Jordan Ambra

Leading the engineering department at PBSCO by attracting and hiring top talent, implementing best practices, and mentoring and training the entire organization on how to build excellent, high-quality software products. Shaped and grew a positive, respectful, and effective 100% remote engineering culture through proper mentoring and hiring strategies, as well as excellent processes to support all staff. Implemented processes and systems that identify, monitor, and reduce bugs much closer to zero, and continuing to downward trend. Defining and tracking business-critical metrics, and helping the team improve on them month over month. Worked collaboratively with other departments to help restore trust and relationships in the engineering staff, and shift to be a consumer-focused product-first department.

Built out multiple products and teams for Corva, scaling them from zero users up to billions of transactions and terabytes of data throughput each day. Created the infrastructure and tools to turn Corva from a product to a platform, similar to Facebook’s 2007 transformation. Built the data pipeline, real-time alerts engine, and reporting systems, among many other infrastructure components and microservices to support the size and scale of Corva. Created software and firmware for bulletproof endpoint devices that collect data in the field. Hired and managed multiple small and medium-sized teams, mentoring and coaching them; many have since founded their own companies and taken leadership roles in other companies.

I run Serenity Software, where we offer business process consulting and custom software development for startups and tech companies, helping hundreds of companies go from zero to launch, from launch to profitability, and from profitability to scale and beyond. I frequently act as interim/fractional CTO, CIO, architect, and many other roles as-needed, especially to turn around struggling and stagnant companies and teams. I focus on teamwork, cooperation, culture, and process discipline to help companies be their best and serve their customers. I’ve managed dozens of diverse tech teams across many different industries, including in-person and remote teams. I’ve built teams from scratch, hired on behalf of companies, and improved existing teams.

Built a payment and event platform for donating to various causes, including churches, charities, and non-profits. Company had a successful exit and sale.

I'm CTO and partner of RINDR, a new company for powering the easiest hand-edited automobile videos for automotive dealerships. We've built this platform to be very simple to use, so that an internet manager can film custom videos for the vehicles in their inventory and instantly include them on their website with our lightweight and well-designed website integrations. Company has since been sold and closed.

I conceived and implemented a complete continuous integration and release cycle for development, which helped the team release verified, high quality software. I also implemented standardized developer environments using Vagrant, a tool to run virtual machines with the same setup as our production machines--guaranteeing that we could avoid issues with environment differences. I also automated all unit, integration, and acceptance testing and made everything work from a command line and through a web interface so that both programmers and QA team members could verify versions of the software. I managed and automated server procurement using AWS and Rackspace, including automated generation, provisioning, updating, database management, and disaster recovery.

I created a fully automated, self-managing business intelligence data warehouse and reporting solution. Customers have automated reports sent to them, and I created various tools to support employees so they can manage data and run the system by themselves. I have also written or rewritten a variety of 3rd-party API data integrations to efficiently import and reformat data to ClickMotive's needs. These APIs include various phone call tracking providers, Google Analytics and AdWords, a browser screen capture program, and more. I also created an automated (zero-click) continuous integration for all of our database schema and data integration deployments based on Red Gate SQL Compare, Team City, and MSBuild. This system runs on MS SQL Server, SSIS with custom C# tasks, and SSRS for reporting.

As program manager, I hired and lead a small team of very talented developers to expand on our flagship product's capabilities and to take it to the next level. Also, I managed client relationships and worked directly with our customers to build improvements and integrate feedback into our development process.

I architected a highly scalable, highly flexible website templating architecture and CMS for automotive dealerships, and built out much of the prototype and initial product launch. The application uses a variety of 3rd-party data sources and monitoring tools so that it has highly accurate, highly available, and automated data to power the websites.

I created a unified front-end web framework for all Overhead Door websites and applications. The first user of this framework was a sales force CRM tool I wrote to help salespeople manage external clients. I also developed several business processes and applications to improve workflow and save the company money.

I redesigned and developed Concentra's public websites and intranet, including many helpful web apps such as a medical center locator, contact management system, news system, and search engine. I also spearheaded and implemented a migration of all 11,000 employees into Active Directory so we could support SSO across the entire organization.

Alongside a team, I developed DBU's main website design and several sub-sites. I also created the online student admission application, student worker time clock application, and a 3-camera baseball streaming webcast web app.