Ernest Andrew Ezis

ernest.ezis@gmail.com
303-532-9763
Boulder, CO

Technology leader with strong business skills. I have a track record of success leading and managing technology teams tackling difficult problems in complex domains. I am a strategic thinker and thought-leader adept at fostering a culture of collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity on my teams -- I have also managed remote international teams and fostered teamwork across sometimes difficult cultural boundaries. I am an exceptionally strong active listener and often serve as the communications link that bridges the executive, technical, and operations teams. I am customer-focused with a knack for spotting and curing emerging issues before they become costly problems. My domain experience includes financial markets, trading, payment systems, auctions, captive finance, technology, procurement, and health industries. I am skilled with transactional systems, cloud solutions, statistics, analytics, business intelligence, machine learning, and real-time distributed systems. Naturally curious, lifelong learner.


Technical Skills

  • Expert Python developer; skilled with Javascript and Dart familiar with Elixir, Go, and able to learn other languages as required
  • Full stack Django, Flask & FastAPI, Vue.js via & Quasar Framework (web, mobile, desktop, PWAs), learning Flutter
  • Ten years of production experience with the Amazon Web Services, three with Google Cloud including Cloud Firestore
  • Machine learning experience with Numpy, Scipy, Pandas, scikit-learn, keras, tensorflow, geocoding, etc.
  • Expert architectural skills; have designed and built a number of highly scalable, distributed, real time systems; well-versed in concurrent processes and asynchronous event-driven systems; microservices, etc.
  • Very strong analytical skills; deep trading and financial market experience; practical exposure to statistical methods and predictive modeling
  • Crypto & blockchain enthusiast; active trader and hodler, fan of sound money

Education

  Bachelor of Arts (English)   Dartmouth College                      1987      
Awarded an academic citation for work with early American literature. Competed as a top-flight high school and NCAA Division I collegiate cross country runner. My high school teams won several state championships, my college teams were nationally ranked, dominated the Ivy League, and provided me with the opportunity to compete in the ICAAAA and NCAA National Cross Country Championship races.

Work History

Maryland Dept of Health

CTO
Boulder, CO
  Jan 2016 -- Jul 2018

Mile High Sandbox

Owner & Founder
Boulder, CO
  Aug 2012 -- Current

Market Research

Paradise Island, Bahamas
  May 2010 -- Jun 2012

Flection Point, LLC

Owner & Founder
Boulder, CO
  2002 -- current

PACCAR Financial

Business Tech. Mgr.
Seattle, WA
  2004 -- 2005

 

Right Hand Manager

Product & Program Mgr.
Seattle, WA
  2002 -- 2004

Promisant Ltd

Chief Soft Architect
Atlanta & Bermuda
  2000 to 2002

ASTA Technology Group

Owner & Founder
Camden, ME
  1997 -- 2001

FreeMarkets Online

Architect & Developer
Pittsburgh, PA
  1997 -- 1997

2Solve Technologies

Owner & Founder
Pittsburgh, PA
  1995 -- 1997

 

Parker/Hunter Inc

IT Manager
Pittsburgh, PA
  1991 -- 1995

Arthur Andersen & Co.

Financial Dev & Analyst
Washington, DC
  1989 -- 1991

Congressman Wyden

Sys Man/Leg Corres
Washington, DC
  1988 -- 1989

Congressional Quarterly

Editorial Assitant
Washington, DC
  1987 -- 1988


Select Work Experiences

Flection Point Technologies, LLC (Boulder, CO) -- This long-running company holds intellectual property, active commercial projects, and encapsulates a boutique consulting practice advising Private Equity firms and their management teams regarding technical assets and strategy both pre and post-acquisition, and turn-around consulting. Mile High Sandbox LLC is a similar holding company incubating more recent technology projects. I recently developed and released (2019) a web and mobile application for literature teachers as part of an expanding footprint in the education market. I also completed coursework -- a 'nanodegree'-- incorporating artificial intelligence into trading models.

Maryland Department of Health, CTO (Boulder, CO) -- Responsible for providing technical leadership for a $14B information intensive environment with 9,000 employees. The initial focus was to stabilize then transform the IT department, its culture and practices, then make it enterprise-ready and capable. Undertook an exhaustive diagnostic survey of the entire application landscape to identify, prioritize, and cure critical risks. Adjusted roles and responsibilities to meet technical challenges, mentored staff, led multiple simultaneous initiatives and forced a warm embrace of cloud technology and functional programming. This was undertaken as time-limited "turn-around" and "rescue" work.

