Tim Saylor Email & Phone Number

Chicago, Il, Us

Chicago, Illinois, Us

Chicago, Illinois, Us

RedShelf is an education technology company providing a digital textbook platform for university students. As a Director of Engineering, I manage two teams responsible for the "inclusive access" sales channel and for making our product catalog available through bookstore point of sale systems. In that capacity I have two primary roles, engineering leader and people manager.As an engineering leader, I ensure that we effectively and reliably build products that provide value to our customers.* I work with our product management team to refine product plans and estimate them for roadmapping so that we can scope essential work to fit into the time available.* I work with our scrum master to facilitate sprint planning and execution, resulting in fewer incomplete sprints and a predictable team velocity.* I lead the engineers and QA in designing technical implementations that fulfill user stories in a testable way, resulting in production systems that are easier to reuse for new requirements and less prone to regressions.As a people manager, I help my teams function effectively and be assured that their hard work tangibly contributes to the goals of the company.* I create a psychologically safe environment where making mistakes or "not knowing" is an opportunity to learn.* I encourage a collaborative culture where people work together to succeed as a team.* I develop a rapport with each person so they feel free to talk about issues they're facing and manage their work/life balance.* I coach people through challenges and guide them toward projects that advance their careers.* I identify when people are silently struggling and help them through it.While at RedShelf I've hired 9 engineers, talking to ~10 candidates for each position filled. As the most experienced python engineer I also ran technical interviews for other teams' candidates.

Chicago, Il, Us

Options Away is a travel industry startup that offers the ability to lock in the price of a plane ticket without committing to buying it. For a small fee, customers can wait a few more days to decide if they want to take that flight without any risk of the price going up. We publish an API that travel sites integrate into their shopping flow to engage customers who aren't ready to buy a ticket yet, but may be close. This prevents customers from dropping entirely out of the funnel and makes travel sites more likely to ultimately get the customer's booking. We've integrated with Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity, Kayak, Hipmunk, eDreams, Opodo, and GoVoyages.I managed a team of 6 developers and a QA engineer to build and operate our API platform. We shaped a scrum process that was chaotic when I arrived into a well functioning process that delivered reliable and predictable results. We transitioned the application from a functional proof of concept in PHP to a well engineered system in Python that adapted to changing business requirements with ease and scaled to process 72 million itineraries a day. We extended our footprint into Europe with eDreams, Opodo, and GoVoyages, selling in multiple currencies and rendering pages in multiple languages. We integrated with four different backend booking channels and check them all to find the best ticket price available. Our systems have been entirely in AWS since day one.* Worked with senior management and product managers to shape the product roadmap* Managed individual contributors on all matters, from technical advice to job satisfaction and career goals* Interviewed and hired developers* Collaborated on the system architecture plan, and advised others on how to apply it to new features* Used Python, Flask, SqlAlchemy, MongoDB, Redis (AWS Elasticache), MySQL (AWS RDS), and CassandraOther titles held: Senior Software Developer

Startup Foundry is a team of engineers and entrepreneurs who know how to build startups that transform industries. They identify trends and important market opportunities to generate hundreds of ideas from which, every year, they identify 3 to 5 scalable and profitable business models. They research, develop and test those models. Finally, they form teams to transform validated ideas into great businesses.I was a full stack engineer there, building products on a React/Python/Django/Redis/PostgreSQL stack. My expertise was on the back end.

Houston, Tx, Us

Analyte Health enables patients to perform diagnostic testing for various conditions without having to physically visit a doctor's office. For conditions that aren't urgently life threatening and are detected solely through lab tests, Analyte's doctors order the tests, evaluate the results, and communicate with patients using a state of the art, online platform. The tests themselves are performed at thousands of lab locations around the country, the same ones used by many traditional doctors. By using Analyte's service, patients can get tested more conveniently, cost effectively, and privately than they could through other means.I was a backend engineer, building their e-commerce and medical results processing system using Python, Django, and MySQL.* Designed and built Analyte's local site builder tool for SEO* Used and improved on our agile development process* Built tools for continuous integration and deployment* Worked with a product management and UX team* Built all systems to conform to HIPAA rules

* Gathered client requirements and designed user stories* Implemented custom web applications in Django* Implemented dynamic front ends using jQuery and CSS* Implemented Business Intelligence reporting using the Pentaho suite* Set up production servers with Linux, MySQL, Postgres, and Apache

ReusableBags.com (now ReuseIt.com) is an e-commerce site fore reusable bags, bottles, and other items that help people lower their environmental footprint. I worked on their PHP osCommerce/Magento based web store, and on their custom CMS. I built a product recommendation tool using market basket analysis on historical purchase records that increased the average purchase size.

It

This was a contract position through TekSystems. I developed a photo battle application and a "more stuff to do" widget that intelligently recommends other features to check out to reduce bounce rate. I used the LAMP application stack, javascript, html and css.

Chicago, Illinois, Us

Developing a web application to manage communication with contacts and event registration for IIT's marketing department. It is written in python using the django web framework.

Us

Austin, Texas, Us

Implemented an automated unit testing framework and created test code for the existing codebase in python.Implemented and maintained modules for credit card processing for an OSCommerce based e-commerce application.