Analysis. We're doing millions of transactions per second and scaling 10x or more in the coming year. More information around Inscape Data Services -> https://inscape.tv/- Responsible for all engineering of our Inscape division (US and Bulgaria). This includes management, architecture, scalability, uptime/SLA, project scheduling, growth/cost projections, etc. Duties also include working with the CEO/Bizdev on presentations to customers and Executives.- Our Embedded SmartTV software is currently running on over 10M SmartTVs throughout the US. During our peak time (~6pm PST), we are receiving packets from over 2.5M SmartTVs each second while also ingesting content from 500+ stations throughout the US and comparing for a match within 200 milliseconds.- As a team, we’ve been able to advance Site Reliability from under 99% when I arrived, to now being able to supplying customers with a 99.99% SLA.- Site Reliability/Uptime is very important to our team and our customers. We're always looking forward to proactively fix any issues before they become outages along with constantly looking at new architectures for better performance and scaling of our environment.

Emeryville, Ca

We did it, we were the first to launch in Nevada and took the first ever *legal* online poker bet in the US on 4/30/13!!! We also launched in New Jersey on 11/26/13.Ultimate Gaming's bringing legal online poker and casino to the masses... well, at least Nevada and New Jersey for now with other states coming online shortly. We're proud to have launched Ultimate Poker in Nevada and New Jersey for real money.I've been busy managing the Emeryville Development Center and software engineering side of the house (~20 engineers), while coordinating with our home office in Las Vegas and off-shore engineering centers in Bulgaria and Ukraine (~15 engineers). The team worked hard to meet all the regulatory issues needed to receive our license and become one of the first ever legal online poker games in the US.

San Francisco, Ca

Betfair is the leading online gambling exchange in Europe, with more betting matches executed in a day then all European stock trades. Leading teams of frontend and backend engineers working with the UK teams to bring the Betfair exchange to the US market. We are rebuilding/modularizing the existing Java/Oracle backend allowing it to be configured for the different issues we will face in each state. We have completely rewritten the frontend using the LAMP stack along with adding Ajax functionality for a better wagering experience.

Memeo is a leading backup and cloud storage start-up working with such companies as Seagate, Western Digital, Google, Sony and others to solve the storage, retrieval and syncing of files across the internet. My roles at Memeo consist of leading the Internet Services group that designs and implements the backend infrastructure that runs Memeo's 4 major desktop clients. I have also been leading Memeo's push from PC client based solutions to offering all the same functionality found on the PC with a web based application which will allow users to get to their data from anywhere in the world without having to download a client. I have been able to use my experience building scalable online storage solutions and websites at Yahoo and GeoCities to bring best practices/technology and great user experiences to Memeo's push to the web.

Santa Clara, Ca

ConnectedTV (connectedtv.yahoo.com) • Manage Frontend, Proxy, QA and Release Engineering teams developing media rich 10’ applications on time with a very high level of quality. • Manage development of all Yahoo! TV Widgets (Sports, Weather, Profile, Gallery, Finance, YouTube, etc) working together with such companies as Samsung, LG, Vizio and Sony. • Collaborated with Intel to design and implement a set-top box running their new Canmore chip powered by Yahoo TV Widgets in 1080. • Personally coded the “Weather” widget for Yahoo! TV Widgets using Javascript/XML/JSON, the “Weather” widget is currently live on Samsung TVs.Communities Group • Managed and mentored a team of 40+ engineers and managers developing cutting edge solutions: o Y!Groups (groups.yahoo.com) delivering > 30 million emails/day o Y!Photos uploading over 1 million photos/day o Backend data storage reaching 1 PetaByte across server farms worldwide o Built a backend system to graph personal connections out to three degrees of separation and return info one each node within 100 milliseconds • Worked directly with teams in Bangalore for product QA and software development. • Developed annual hardware budget projections and managed hardware procurement, installation and support while maintaining budgets. • Selected as part of the engineering due-diligence team in the acquisition of the Flickr by Yahoo.

Beverly Hills / Santa Monica / Marina Del Rey, Ca

9th employee (2nd Software Engineer) instrumental in building one of the internet’s highest trafficked sites. Reported to the co-Founder and CTO and was responsible for front and backend development. Acquired by Yahoo! for $3.6B in 1999. • Key site developer of original site, which quickly grew to the #3 highest trafficked site on the web.• Assumed role of DBA and built up Informix database system to handle over 50 million members.• Built backend C++ billing system to charge over 5,000 credit cards daily.• Personally developed the world’s first online HTML text editor in C with over 2M users daily.