Brian Burson          

executive Summary

Nearly 25 years of practical experience building and leading software development teams that excel at designing, writing, and delivering high quality, performant, and enticing websites. Passionate about taking product ideas and getting them reliably built into sites that customers love to use.  Strengths include creatively assigning engineering resources to product roadmaps; forming, growing, and motivating both large and small teams; and guiding teams through technology, process, and operational changes.   Have led initiatives around defining cross-divisional engineering best practices, rolling out Agile and DevOps practices, and maintaining frequent releases while stabilizing highly available systems.

competencies

Executive Leadership

Acquisitions and Integrations | Strategic Planning | Business Development | Enabling Innovation | Change Management | Financial Planning | KPI Development | Globally-dispersed Teams | Talent Management | Culture Development | Mentoring

Software Development

Recruitment | Agile - Lean, Kanban, Scrum | Product Design and Development | UX/UI Practices | Architecture | Evolving Legacy Platforms | Quality Engineering | DevOps | The “Cloud” | Reporting

Professional Experience

Vice President of Technology (2017 – 2018)

Health eCareers, a division of Everyday Health Professional, Centennial Colorado

Business: Career Solutions / Job Board for Healthcare Professionals | Scope: Responsible for all technical operations including software development | Budget: $1.8M | Reports: 18 developers, automated/manual testers, data analysts | Technology: C#, MVC, REST, Java, AngularJS, Cold Fusion, SQL Server, AWS, Jenkins, Jira, GitHub, Microsoft Team Foundation Services

  • Health eCareers was acquired by Everyday Health Professional (a division of J2 Global) in December 2017. Everyday Health Professional runs MedPageToday, a medical news service and CME site for healthcare professionals.

  • Actively involved in entire sale process (from DHI Group Inc.), including management presentations and roadshows, detailed due diligence preparation and presentations, negotiation of Transition Services Agreements, and the actual separation of systems and services from DHI. 

  • Co-led migration of Health eCareers web applications to AWS and integration with new enterprise email/marketing (SailThru) and accounting/financial (NetSuite) platforms.   Led a GDPR compliance project to enable Health eCareers to operate worldwide.  Work was completed on time within the first five months of the transition in accordance with the Transition Services Agreement with DHI.

  • Directed architectural and resourcing efforts around creating remaining APIs for Career Center entities, exposing them externally to key partners as well as using them internally to rebuild UI/Front Ends for customer and internal admin systems.

Vice President of Software Development (2015 – 2017)

Health eCareers, a division of DHI Group Inc, Centennial, Colorado

Business: Career Solutions / Job Board for Healthcare Professionals | Scope: Responsible for all software development | Budget: $2.2M | Reports: 20 developers, automated/manual testers, data analysts, designers | Technology: C#, MVC, Java, AngularJS, Cold Fusion, PHP, SQL Server, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Server, Tableau, Jira, GitHub, Microsoft Team Foundation Services 

  • Projects focused on modernizing and simplifying an aged platform and codebase--including consolidating several architectures and implementation patterns, eliminating obsolete frameworks and technologies, combining similar data stores, and creating APIs behind key public facing features.

  • Formed data analyst team to create or assist in building operational dashboards and KPI reporting for sales, marketing, partnerships, product, and technology.

  • Last project before Health eCareers was sold revamped the entire job seeker user experience.

Vice President of Learning Platforms (2013 – 2015)

Pearson Education, Centennial, Colorado

Business: Higher Education textbooks and online courseware and content | Scope: Responsible for Learning Platform development for Pearson’s Higher Education division | Budget: $15M | Reports: 85 engineers / 16 teams (US) | Technology: REST API’s, Java, JavaScript, Node.js, SQL Server, MongoDB, Cassandra, AWS, Jira, GitHub

  • Increased Pearson’s Higher Education online global reach by directing the design and implementation of a totally services-driven, reusable, cloud-based (AWS) Learning Platform.

  • Freed up 35% of the overall Product Development budget for new products by transitioning two sustaining product lines (50 subsystems, 2.5 million LOC) to offshore teams in Sri Lanka. 

  • Strengthened offshore development capacity by working with Sri Lankan management to clearly define goals, best practices, organizational strategies and then assisting with leadership candidate interviews.

  • Saved over $450,000 in annual developer and server license costs by successfully migrating development teams from Microsoft to open-source, java-based technologies.

  • Decreased average release cycle time from 4 weeks to 2 days by introducing continuous delivery processes and driving investment in build, testing, and deployment automation.

  • Drove efforts to reduce customer impact minutes by 46% by introducing comprehensive instrumentation and monitoring that targeted reducing the mean time to diagnose (MTTD) customer-facing issues.

  • Ensured smooth operations of all systems (nearly 10 billion transactions/day) by working with cross department leadership to define and introduce DevOps practices around instrumentation, deploys and product monitoring.

Senior Director of Software Engineering (2008 – 2012)

Pearson eCollege, Denver, Colorado

Business: Online, distance education courseware | Scope: Responsible for software development of four product lines | Budget: $18M | Reports: 125 engineers / 24 teams (US, Sri Lanka, Australia) | Technology: SaaS, REST API’s, C#, ASP.NET, Microsoft Classic ASP, SQL Server

  • Rapidly expanded development capacity (40 contractors over 12 months) by refining recruiting and onboarding processes, as well as improving training and team knowledge transfer.

  • Doubled the number of successful releases each year by employing agile practices and establishing continuous integration processes that incorporated automated coding standards checks and unit tests.

  • Drove technical due diligence of Pearson’s acquisition of an Australian content management company and then led their integration into Pearson operations and systems.

Director of Software Engineering (2003 – 2007)

eCollege, Denver, Colorado

Business: Online, distance education courseware | Scope: Responsible for Learning Management System (LMS) development with global team | Budget: $8M | Reports: 35 engineers / 7 teams (US, Sri Lanka) | Technology: SaaS, MVC, C#, ASP.NET, Microsoft Classic ASP, SQL Server

  • Increased overall development bandwidth by 40% by taking leadership of, expanding, and aligning engineering operations in Sri Lanka and the US.

  • Improved LMS system stability and extensibility by refactoring architecture from 2-tier ASP/Database model to n-tier, MVC C# platform.

Earlier Career

Software Development Manager - eCollege - 2000 - 2003

Architect | Lead Software Engineer - Paramin Consulting Group - 1995 - 2000

Software Development Manager - Stratus Group - 1994 - 1995

Co-Founder | Director Software Solutions - 100% Software Solutions - 1993 - 1994

Education

Bachelor of Science, Chemical Engineering, Oregon State University