Engineering executive with 14 years of management and product development experience in the areas of online promotions, e-commerce, digital coupons, advertising and other marketing services. Seasoned professional with successful track record prototyping, architecting, developing and scaling new products.  Most comfortable in a startup environment where I will be continually challenged and given reasons to develop new areas of expertise.

Professional Experience

Panomark, Burlingame, CA — Sep 2010 - Present

Panomark is a boutique digital marketing agency offering search engine marketing and optimization, online promotions, mobile advertising, social media, and other marketing services with an emphasis on using technology to provide customized client solutions.

Chief Technical Officer — Mar 2013 - Present

Responsible for technical strategy, architecture and implementation of Panomark client's projects including e-commerce, promotional, and marketing initiatives.

Vice President of Engineering — Sep 2010 - Mar 2013

Architected and lead development of PanoVAX video ad exchange which provided a meeting place for user generated video content creators and potential advertisers. This platform facilitated merging advertisers messaging with user generated content prior to upload to YouTube and other major user generated content sites and compensating creators for ad views.

Architected and lead development of FactoryMonster eCommerce platform which acts as a US based storefront for a consortium of China based manufacturing and fulfillment providers. This eCommerce platform currently sells nearly 200,000 products in hundreds of different categories and provides multiple recommendation engines to help consumers find items across this catalog.

Architected and lead development of online promotions platform to help Panomark's clients drive trial, increase revenue and encourage brand loyalty by incentivizing and rewarding customers for product purchase or online activity.  Platform was used to run national promotions for Red Baron Pizza as well as smaller promotions for eBay Fashion and other clients.

Provided technical guidance for a variety of Panomark client's SEM, SEO, and promotional initiatives.

You Technology, South San Francisco, CA — Oct 2008 - Jan 2012

You Technology (formed by the merger of my previous employer SoftCoin and S&H Solutions in 2008) is a SaaS vender providing hosted web sites for retailers and packaged goods manufacturers.  The company's technology suite allows a client to quickly launch a sweepstakes, instant win, loyalty, eCoupon or eCommerce web site.

Independent Contractor — Sep 2010 - Jan 2012

Provided technical guidance and expertise relating to the eCoupon, promotions, and eCommerce platforms that I had lead development of while at You Technology and SoftCoin during the previous 11 years.  Continued to serve as senior member of technical staff while helping to recruit and hire my replacement.  Once replacement was hired I served in an advisory role as well as providing software architecture and development services.

Director of Engineering — Oct 2008 - Sep 2010

Managed a team of engineers tasked with development of various next-generation marketing platforms. 

Architected and lead development of electronic coupon platform used by Kroger and other national retailers to allow consumers to deposit manufacturer coupons directly to retailer frequent shopper cards. Platform has since been used by consumers to clip and redeem millions of coupons per year from their computers, tablets, and smartphones.

Continued to oversee development and maintenance of SoftCoin promotion platform supporting loyalty, instant win and sweepstakes websites used by many of the largest CPG manufacturers.

SoftCoin, San Francisco, CA — Oct 1999 - Oct 2008

SoftCoin was a SaaS provider offering customized promotional websites to packaged goods manufacturers.

Director of Engineering — Mar 2007 - Oct 2008

Managed an engineering team including full time developers, contract developers, QA staff, Systems Administrator, and DBA.  Served as technical representative on pre-sales calls.  Collaborated with creative services and account management team on scheduling and resource allocation.

Streamlined promotion setup and development process allowing SoftCoin to build more promotional sites without significantly increasing size of development team.

Primary developer and technical contact for multiple high profile client sites including: Dr Pepper Band in a Bubble, Dr Pepper Hunt for More, and SoBe No Fear promotions.

Engineering Manager & Platform Architect — Mar 2006 - Mar 2007

Doubled engineering team size as we scaled to meet increased customer demand for our services.  Served as company technical representative on sales calls and meetings at client sites.

Primary developer for all integration projects, including SOAP based web services allowing third parties to host portions of promotional web sites while passing consumer data back to SoftCoin for business logic and storage.  Designed shared-key based authentication system for SOAP web services.

Managed development and launch of more than 50 client web sites including sites exceeding 100,000 users per day.  Clients included Dr Pepper, GlaxoSmithKline, Frito-Lay, Proctor & Gamble and many smaller brands.

Authored technical documentation for web services, code generation, opt-out list filtration, code validation, and other integrated services.

Lead Engineer — July 2001 - Mar 2006

Lead development of SoftCoin's second generation promotion platform.  This system included J2EE components for account registration and maintenance, sweepstakes, instant win, refer a friend, prize catalog, transparent web proxy, administrative and customer service tools, reporting, analytics, and code validation.  This platform has been used to host hundreds of promotional websites, serving millions of consumers, with billions of unique promotion codes in market.

Designed and developed J2EE eCommerce platform that included ability to search, tag, and sort items as well as support for featured items, cross-sell, up-sell, personalized recommendations, wish lists, flexible shipping cost algorithms, and the ability to sell items for a combination of promotional currency and cash.  Included integration with Cybersource and VeriSign for payment processing and tax calculation.  Integrated with multiple fulfillment houses for order processing.  This eCommerce platform was used to host many Proctor and Gamble eStores as well as hosting all of SoftCoin's promotion rewards fulfillment.

Designed and developed XML rule based personalization engine allowing a wide variety of personalized content.  Included support for personalized eCommerce offers, personalized web pages, personalized emails, personalized promotion rewards, and other customizable content.

Acted as primary database architect and backup Oracle DBA.  Responsible for development databases and managed production database when primary DBA unavailable.  Assisted in tuning production database during periods of heavy load.

Oversaw migration of platform from a combination of Sun Hardware, Solaris Operating System, ATG application server, and Stronghold Web Server to a more cost effective open source stack including Linux on Intel hardware, JBoss EJB Container, Tomcat Servlet Engine and Apache Web Server.

Engineer — Oct 1999 - July 2001

Participated in design and development of initial version of SoftCoin's promotion platform.  Helped design, install, and configure data center comprising nearly $2,000,000 of hardware and software assets.  Installed and configured Solaris, Linux, Apache, Oracle, ATG Dynamo, and Java VMs.

Consultant, Mann Consulting, San Francisco, CA - Oct 1998 - Oct 1999

Provided systems administration, networking, telecommunications, and desktop support services.

Education

University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA — B.S. Computer Science, 1998  

skills & Expertise

Domain Expertise: Software Development, SaaS, eCommerce, Product Management, Scalability, Web Analytics, Mobile Devices, Amazon AWS, Early-stage startups, Promotions, Marketing, Web Services, Electronic Coupons, Software Architecture, Technical Leadership, Integration, Agile Methodologies, Open Source, Prototyping & Rapid Development, Network & Data Center Design

Development: J2EE, Java, REST, JSON, SOAP, HTML5, Wicket, Torque, XML, EJB, JSP, Dependency Injection, MVC, Agile, Spring, OAUTH, PHP, Perl, C++, C, Python, Objective C

Database: MySQL, Oracle, NoSQL, Amazon RDS, O/R Mapping, Architecture, Normalization, Optimization

Open Source & Community Involvement: http://mikecomb.com/software and contributions to numerous other open source projects.

Patents

US 7,801,766: Method, system and computer readable medium for facilitating a transaction between a customer, a merchant and an associate