After graduating in 2001, I started as a Software Developer building solutions for the semiconductor manufacturing industry. I specialized in equipment maintenance tracking (which turns out to be a really complicated, technical domain when you’re maintaining billions of dollars of robots), and then moved in to advanced fault detection and classification algorithms (looking at streaming data from hundreds or thousands of sensors and performing near-real time heuristic and statistical analysis to detect when something didn’t go quite as planned). My major users included some of the leading players in high tech manufacturing: Texas Instruments, Micron Technologies, ST Microelectronics, IBM, HP, Western Digital, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, and Cree. In the process, I got to spend time working with users all over the United States and Europe – and a few in Asia – tackling some of the toughest problems in high tech manufacturing.
After about eight years, I pulled a Liberal Arts move and switched from high tech manufacturing to selling socks and underwear: in 2014, I am working as a Distinguished Engineer at JCPenney, where I do big-picture system and software architecture work. I have primary technical responsibility for all of our marketing systems: customer data and analytics, customer relationship management, customer loyalty, email and text communication platforms, promotion definition, and all of the other stuff it takes to promote JCPenney’s products and brand to the U.S. marketplace. Additionally, I work on an Enterprise Architecture team that continually defines a Fortune 500 company’s long-term technical roadmap: designing the next-generation of retail operations.
I love hearing from Kangaroos (and prospective Kangaroos). If you’re smart and you get things done, you can find me on LinkedIn.