Ratha Grimes

Google, Billing and Payments team. Software Engineer, April 2010 - July 2011.
The Billing and Payments team provides the financial infrastructure for the company’s entire line of products.

• Designed and implemented enhancements to the invoicing software. This included coordination with Finance Ops, QA, and outsource vendors.
• Gathered requirements and wrote custom reporting software for a new product/billing integration.

All Web Leads, Senior Software Developer, March 2009 - March 2010.
All Web Leads is a lead vendor for insurance agents, collecting applications from customers who click on search ads, and selling the resulting leads to agents whose criteria the leads match.

• Implemented Scrum on the front-end development team, which increased transparency to stakeholders and improved predictability of releases.
• Championed the use of testing automation, and created a framework to enable automated regression of front end lead collection forms.
• Designed and coded improvements in both back-end lead routing in C#/.NET and SQL Server, as well as the front end lead collection and management systems in PHP, MySQL, and Memcached. This included redesigning the buyer criterion matching component of lead routing to support flexible, arbitrarily complex queries: from interviewing account managers to gather requirements, through authoring the expression language and implementing parsers in both C# and PHP.

Microsoft, adCenter Display Ads Platform. Software Design Engineer, August 2005 - November 2007.
Microsoft Display Ads Platform provided banner advertising infrastructure for Bing and many other properties across the company.

• As Incubation Developer, worked independently to invent and develop prototypes integrating the Display Ad Platform into other products, existing and new. Wrote supporting documentation and patent predisclosures for successful prototypes. Presented demos to the team and communicated progress to managers.
• Reached out aggressively to other groups at Microsoft to generate opportunities for integration. Acted as liaison, providing support to enable integration projects.
• Co-created the initial design and implementation of the offline ad-serving SDK to enable Ad-Funded Software.

Independent Contractor, February 2003 - August 2005

• Designed and implemented a full ground-up custom eCommerce system to sell custom laptop computers. The solution was developed in PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript.
• Updated the architecture of a local social-event tracking website. Implemented source control and a bug tracking system; set up and maintained DNS, virtual hosting, staged deployment areas, and bulk mailing facilities.

Bluestreak, Software Developer, September 1999 - February 2003
Bluestreak was an independent third-party ad serving company, offering rich media products as well campaign optimization, data mining, and email marketing solutions.

• Lead developer for eBanner/Magnet, an expanding Java applet offering one of the very first rich media ad experiences on the Web. Developed a configurable object architecture to provide reusable building blocks, out of which complex, interactive animations could be choreographed. Worked closely with in-house designers and CSRs to assist with the creation of animations for this product.
• Designed and implemented several feature additions to a high-performance ad server written in C++ and a Web-based customer-facing ad management system in ASP.
• Developer for “Data Concert,” an advanced reporting module for ad serving statistics using OLAP technology.