Thinking outside the box, I solve problems in scalable, secure, and maintainable ways using whatever tools make sense.

Sr. Software Engineer @ From February 2013 to Present (2 years 11 months) San Francisco Bay AreaSoftware Development Engineer II @ From March 2012 to February 2013 (1 year) San Francisco Bay AreaSr. Software Engineer @ I worked on a full replacement of the address book and contact editor user interfaces used across the Shutterfly site. The legacy code base was revamped with new components and new features such as inline editing, infinite scrolling, and address validation. I also worked on a new envelope labeling product offering, an analysis and recommendation for an e-commerce performance issue, and an in depth data collection and analysis of a server failure anomaly. From March 2011 to April 2012 (1 year 2 months) Sr. Software Engineer @ I work on a range of systems and features which support our VideoSense product offerings. VideoSense is comprised of an asset management system, search and reporting system, and automated syndication system for tier one customers such as Warner Brothers TV, Paramount, and Telepictures. I designed and developed a fault tolerant, grid based, workflow automation suite (called Workflow) which orchestrates all the transcoding, video clipping, image manipulation, file transfer, and other tasks that support our core products. The system utilizes technologies such as AMQP, XMPP, FFmpeg, PIL, SQL, FTP, SCP, SFTP, and ASCP to complete specific workflow requirements for each of our customers and syndication partners. I designed and developed an interfacing system to communicate between VideoSense and Workflow using a directed graph data structure to describe the ingestion and syndication requirements. Based on metadata in the graphs, the system organizes available tasks into jobs and submits them. I also coded a Flex based UI which allows our IT operations and Media operations teams to look at the state of the system, diagnose problems, and interact with the system to resolve issues. I designed and developed a horizontally scalable web service using FFmpeg, MySQL, and Memcached which provides random access to any frame of video at any resolution to our search and asset management products. This system decreased the time required to serve frames after asset ingestion and eliminated the hassles involved in maintaining billions of files. From October 2008 to March 2011 (2 years 6 months) Sr. Software Engineer / Team Lead @ I worked as a Senior Software Engineer / Team Lead for Lulu.com's suite of creation tools which enable authors to publish their works as professionally bound printed books. I worked as a Software Engineer focusing on Lulu.com's Adobe Flex/Flash-based Studio application architecture, which powers our Photo Book Studio and Calendar Studio offerings. Previous to my involvement in developing the Studio framework I played a key engineering role in its progenitor, Lulu.com's initial Photo Book creation tool, which was based on a variety of components and technologies from OpenOffice to early AJAX techniques. I refactored and added functionality to Lulu.com's book metadata distribution system which transmits feeds to Nielsen BookData UK and Bowker. I have also been involved in several tertiary projects such as Lulu.com's Services portal, Trac administration and SCM Integration, site refactoring, and many others. From February 2006 to October 2008 (2 years 9 months) Software Engineer @ I was the lead Software Engineer with responsibilities which included System Administration, System Engineering, Software Development, and Mobile Training System Deployment. Developed desktop application for custom course generation. Replaced tedious and error prone manual process of compiling course materials with a simple to use wxWindows based GUI. Automated Microsoft Office products and Adobe Acrobat using Python to produce an in house print on demand system for generating training materials. Developed scripts and procedures for high speed and automated hard disk duplication. Deployed mobile training systems based on multi-boot laptops and wireless network. Deployed and administered web servers, firewalls, and VMware based application servers. From October 2003 to February 2006 (2 years 5 months) Software Engineer @ I performed contract work during which I developed a parsing application which interfaced with Microsoft Word to export images, generate xml, and compose a distribution package to upload to NextKnowledge/Click2Launch's eLearning System. I also coded features in VBA script to their Word Template-based creation tool such as image insertion and one-click deployment. From August 2003 to November 2003 (4 months) Systems Administrator @ I was contracted under Modis as a systems administrator for Washington Mutual to maintain and administer systems after its acquisition of Fleet Mortgage. Performed systems administrator duties for Fleet Mortgage's aging SPARCserver systems during final phases of decommissioning. Replaced continually failing disk drives and maintained raid integrity using Solaris Volume Manager. Performed backup administrator duties such as tape rotation, recovery, and archive retrieval using Legato Networker and Veritas NetBackup. From November 2002 to May 2003 (7 months) Software Engineer @ Starting as a System Administrator and the rookie my team and I maintained hundreds of Gannett, Landmark, and KnightRidder newpaper web sites. I was also given the undesirable job of resolving the large and ever growing queue of tickets related to customer complaints regarding GMTI's web analysis reports. Rather than blindly process the ticket queue as those did before me, I wrote several helper scripts and programs culminating in an all-encompassing script which implemented the manual heuristic I had developed and proactively corrected web analysis reports before complaints were generated. After replacing myself with a script I was promoted to System Engineer where I racked hardware at a data center location and maintained a Legato Networker based backup infrastructure. I enjoyed coding more and was promoted into Software Engineering where I developed a clustered computing infrastructure to take advantage of commodity Linux hardware to run WebTrends web analysis reports. From January 1999 to April 2002 (3 years 4 months)

Ken Kurzweil is skilled in: REST, Agile Methodologies, JavaScript, Python, Linux, Perl, Subversion, Software Development, Node.js, Web Services, PHP, XML, ActionScript, Unix, Advanced CSS