Paul L. Sipe, BSCS, MBA
Professional Experience
Senior Director of Engineering, May 2007 - October 2009
- Director and technical leader for multi-discipline teams including 7 managers and over 50 designers and engineers engaged with ForRent (www.forrent.com), and its affiliated websites
- Identified and recruited top technical resources to support solid IT and software development including business analysis, graphic design, web development, software engineering, technical support, systems administration, database administration, and software quality assurance
- Lead the design and development effort for ForRent's Intuitive Search, including user-driven analysis, development, integration, and system deployment. This launch included a Lucene-based, denormalized search engine with relevance-ranked close matches. The project resulted in a 6.3% reduction in home-page abandonment and an increase of 5000 guestcards per week. The project was awarded First Place, DE Innovation Awards for 2009.
- Managed the acquisition and successful transition of production equipment and technical resources from the Bloomington, IN office to the home office for ResiteOnline products
- Worked with the VP of Web Development to author and manage capital and operating expense budgets
Web Development Manager, August 2006 - May 2007
- Built and managed a team of 8 engineers to develop web-based, software-as-a-service products, including the database-driven site engine: Resident Source (www.resiteonline.com). These products were developed on the LAMP platform.
- Defined architecture and high-level design for Version 1.0 of the Resident Source product
- Developed work breakdown and schedules for draft, beta, and final 1.0 releases. Managed software revision control (using svn) across three instances of the system. Managed the QA efforts of SQA Engineer and Customer Support team.
- Employed industry standards to develop job descriptions and career paths for engineering positions
PHP Consultant, February 2006 - August 2006
- Lead PHP Developer for Spanish version of For Rent website (www.pararentar.com)
- As a Senior Developer, contributed to the successful launch of SEO job listing website (www.jobalot.com) including programming and development using PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL Server, and Apache
Founder, Amherst Web Design, July 2003 - Present
- Design and develop client websites. See portfolio.
- Deployments include utilization of PHP and MySQL to provide:
- DB-driven online offering of products and courses (www.taproot.com - courses)
- Full SSL e-Commerce and invoicing system (Authorize.net)
- Integrated Movable Type (Six Apart) blogging system (www.taproot.com - blog)
- PHP-based customer account (MyAtlasComics) with captcha
Online Course Facilitator, June 2002 - February 2006
- Prepared and delivered courses for University of Phoenix's graduate and undergraduate programs
- CIS 319 - Computers in Information Processing
- WEB 410 - Introduction to Web Programming
- CMGT 555 - Systems Analysis and Development
Engineering Manager, June 2000 - April 2001
- Managed the EA.com/Kesmai Studios software development team - 18 software engineers
- Worked with game producers to identify programming needs and plan technical staff
- Managed Kesmai Studios budget; initiated studio-wide budget tracking system
- Conducted skills inventory, managed personnel transitions between game projects
- Contributed to design reviews (UML) and code walkthroughs (C++)
- Conducted needs analysis and system specification for Linux and Solaris hosts
Project Lead, April 1996 - June 2000
- Responsible for large-scale document management system that manufactured text plus graphics articles from hard copy, into an electronic document vault.
- Developed project plans, work breakdowns, and schedules for both programming/testing activities and deployment (cut-over/roll-back)
- Rebuilt Unix applications for common workflow, error logging, and file handling
- Documented software design, conducted design and code reviews
Senior Software Engineer, May 1988 - April 1996
- Designed and developed digital driver's license/ID baseline software
- Systems development (C/Unix/MS-Windows/TCP/IP)
- Developed index storage/retrieval scheme using magnetic and removable, optical disks
- Integrated FileTek mass storage system with existing Unisys imaging system
- Developed transport level communications interface with processors
- Conducted Function Point Analysis to estimate effort of a large-scale imaging application
Software Engineer, June 1985 - May 1988
- Developed firmware (Intel RMX) for the Kodak 6800 optical disk controller
- Developed device driver (DEC MicroVAX) for SCSI adapter board
- Maintained and enhanced communication software products on DEC computers
- Developed a task scheduler for the PDP-11 computer