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Paul Kist

Engineering Lead, Music Producer, Non-Profit Guy
Hudson Valley, NY

I make things.

New Yorker by birth, Egyptian by roots, and Bay Area in spirit. I spend my days building a more authentic, creative, playful, and healing world, through the arts, tech, food, and communiity.

Staff Engineeer at One Medical // Formerly at Traackr and Optaros // Founder at The Noon Project // Co-Founder/Board Member at Seeds For Hope

Let's talk music composition, qi cultivation, photography, men's work, bread-making, writing, eastern chant, spirituality, somatic healing and New York style pizza.

Medium | Soundcloud | Instagram | Flickr | LinkedIn

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Years Experience

Technical Leadership

In my 25-year career, inspired by a mentor, I champion the idea that "Software is a people endeavor." As an engineer and technical lead, I focus on instilling teams with values and principles for high-quality technology. I emphasize robust processes, not just tools, as the foundation for effective technology. My drive lies in facilitating teams to excel, fostering satisfaction, and producing superior software. With diverse professional services experience, I've contributed to projects in education, health care, e-commerce, and currently, social analytics and big data.

Community through the Arts

Engaging in the arts is a powerful means of serving a purpose through music, telling stories with photography, and empowering others through teaching skills. As a photographer, composer, and songwriter, I've found a way to bring these skills together into community building, self-expression, and spirituality, spanning diverse locations in my pursuit of using the arts to uplift and heal communities.

Rooted in Nature and Humanity

Coming out of the COVID-19 Pandemic, I stand at the intersection of nature and humanity; but it didn't start in 2022. Following a serendipitous relocation to Nairobi, Kenya, in 2006, I dedicated nearly a decade to championing sustainable development through education. Firmly convinced of our profound connection to the natural world, I advocate for healing and inspiration through deeper engagement with it. My ongoing journey involves actively seeking experiences and acquiring skills to bolster endeavors that contribute to a more healed, creative, and authentic existence.

My Work

My Skills

Current Experience

95

JavaScript

Angular7, Typescript, Vuejs, ES6, AngularJS, D3js, jQuery

80

Ruby on Rails

MVC, ActiveRecord, Configuration, Packwerk

75

PHP

PHP 7, CakePHP 2.0, Wordpress, PHPResque, Joomla, Symfony

85%

Systems Architecture

Async, data pipelines, API Integrations, data modeling

70

Technical Project Management

SCRUM/Agile, JIRA, Implementation plans, Cross-team collaboration

Creative Skills



Music Production

MIDI, Digital Performer 8, MOTU MachFive 2, Ethno Instrument 3

Photography

Adobe Photoshop CC 2014, Lightroom 3

Video Production

Final Cut Pro, Magic Bullet Looks, iMovie

Want to know more?

Contact Me  

My Resume

  • Present

  • Wild Thyme Studios and Consulting

    Founder and Principal
    Hudson Valley, New York
    FEB 2025 to Present

    Career break; launching part-time consulting practice offering systems design, technical roadmap planning, and hands-on engineering for early-stage SaaS companies. Providing limited-scope projects; As of Aug 2025 seeking full-time team-based work.

  • Amazon One Medical

    Staff Software Engineer
    San Francisco, California and Remote
    SEP 2019 to DEC 2024

    • Architectural Leadership During Acquisition: Defined department technical strategy with senior leadership, Offered architectural input and advocacy on long-term systems planning. Worked with senior leadership on technical discovery and decision-making during the Amazon acquisition. Provide technical guidance across 3 flagship projects for 2024.
    • YEXT Integration: Initiated, scoped, and championed multi-year, cross-department business data distribution initiative without disruption of existing roadmaps. Migrated One Medical business location data to Schema.org standards, ensuring cross-platform support with zero-down-time. Strategic groundwork enabled a full integration with YEXT in 1 sprint, cutting manual updates by over 75%.
    • Video Visit Integration (Tech Lead): Defined backend architecture and reusable API layers enabling delivery of telemedicine while ensuring future scalability. Directed 5 workstreams and 11 engineers through the integration of health services with onboarding, led to significant increase in One Medical / AHS memberships.
    • Behavioral Health Automation: Architected and implemented scalable systems for One Medical's mental health programs, including automation service delivering screeners to patients. Improved provider screening follow-up by 4x. Enabled scaling of pilot programs by 50x.
    • Engineering Culture: Founded and led internal Technical Excellence initiative aligning technical improvements with business impact. Defined rubric for org-wide tech debt tracking and measurement. Presented to both senior leaders and engineering communities/ Authored an engineering whitepaper reviewed by Amazon L7s for incorporation to org-wide ops processes.

