Kirk Gray Email and Phone Number

As Vice President of Software Engineering I oversee all engineering teams for our School Business division, leading over 200 engineers across the country and globe. Things I do include: executive leadership, organizational design, software architecture, budgeting, stakeholder management. I partner closely with our product management and academic design teams to build great educational experiences for teachers, students, and administrators.

Head of Engineering for Open Learning - responsible for delivery of Open Learning product.Chief Architect for Open Learning - work with engineers, architects, and leadership in product and project management to ensure that we are building a reliable and robust system to address the needs of educators and students.Leading Platform Services Engineering, building new microservices for consumption by various applications across McGraw Hill.

Mentoring engineers and engineering leaders on a variety of topics.

At Schoolrunner, I led our engineering efforts, including infrastructure, quality, and new feature development. This includes a portion of our product management duties, including roadmap definition, backlog creation/maintenance, and Interfacing with customers to make sure our software fits their needs.I'm also got my hands dirty by writing PHP, Python, and Ansible code, while providing direction and mentorship to engineers.

I worked with a group of awesome folks at Robots and Pencils! In my job, I was lucky enough to do some pretty cool work with great people.- Mentoring, management- Data Architecture: Building data pipelines with Kafka and Storm- Designing and implementing Microservices architecture using Go.- Building services with Node.js- Deploying to EC2 using Docker and Ansible- Building out monitoring solutions using Prometheus- Assisting in business development

Director of GRID Platform Services Engineering, leading multiple teams developing core learning services APIs.

Worked on large scale platform and data channel technology at Pearson. Managed an awesome group of engineers and architects, solving tough problems with interesting technologies, learning new things every day.Led a devops team, architecting solutions using technologies like node.js, Cassandra, RabbitMQ, Storm, Hadoop, Kafka, and Elastic Search to create a robust, HA, cloud-based solution for data capture and analysis

Working on large scale data channel technology at Pearson. Led a devops team, architecting solutions using technologies like node.js, Cassandra, RabbitMQ, Storm, Hadoop, Kafka, and Elastic Search to create a robust, HA, cloud-based solution for data capture and analysis.Led a team that developed new analytics views for OpenClass customers using graph database technology and machine learning.Previously assigned to design and development of new social platform for Pearson OpenClass initiative, assisting in design and development of REST-based backend using MongoDB.

Lead Engineer charged with developing high-quality, scalable, and reusable code to facilitate integration with many services and application across the Pearson Education ecosystem. Achievements include leading the revamp of the release process to reduce release times from two weeks to two days. Technologies used include Hibernate, Spring, jQuery, Struts, MySQL, SQL Server, Tomcat application server, CAS SSO, Java Security, Web Services, Groovy.- Support and perform new development of CAS-based single-sign-on solution, in addition to providing support for third-party integrations across Pearson Education system - Design, implement, and refactor code to support a high-traffic Liferay Portal installation- Create automated installer library using Groovy- Assist in evaluation of source code and release management best practices

Assisting a small team in upgrades to core technology and look and feel of a social network for sports and recreation. Technologies used include Hibernate, Spring, jQuery, Struts (1+2), MySQL, Apache, and JBoss application server.- Lead of partner development, working with external stakeholders to deliver custom sites and integration points to Sportsvite.- Led upgrade from Hibernate 2.1 to Hibernate 3.2.- Ported application from JBoss 3.2.6 to Tomcat 6.- Assisted in porting web tier to Struts 2.- Created a number of AJAX components using jQuery and assorted plugins, including thickbox, jtip, and autocomplete.- Performed maintenance on another site, written in PHP, running on the LAMP stack, including migration to new server.- Updates include upgrades to PayPal e-commerce credit card processing.

- Served in leadership role on team dedicated to monitoring, auditing, and improving performance of mission-critical enterprise software solution for education and training. - Responsible for development of performance testing tool library and documentation, including Java tools, third party applications such as JProbe and Toad, and open source products like Glassbox. - Applied critical application and database code refactoring to high-profile portions of the application, increasing application scalability and stability. - Designed and developed system-wide framework using AJAX and Java 5 Concurrency libraries to perform long running tasks. - Provided Software Performance Engineering input at each phase of SDLC. Participated in review of all requirements, design, test case, and automation documentation. - Audited Java and SQL code to ensure efficiency and scalability, and to avoid performance anti-patterns.

- Provided end-to-end J2EE development for a Fortune 500 client.- Performed CSS-based redesign and rebranding of a website after acquisition.- Added DNS registration components- Utilized Web 2.0 technologies to improve user experience.

- Worked on government contract, providing J2EE development.

Java development, Swing