scott.wiersdorf@gmail.com
+1.801.796.2484
Personal blog, including technical posts
About Me
People I’ve worked for, people I’ve worked with, and people who have worked for me tell me they like my leadership style, my ability to clearly communicate complex concepts, my rigorous standards for writing good software and designing software systems, and my compassion for people and their growth.
Employment
VP Software Engineering
Publicis Groupe | October 2024 - present
Still figuring out what I’m doing here, but so far I’m leading the teams I led under Mars United (aka The Mars Agency) and Analytic Index to build a new commerce platform for best-in-class data analytics for our customers.
VP Software Engineering
Mars United Commerce, Inc. (formerly The Mars Agency) | October 2023 - August 2024
Oversee all Mars Agency development and data platform teams, working with Chief Product Officer, CIO, and other organization leaders to support agency clients’ media execution, budgeting, and reporting needs.
Responsible for creating Mars’ data room to prepare for its own sale and eventual acquisition by Publicis Groupe (September 2024). This involved a lot of code audits, architectural reviews, diagramming, explaining, arguing, compromising, and giving a lot of credit to other people for their part. It takes a company to sell a company.
VP Software Engineering
Analytic Index, LLC | October 2020 - October 2023
Responsible for ensuring that the data analytics software systems we build will help our customers achieve their business outcomes.
Work with our co-owner/chief product office to think through, design, and implement the simplest solutions possible that will still scale. I leverage much of what I learned as a group architect to keep our technical and business options open as long as possible. I manage a small team of engineers who are responsible for specific aspects of our business and work hard to ensure they’re supported and as autonomous as possible (while still coordinating integrations).
Help guide Analytic Index from startup through acquisition by The Mars Agency (November 2023) by building a fast, scalable data analytics and delivery platform. I also put together our data room for due diligence while our company was being considered for sale.
Group Architect
Endurance International Group, Inc. | October 2017 - October 2020
Developing a program of architectural and technical leadership within EIG.
Working with the CTO and VP Architecture, help to develop a vision and technical strategy for Endurance’s web hosting division. Challenges include: a large, complex, tightly coupled (monolithic) codebase; no build pipelines (affects repeatability and versioning); little observability (affects mean-time-to-resolution and other basic performance metrics); inexperienced teams with little software engineering prowess; untestable code; mountains of technical debt.
I’m currently leading a team of wonderful engineers working in some of the whitespace of the Utah Engineering organization. We’re trying to address some of these challenges within the organizational constraints (but we have the support of our corporate leadership team, which has made making progress possible). This is by far the hardest thing I have ever worked on.
Enterprise Software Architect
Endurance International Group, Inc. | October 2014 - October 2017
Find ways to help all of EIG’s brands work together to share scalable software that still meets each brand’s distinctive needs.
Built a scalable integration testing framework for the QA team based on the Mojolicious Web Framework and functional programming techniques.
Working with event-driven, cloud, and container technologies like Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, Google Cloud (love!), Pub/Sub and the Hashicorp technology stack (also love!)
VP - Software Engineering
Better Servers | October 2011 - October 2014
Design, document, test and implement a scalable RESTful, non-blocking API for managing datacenters and datacenter resources (servers, networks, storage volumes, backups, etc.). Responsible for company software engineering standards.
I authored all of the API documentation and wrote a deployment system for it.
I authored an event-driven TCP socket client with heartbeat checks, auto-reconnect and geometric back-off capabilities to publish arbitrary system events to the messaging system.
I wrote a JSON schema validator for Perl (currently unpublished). It currently implements about 80% of the specification.
Contractor/Special Projects Developer
NTT/Verio | November 2008 - October 2015
Designed and authored a git-based, versioned filesystem, used by a release image and software distribution system to keep thousands of physical servers synchronized with gigabytes of code in minutes. This system allows development and QA to make dozens of agile release cycles per day, facilitating rapid prototyping and testing for Verio’s web hosting products.
Wrote an event-based, high-concurrency task manager (using beanstalkd as a backend) allowing thousands of simultaneous SSH connections from a single host.
Earlier Positions
IT Applications Developer | Discovery Communications/Petfinder | June 2008 - April 2009
Web application and database programming.
Principal Programmer | Bluehost Web Hosting | March 2006 - June 2008
Perl IT programming, web programming, and database integration. Statistical reports, fraud detection and fraud prediction using Bayesian classifiers.
Co-founder, programmer | Conceptuary, Inc. | November 2003 - November 2005
Application server design, integration, systems administration, mail server, web server, etc.
Unix Software Engineer level III | iServer, NTT/Verio | September 1999 - February 2006
Variety of system and application programming, server monitoring, build engineering, 3rd party software integration and maintenance. Lead engineer for CPX (Verio’s proprietary web hosting server control panel for VPS products).
Founder, consultant | Deep Fountain Consulting | July 2001 - present
Anything related to Unix server administration, Internet technologies, custom systems, web, or application programming.
Co-founder | MotorCities.com, Inc./CarPictures.com | July 1998 - September 2004
Built and maintained a high-volume car enthusiast web site.
Education
BS, Computer Science
Brigham Young University | 1994 - 1999
Honors Program Writing Fellow
Brigham Young University | 1996 - 1998
BYU Honors Program writing tutor
Founding member & Board President
Odyssey Charter School | 2005 - 2015
Authored the school’s technology plan, which helped secure a $100k startup grant from the State of Utah.
President of the Board of Trustees | May 2009 - June 2015
I helped transition the school from an operational board to a governing board using Carver Policy Governance. I have also provided lightweight Policy Governance training to other schools. In the past, I served as Secretary to the Board of Trustees, member of the founding hiring committee, technology committee, and communications committee.
Skills
Technical Leader
The skills I value most are related to technical leadership. In this stage of my career, I have come to appreciate that most complex business problems are related to people and organization, rather than technical. Of course there are still tricky technical problems, but these are easier to solve when your business outcomes, organization, and architecture are in complete alignment.
Engineering Manager
To me, being an engineering manager is one part process wonk, and one part listener. Working with product leadership and agreeing on how we work together goes a long way toward successful business outcomes. Implementing a simple, easy to teach process for tracking work and making it visible should be the goal of every product team.
Additionally, making time to listen to every member of the engineering organization not only yields important insights, but provides a space and opportunity to learn, mentor, train, and understand difficult-to-measure KPIs such as hope, excitement, morale, and can provide leading indicators about turnover and what needs to be fixed in the organization.
Individual Contributor
Languages I sometimes use: Python, JavaScript, Bourne Shell, Make, Perl.
Technologies I sometimes use: Linux, Mac OS, Google Cloud (many of the tools), Linode, Digital Ocean. I still do a lot of writing and visual communication.
Technologies I haven’t used for a few years: Swift, Go, AWS, jQuery, HTML5, CSS, FreeBSD, PHP, system programming, system administration, MySQL, SQLite, PostgreSQL, NoSQL, database design, build and release engineering, security, performance, PDF API, XML, JSON, Apache, lighttpd, nginx, sendmail, telephony (Twilio), server monitoring, backups, log file analysis, procmail, naïve Bayesian classifiers
Miscellanea
I’m passionate about learning and education in general. I love to learn and I’m an avid reader, particularly of the classics and philosophy. I’ve hiked 28 of the 32 highest peaks in Salt Lake County. I ride a 2007 red Genuine Buddy scooter. I play foosball and table tennis and have a national rating of 1360. I haven’t played much table tennis since Covid-19.
Last modified on 2025-02-14