Ryan Guill Resume

Mark Ryan Guill

(901) 286-5466 / ryanguill at gmail dot com

Introduction

I am an engineering manager / engineer with over 20 years of experience designing, developing, and maintaining software for a wide range of needs, from startups to small businesses to international corporations.

I specialize in listening, learning, and communication. My goal is to become a subject matter expert in the systems, the processes, and the people, using that knowledge to develop software that meets customer needs and fosters collaboration with peers.

I have a never-ending desire to grow, continually learning new technologies and expanding my business experience. I've been fortunate to work with many great companies and people, always looking forward to bringing my experience to new challenges. I am adept at learning new languages and paradigms, always eager to embrace new technologies and opportunities.

I have experience with large systems, supporting and nurturing legacy applications while designing how they can evolve or be carefully transitioned or replaced to better fit current business needs. I also have experience with startups and greenfield development, moving fast and building foundations to support a growing business, whether iterative or build to last for the next decade. I enjoy focusing on developer tooling and abstractions, enhancing the developer experience and helping everyone ship faster.

I aim to be a force multiplier, serving as a conduit for information within a product team and a bridge between stakeholders, product, and engineering. I achieve this by being an avid note taker and focusing on written communication.

One of my key focuses is data. I love data analysis, exploring and unearthing data to provide business insights, support decision-making, discovering opportunities, providing evidence to support or disprove hypotheses, and measuring the effectiveness of my teams in delivering business value.

Technical Profile

  • Broad relational database experience with many engines and environments including years of experience designing databases for both OLTP and OLAP needs.
  • Over a decade of experience with JavaScript and TypeScript, both on the server and client side, as well as experience with several other languages, including mainstream and niche languages.
  • Server administration experience with Linux and Windows, both on-premises and in the cloud.

Recent Professional Experience

Vendr, Inc (Remote)

Senior Software Engineer, Nov 2022 - Jun 2023
Team Lead, Jun 2023 - Dec 2023
Engineering Manager, Dec 2023 - Present

Vendr is a startup working to revolutionize SaaS buying and selling, providing pricing benchmarks, negotiation support, and procurement automation.

Joined as an senior engineer in November of 2022 working with the catalog team to discover and categorize the world of software, and develop data products to help our customers determine fair pricing.

Promoted to team lead after six months, leading a cross-functional team of software engineers, data engineers, and data operations teammates. Developed a system using LLMs to extract structured data from SaaS contracts to power data products. Designed and developed an API-driven system with internal and external dependencies, primarily using AWS primitives.

After another six months, successfully led the team to the point where it was split into three teams. Promoted to Engineering Manager of a small team of software engineers. Rebuilt the contract parsing system to allow optional human review, categorizing and testing the results. Developed a back-office tool giving company-wide access to over 100,000 parsed documents with structured extracted data for contract analysis and further data product development.

Some of the technologies I use at Vendr:

  • AWS technologies such as Lambda, API Gateway, SQS queues, S3, CDK, EventBridge
  • Database technologies including PostgreSQL, Serverless Aurora, Snowflake, DBT (SQL and Python), Fivetran, Metabase
  • SST.dev and React on Remix (soon to be react-router-v7), TypeScript
  • LLM technologies from various providers and third parties, including OpenAI and Anthropic

A few of my projects included:

  • Designed and developed a system to process and extract structured information from hundreds of thousands of documents. This system allowed extraction with various plans, tracked all extractions and document context, de-duplicated and categorized them, and built an internal frontend for company-wide document access, review, and correction. Enabled the creation of data products and helped sales consultants reference relevant contracts.
  • Designed and developed bitemporal data storage for our catalog of SaaS, allowing us to track information, how it evolved in the real world over time, and how our system's understanding of the real world changed over time.
  • Developed a process to safely ingest data from Snowflake to PostgreSQL, powering data insights in the application.

Hagerty MotorsportReg (Remote)

Senior Developer / Team Lead, January 2016 - November 2022

MotorsportReg is a platform for organizations to host and manage all kinds of motorsport events, and for enthusiasts to find and register for those events. I joined the team as employee number 6 and was the primary engineer throughout my tenure, helping grow the team through an acquisition by Hagerty Insurance in 2019 to over 20 team members.

My responsibilities ranged from maintenance of the existing application, developing new products and features, onboarding, training and leading other product team members, support of the existing applications, managing the infrastructure and deployments, data analysis and being a subject matter expert.

A few of my projects included:

  • I built an application to handle a land rush of over a thousand enthusiasts all trying to get the best parking spaces for the paddock of an event at the same time.
  • I managed and implemented the transition of a 10+yo colocated stack into AWS
  • I implemented Redash, democratizing access to data, and exposing crucial insights into the business allowing us to make data driven decisions, monitor success of new and improved features, and understand our customers and how they utilize the system.
  • I built a system to manage on site registration and check in at events, managing who is there, their crew and guests, validation of their credentials and business rules for organizations to manage their event day.
  • I implemented a support funnel that allowed customers to find the answers they needed, or put them in touch with the right person to help. This reduced the support burden in our organization by over 80%.

