Billy Hand

Work History

Banyan

07.2021 - Current

Developed Kafka stream processor to index and store merchant and bank transaction data, then identify and score candidate matching pairs, and finally store and egress top matches
Optimized transaction matching implementation to scale from 20,000 per day to 3,500 per second based on the expanding list and scale of clients
Created docker compose based local stack with high parity to production to enable fast onboarding of new engineers, easier experimentation/exploration and realistic continuous integration on our build server
Worked with the CTO to scale the engineering team from 0 to 16 including data scientists, backend software engineers, frontend software engineers, and site reliability engineers
Worked with analytics to simplify invoicing with automated billing reporting
Worked directly with software engineers at MasterCard to connect our merchant partner integrations with their fraud detection platform allowing their customer support to see more details on their customer’s purchases
Implemented consumer opt-in transaction streaming MVP in less than a week for a demonstration and pilot product with Intuit
Improved transaction matching to include matching based on merchant loyalty tokens enabling a new class of rewards and offers

Walmart

03.2021 - 06.2021

Improved test coverage from 50% to greater than 90%
Lead effort across teams to introduce reliable queuing of work done synchronously on web requests
I joined at an awkward time for the org and had three different managers and reorganizations in as many months

Expo, Inc

02.2019 - 03.2021

Scaled engineering team from 0 to 6 to bring software development in house
Oversaw the transfer of capabilities and responsibilities from contractors to ensure a seamless transition
Deployed an SMS-based notification service to enable our sales and customer support people to respond to customer behaviors in realtime rather than after reports were generated
Within a month delivered backend features to support large file uploads (videos), video conference stream configuration, scheduling and attendance for online attendees of virtual expos in response to the global pandemic
Worked with the Director of Product to introduce behavior driven development communication, documentation and testing processes to improve platform stability
Mentored quality assurance team on their efforts to make manual testing more automated using Selenium and a Java web request and assertion framework

MediaMath

11.2013 - 02.2019

Improved post-upload video encoding and compression to calculate settings based on the parameters of the original to achieve higher quality and better file sizes
Researched, designed and developed to allow for the configuration of skippable ads in our platform and to expose that configuration in a standards compliant way to the web publisher
Created a configuration micro service for placebo testing the core platform
Created a configuration micro service for a new system of segmenting users including complex, recursive boolean expressions
Created a continuous delivery system based on GitHub events

DebtPayPro

08.2012 - 10.2013

Designed and implemented 'virtual bank account' system to accurately and efficiently model client balances and transactions
Designed and implemented Selenium-based web scraping for lead generation
Prototyped three different PDF generating systems (an SVG based one, one based off of a .Net library, one based on wktohtml) to replace an expensive, unreliable and proprietary service
Developed low latency messaging server using Python/Tornado to enable server-to-browser pushes for notifications and instant messaging
Manually hardened and maintained CentOS servers keeping PHP, nginx and MySQL up to date
Developed application to replace manual transaction matching/approval process to allow for growth of client base including fuzzy name matching, PDF/CSV parsing saving an account manager hours of work every day
Implemented parsing/generating NACHA files for automated clearing house transactions

Toy Studio

10.2010 - 07.2012

WordOff.com - Developed the back-end and contributed heavily to the overall technical vision of one of the worlds first truly cross-platform (web, iOS, Android) social games built with HTML5 and NodeJS
Lucky Derby - Developed this real money horse race betting game as the prototype for the new HTML5 platform
Candy Dream - Primarily worked on social features to encourage growth of the user base
PlayersEdge.com - Developed both front-end and back-end of this high volume Twitter-like social game networking site

Viveli/Game Theory

02.2010 - 10.2010

PFW - Took another developer’s prototype and made it into the replacement for all of the landing pages that drove Viveli’s business
Picmorph.com - Was given this PHP web application due to its poor performance, security issues and hard-to-maintain code base
Delivered improved and re-skinned product with a vastly improved back-end within a month
Yixe - Added international support to the existing PHP landing pages and integrated new mobile content provider API allowing for millions of dollars of additional revenue monthly
AFL - Contributed to a PHP application for analyzing offline transaction data (tens of millions of rows) from mobile subscription sites