Kevin Stephenson Email & Phone Number

Anaheim, California, United States

Initially engaged by new CEO as a consultant to perform technical and personnel appraisal. Upon discovery of team friction; architectural deficiencies; and outdated IT and processes, engagement was expanded to institute personnel changes; provide management and technical mentoring; upgrade, replace or recode systems; and assist with M&A forward and reverse due diligence. Transformation led to a successful exit via merger with CrowdVision.

Los Angeles Metropolitan Area

Provided technical leadership from initial startup phase to market launch. Advised on and integrated IT systems used for core investor functionality. Collaborated on contract negotiations; legal document reviews; and legal and regulatory compliance. Final implementation consisted of marketing, analytics, accounting, compliance and white-label crowdfunding systems.

Santa Monica, Ca

Took over all technical aspects of the company. Introduced proper development processes and software engineering practices. Recruited Director of Engineering to assist with rebuilding of the backend that had technical debt due to being a marketing and fundraising proof-of-concept. Provided mentoring to off-shore development teams. Re-architected security protocols to meet or exceed NIST standards. Created a production ready, end-to-end solution to link ACH-connected depository accounts to a new equity and debt financial instrument trading platform using Plaid and Dwolla. Assisted CFO with CPA engagements and development of liquidity and leverage algorithms.

Greater Los Angeles Area

Self-funded founder of innovative productivity software company. Researched the product and technical feasibility of a multi-service, multi-cloud, integrated productivity platform loosely based on the book Getting Things Done (GTD).

Greater Los Angeles Area

Worked with CTO, CIO, VPs, architects, developers and operations team to create and deploy a cutting edge, massively scalable social network platform. New site employed a simplified and standardized architecture underpinned with cleanly decoupled SOA and a Universal Message Bus. Modernized the full stack with asynchronous, event message and IoC patterns. Standardized data element naming conventions. Implemented universal entity keys and mandated strong cache coherency using object versioning. Worked with product and technical departments to prioritize projects, assign tasks, and assist with career development for ~40 developers and ~40 operations staff.

Greater Los Angeles Area

Took on additional architecture and support responsibilities during this transition time. Was the only employee left that knew how the entirety of the old site worked, requiring direct involvement in myriad of support issues as site contained hundreds of databases; ETL pipelines; infrastructure components; services; and build, deployment and monitoring processes. After the sale of the company, transitioned into the architectural leader of the company, acting as the de facto Chief Software Architect from September, 2011. Role included evaluating dozens of internally developed infrastructure technologies for new site feasibility. Many commercial and open source systems and frameworks were evaluated for new site, including Memcache, Redis, MongoDB, Cassandra, RIAK, CouchBase, CouchDB, JMS, RabbitMQ, Kafka, TIBCO, ZeroMQ, Mule, ServiceStack and IoC containers.

Greater Los Angeles Area

Took over primary oversight of core OLTP architecture. Assisted ops department with cost reductions in preparation of company sale. Challenged expedient solutions that would have caused brand damage and loss of millions of dollars in data. Provided advanced training to data teams, shattering myths regarding locking, transactions/logging, tuning queries, and app locks. Performed internal and public presentations on SQL Server pessimistic locking and how to prevent lock contention.

Greater Los Angeles Area

Oversaw expansion of cutting-edge backend systems and improved monitoring of legacy systems

Greater Los Angeles Area

Worked on core social networking features and built a critical infrastructure piece for the Myspace Music Joint Venture subsidiary. At the site's peak in mid-2008, OLTP volumes were in excess of 500k TX/sec with 2 TB of data created daily across thousands of databases. With the Chief Data Architect, championed the use of development standards on this large data development team.

Contract database development.

Greater Los Angeles Area

Replaced two MS Frontpage and MS Access OLTP/decision support systems with ASP and SQL Server 2000. The prior architecture was a remnant of the pre-SaaS, single-tier Access product and was not extensible, secure, or scalable for the web. Product was continuously extended by reverse engineering rating algorithms from insurance carriers, resulting in competitive advantages that lead to market domination for several years.Acquired by Word and Brown in 2008.