Mind-Over-Data, LLC (Memphis, TN)

Senior Developer / Team Lead, February 2013 - December 2015

Mind-Over-Data is a small business development and consulting organization developing custom software for a variety of clientele, from small venues to fortune 500 companies.

My responsibilities were primarily split between teaching and leading new developers and developing new applications. The work here was primarily greenfield development, creating custom back-office solutions to manage assets and content for kiosk systems, management and reporting systems for accounting and marketing budgets, but also maintenance and enhancement of legacy systems for a variety of customers. Also server administration, team management and project management for both internal and client projects.

Our clients included a broad range of industries including banking / finance, marketing, manufacturing, event planning and management, charity organizations, healthcare, transportation and logistics, and education.

A few of my projects included:

  • I developed a custom websocket server to power a meeting space application allowing users to collaborate on 3D objects in real-time. The server provided multiple rooms, an algorithm to choose an appropriate host and presenter capabilities.
  • I developed and maintained a patient survey system for an oncology research facility. The surveys were controlled using a versioning system that allowed for tracing the history of the changes to the surveys but also allowing for reproducibility of the survey so that answers could be correlated with the exact set of questions the patient received.
  • I maintained and enhanced an existing external system for managing marathon and other running events hosted on AWS. Responsible for developing new capabilities of the system as well as research and maintenance.
  • I maintained and enhanced a system for a Fortune 100 external client that tracked their marketing project budgets, allowing them to categorize and track their overall spend, find funds allocated but not spent and report across their entire organization.
  • I designed and developed a scheduling application for a local school system that faculty could use to assign and notify students for a flexible time period each day for enrichment or intervention.

Yusen Logistics / NYK Logistics Americas (Memphis, TN)

Senior Programmer Analyst / Team Lead, July 2009 - February 2013

Yusen Logistics (formally NYK) is a supply chain solutions company offering multiple mode transportation, warehousing and ocean freight management.

My responsibilities grew at Yusen from individual application maintenance to team lead and maintaining the transportation management system which was the primary operating system of the company.

Some of my projects there included:

  • I designed and developed an external customer facing portal system that had several modules which allowed for customer managed data applications to provide and receive data from the company, visibility of their shipments across the supply chain and other reporting. This system integrated with several transportation and warehousing systems, developed both internally and externally.
  • I developed a new expense reporting web application on top of a legacy AS/400 JDE system. I was tasked with reverse engineering and integrating with the existing JDE expense system. Leading the team we were able to utilize the existing database and deliver the application with the requested enhancements as well as several user interface improvements on time and under budget.
  • Developed several internal tools in a variety of technologies for project management, tracking of development issues, QA test plans and results and code standardization and generation. These tools improved communication across teams and reduced defects which decreased development times.
  • I developed several internal tools in a variety of technologies for project management, tracking of development issues, QA test plans and results and code standardization and generation. These tools improved communication across teams and reduced defects which decreased development times.
  • I lead a team of engineers responsible for maintaining and enhancing the 20 year old legacy TMS that handled many different modes of logistics. I was responsible for break/fix analysis and execution, as well as providing enhancements that utilized the existing codebase and infrastructure but also provided a more maintainable path forward.
  • I was responsible for monthly accounting and reconciliation between our accounting systems and our transportation management system.

ServiceMaster, Inc. / TruGreen ChemLawn (Memphis, TN)

Lead Programmer Analyst, June 2005 - July 2009

TruGreen ChemLawn is a lawn treatment company that provides services to remove weeds and promote healthy grass growth. As lead application developer, I worked primarily on internal applications for critical business functions and efficiency improvements.

I was involved in many parts of the IT organization at TruGreen, building web applications giving easier access to data and systems from around the country, data analysis, integrating between web applications and mainframe technologies.

  • I designed and developed a project management application to communicate requests, approvals, resources, events, documents, related requests, discussions as well as reporting. This application was custom written to suit the specific needs of our IT organization and process, and quickly became the primary communication medium both inside of the IT organization and with the business who was our customer.
  • I designed and developed a documentation server solution to manage all types of digital files while allowing them to be indexed and searched quickly. It provided a permissions structure that allowed it to be used for both sensitive documents as well as communication releases and collaborative documents. It also provided a versioning system which allowed you to access and discuss specific revisions and was utilized by everyone in the company.
  • I built and maintained various data management applications to allow maintenance of data by distributed users across distributed databases. This included creating web applications that could determine which of the 210 branches a user worked for and connecting to the appropriate remote system and allowing them to update its data. Traditionally all maintenance of this data was done locally through green-screen RPG applications. These applications allowed not only branch users to update their data in a much nicer user interface, but it also opened up the ability for centralized call-centers and corporate users to have access to the same applications and data.
  • Along with our Six Sigma organization I designed and developed a customer retention management application which connected to 210 remote mainframes across the country. This application was built to identify and organize customers who had canceled our service to be contacted. I organized and improved the work flow for end users which greatly improved productivity and customer retention. After the first year, analysis showed that it had already saved the company $1.5M.
  • I performed data analysis on marketing data sets to identify prospective customers as well as on customer data for customer research and application support and debugging.

https://github.com/ryanguill
https://gitlab.com/ryanguill
https://twitter.com/ryanguill
References available upon request