Ross Schmidt Email & Phone Number

Bloomington, Minnesota, Us

Minneapolis, Minnesota, Us

• Led Software Engineering department (35 direct/47 indirect reports) spearheading a multidisciplinary global team including SW Engineering Manager, Quality Assurance Manager, and Project Manager, Tech Leads, Tech Specialists, Architects, SW Engineers, Quality Analysts, Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, Product Owners, Business Analysts. Coordinated with global teams in US, Canada, South America, Serbia and Vietnam.• Managed department through 2 company mergers, became solitary manager for 7 agile teams across its 5 Health Care Engagement platforms. Took on numerous transitional roles, such as Manager of Product team, Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Agile Coach as the new company formed. Maintained lowest attrition rate and highest employee satisfaction ratings post-merger.• Orchestrated a strategic integration of agile practices, SDLC tools and processes, software capitalization, incident management, Security patching, production monitoring, release, and automation standards for the merged companies. Led platform stabilization, cost consolidation, and feature reduction initiatives. Reduced one platform’s support footprint from 3 full teams to a single team.• Catalyzed a cultural shift within the company to foster inclusivity across all departments by championing Engineering representation on Employee Recognition team. Distinguished and celebrated top contributors on a quarterly basis, honoring the top four individuals with both monetary rewards and company-wide recognition.• Collaborated closely with the CEO, CTO, and other executive leaders on a daily basis, actively influencing key priorities, client incident resolutions, departmental initiatives, personnel and budgetary considerations, as well as driving pivotal strategic transformations.• Implemented a transformative process to proactively mentor and nurture talent, propelling individuals into pivotal Management and Senior/Tech Lead roles within the organization.

Minneapolis, Mn, Us

Minneapolis, Mn, Us

• Managed 28 direct reports across 5 agile teams, consisting of Team Leads, Architects, Scrum Masters, Local and Remote Developers, as well as On- and Off-shore Contractors.• Appointed to foster enhanced collaboration between Development, Product, Client, and Cloud teams. Orchestrated weekly Architecture and Product future work review sessions, providing critical strategic insights. Regularly presented and analyzed development metrics to Executives monthly. Successfully executed a transformative initiative, sun setting two low-revenue software offerings and strategically reallocating resources for maximum impact and growth.• Managed the migration of Novu’s tightly coupled Ruby-on-Rails monolith to a Docker enabled micro-service architecture. Moved to small, ad-hoc CI/CD releases with 90%+ unit test coverage from bi-monthly releases that required a 4 day QA cycle and after-hour release team. Weekly enhancements to QA Automated Regression by dedicated Automation engineers.• Tracked unplanned work and incident root-cause analyses across applications. Drove support work to <8% team capacity. Decreased post-release incidents, issues and bugs to near zero through automation.• Prioritized team backlogs for yearly HITRUST Security and WCAG Accessibility certifications.• Coached and developed talent into Senior and Tech Lead roles.• Responsible for monthly capitalization reporting and quarterly forecasts of engineering headcount budget and specialized software expenditures.

Eden Prairie, Minnesota, Us

• Led a team of up to 16 direct reports with indirect team size of 80+, consisting of Software Development Managers, Supervisors, Technical Product Owners, Scrum Masters, Software Developers, and Quality Assurance individuals supporting a variety of areas including eDiscovery, Data Management, DevOps, Data Warehouse, and Web• Reported to Vice President of Engineering and collaborated weekly with other Senior Managers on department improvements including Scrum/Agile maturity, quality and SLA metrics, employee engagement, career development, cross-team collaboration, software release coordination, training, and employee performance ranking• Fostered cross product line collaboration between teams in U.S. and Katowice, Poland by creating and leading targeted engagement meetings• Served as Technical Product Owner for both local and remote teams in Poland, directing and developing execution of KrollDiscovery’s eDiscovery Processing Technologies• Product Owner for Greenfield project to replace legacy eDiscovery platforms with third party offerings such as Nuix and kCura’s Relativity utilizing REST, Rabbit and ESF.• Cut operational expenses by $8.1M from 2012–2014 by reducing manual tasks of Operations staff through recurring, transformative software releases• Improved project coordination, development collaboration and code management processes through full department transition from Waterfall to Scrum Methodologies and adoption of TFS• Managed and expedited software expansion of eDiscovery into Germany and France, by decreasing full Data center setup and release timeframe from 4 months to 5 weeks through improvements in software and infrastructure setup and release automation• Implemented application enhancements to allow Disaster Recovery for critical eDiscovery servers and removed 3,000+ instances of XP Operating System across five countries.• Participated in bi-weekly Cyber Security threat assessment meetings and adopted usage of code security analysis tools

Eden Prairie, Minnesota, Us

• Managed a team of up to 18 Development Supervisors and Developers, with an indirect team size of 50+.• Project Manager that oversaw development and implementation of proprietary eDiscovery processing and review applications architected around a highly scalable, distributed SQL environment utilizing 3600+ servers worldwide and responsible for 12PB+ of client data, organically growing eDiscovery business line from $4M in 2000 to nearly $300M in 2010.• Coached and developed talent into Supervisor or Management positions to take ownership of expanding areas within eDiscovery business line.• Acted as Program Manager responsible for numerous large scale eDiscovery programs by coordinating requirement gathering, cross project team schedules, issue resolution, user acceptance and release planning.• Formalized department’s Software Development Life Cycle through defined quality checkpoints and simplification of process used to create an order of magnitude estimate that streamlined concept proposal and approval process.• Created team of 24x7 on-call developers, supporting on-demand client software needs for new eDiscovery business line that eventually handled rate of 14,000+ requests yearly.• Evaluated other company’s technology for possible merger and acquisition opportunities.• Expanded eDiscovery software into UK and Tokyo while condensing $5M server setup into a shippable onsite solution for use when data could not leave country borders.

Eden Prairie, Minnesota, Us

• Served as Lead Developer and patent holder for eDiscovery processing client-server application that started Kroll Ontrack Legal Technologies.• Lead Developer for proprietary eDiscovery review application, Ontrack® Inview™ • Managed internal data recovery software applications involving RAID, DOS, Netware, OS/2, VAX, and Linux file systems, requiring complex reverse engineering techniques.• Performed onsite emergency Netware data recoveries for clients.• Mentored and coached junior developers towards the next step in their career.

Eden Prairie, Minnesota, Us

• Developed software tools used by internal data recovery services and sold as B2C Commercial software involving Netware and DOS file systems. • Maintained and extended core data recovery system architecture and design through enhancements to internal common libraries.