Market Research/QuantRes (Paradise Island, The Bahamas) -- Hired to advise and support the CEO of a multi-billion dollar quantitative hedge fund after a brief consulting engagement in early 2010. We were focused on the futures markets and trading was supported via "Big Data," "machine learning," predictive analytics, forecasting models and various statistical techniques and strategies.

    Established intermediate and longer-term strategic goals and mapped out the tactical and opeational steps to achieve them.
    Coordinated the activities of the Research, Trading, Software Development, and Data Quality departments; identified, described and prioritized a portfolio of projects and ideas; acted as the Project Manager and drove projects to completion.
    Coordinated project work with branch offices around the world. Managed an international staff of software developers and remote teams operating in multiple time zones, with different -- and occasionally conflicting -- cultural values and goals.
    Implemented new business operations and processes as needed, maintained process discipline as required.
    Managed talent recruitment; expanded company outreach, provided summary input to the CEO and helped to shape offers and employment contracts.
    I had an early read on the rehypothecation issues at M.F. Global, averting a material loss.

Financial Trader (Bend, OR) Independent investor and trader. Started off with fundamental analysis than crossed over to algorithmic trading. The system took in real time pricing information then farmed the data out to different processing systems looking for trading signals. I adopted a tournament of champions model to cull poorly performing models and replace them as the market regimes changed, eventually adopting quantitative probability models.

PACCAR Financial (Seattle, WA) -- PACCAR is a Fortune 500 company that manufactures medium and heavy-duty trucks; Kenworth, Peterbilt, Leyland, and DAF. I worked in the captive finance division that originated and managed the in-house loan portfolio (~ $13B in assets). I managed the Business Technology Unit where I managed the development teams and focused on reorganizing the larger technology staff into a business oriented posture that with shared accountability to line of business managers.

Right Hand Manager (Seattle, WA) -- Worked with a Freemarkets Co-founder in his second venture developing Business Intelligence applications to help senior management teams measure, understand and manage period-to-period changes in their procurement spending. Acting as Product and Progam Manager, I lead the feature definition, feature prioritization and functional specification process; facilitated cross-department discussions for product development, marketing & competitive positioning. Lead the development effort and mentored developers with unit testing and code reviews; lead the SQL Server and Analysis Services team and wrote the core analysis code; maintained a strong customer-advocate role regarding ease-of-use and use case scenarios; mentored the development staff with group presentations and one-to-one concept sessions.

Promisant Ltd (Altanta & Bermuda) -- Designed and coded an international credit card transaction processing engine -- we threaded the regulatory hurdles and legal landscape to complete the world's first cross-border capable credit card processing platform. Managed the core development staff, wrote and published product APIs and other market-facing material. This was a ridiculously elegant system crafted with love and care and years ahead of its time in terms of scalability, reliability and sheer speed.

ASTA Technology Group (Camden, ME) -- Founded and developed a software company selling a real-time, message-oriented middleware platform to professional developers. The flagship product, ASTA (A Smart Thin Architecture), was a complete n-tier architecture packaged as a professional development tool for Delphi and C++ developers. I sold the company in 2001.

Freemarkets Online (Pittsburgh, PA) -- Re-designed and coded BidWare, the company’s flagship auction product in an intensive 90-day effort. The application was one of the first to receive a “five 9s” reliability certification and carried the company to their historic IPO in Dec 1999 (fifth most successful IPO in history when it debuted). They were also a customer of ASTA’s product.

Arthur Andersen & Co. (Washington, DC) -- Developed automated valuation models for determining the value of CMOs and other Asset-Backed Securities. Provided technical expertise for specialized consulting engagements including real estate bankruptcy workouts and litigation support.

Congressman Ron Wyden (Washington, DC) -- Managed the computer systems, legislative correspondence, and internship programs. Wrote a program to collect, analyze, and present data for the congressman's widely reported in vitro fertilization study.


Interests

Fly fishing, fly-tying, running, swimming, cycling, cyclocross; literature, history, and economics. I also manage and maintain a website which is used in classrooms around the world and serves about three million page views per month. I like to trade the financial markets, currently focused on the cryptocurrencies.


Volunteer Projects

I enjoy cycling and typically ride 5,000 or miles per year. I give back to that community via the Close Call Database for Cyclists, which helps to identify and neutralize intentionally aggressive drivers. The service has gained worldwide traction -- here is an explanatory article.