  • Find Gumption

    Producer: The Gumpcast [Spotify]
    Oakland, CA
    NOV 2020 to NOV 2021

    Co-creator and Producer of the Find Gumption podcast entitled "The Gumpcast", for its inaugural season in 2020-2021.

    • Successfully produced and managed the first season of Gumpcast, consisting of 11 episodes.
    • Covered diverse topics, including interpersonal relationships, men's work, faith and ancestry, fatherhood, various healing modalities, and emotional wellness.
    • Participated in audience acquisition, particularly through the Africa Crossroads conference in 2021.
    • Occasional hosting duties on select episodes, contributing to the overall dynamic and engagement of the podcast.

  • Traackr

    Founding Engineering Lead to Engineering Manager
    San Francisco, California
    MAR 2010 to JUL 2019

    • Founding Engineer & Platform Scaling: Built and scaled the company's flagship influencer marketing platform, used by global brands in beauty, tech, and consumer goods.
    • Team Leadership & Delivery: Led the Application Team while staying hands-on with system design and implementation, managing development quality, release cycles, and cross-functional collaboration.
    • Frontend Modernization: Championed jQuery to VueJS migration; built Traackr's first SPA analytics interface, transitioning legacy org boilerplates to modular MEVN architecture.
    • Internal Tools: Architected and implemented notification service of business metrics and rich content using NodeJS and MongoDB, providing customizable aggregation and organization of schemaless data.
    • High-Scale Systems: Developed systems for Twitter firehose ingestion (GNIP/Akka), real-time indexing, data-design to support internationalized geo-search with Elasticsearch.
    • Created Traackr’s practice for geo-located based searches. Created strategy for the normalization of > 150,000 freeform location entries, into ISO codes for every UN and ISO recognized continent, region, country, province, and county in the world. Designed geo-based model to allow for multi-lingual support for international locations.

  • The Noon Project

    Founder
    http://noonproject.org
    JUL 2015 to JUN 2020

    The Noon Project is a musical collaboration of global artists working together to raise support for victims of ethnic and religious oppression in the Middle East.

    • Assembled a team of volunteers from around the USA to be administrators of the project
    • Recruited artists leading to the development of 7 songs for the record.
    • Organized two concerts, one in well-known music venues in San Francisco and New York City, to promote the project with new audiences, and raise seed money to be used for the production of the record. Both resulting in sold-out shows.
    • Used the SCRUM Methodology to accomplish first phase of our project which resulted in the building of a brand identity, the execution of two major events, and establishing a partnership, with another organization who will receive the profits of the Noon Project album.

  • Seeds For Hope

    Co-Founder, Former Board Secretary, and Current Technical Advisor
    DEC 2004 to PRESENT

    Co-founded non-profit supporting vulnerable communities in East Africa, led US-based fundraising and outreach.

    • Designed and developed the organization’s website, www.seedsforhope.org. Implemented a Search Engine Optimization strategy for increased web search results.
    • Developed SFH’s social networking presence on the web.
    • Cooridinated The Music for Life Project in 2009, which connected a musician from NYC, with a girls school in Kibera which resulted in the establishment of a Glee / Performance club that still functions today
    • Volunteers on the ground in East Africa at least once a year. Responsible for the media portion of an upcoming campaign around raising awareness on the plight of students in Kenya.
    • Initiated partnership with a grass roots secondary school in one of the slums of Kenya, to further our goals as an organization to provide education to those otherwise unable to afford it.

  • Optaros, Agile Partners, Viant

    Senior Consultant and Technical Lead
    New York, New York and Boston, Massachusetts
    2000 to 2010

    Both Implemented and led full-stack builds for CMS, e-commerce, and publishing systems for clients like Merck, JP Morgan Chase, Limited Brands, CNN Money, the New York Times, and St. Petersburg Times.

    • Delivered enterprise and secure backend implementations across a variety of industries.
    • Introduced agile and open-source practices to globally distributed teams; conducted training in Romania.

  • Hope Center for HIV and Infectious Disease

    Nairobi, Kenya, East Africa
    Contractor - Lead Architect
    FEB 2006 to MAY 2006

    Responded to a need to provide improved data management and data entry for a growing HIV clinic funded by PEPFAR, and co-managed by the University of Washington and the Coptic Orthodox Church. Integrated their then-current system of handwritten data entry and Teleform scanning with a next-generation web application built on PHP Symfony. Created the application to scale to new users, and new locations according the business rules for adding new patients and linking information between centers. Trained employees in QA for testing and UAT.

  • Agile Partners

    Whitehouse Station, NJ
    Senior Consultant
    Aug 2006 to July 2005

    Senior technologist at Merck Inc. working primarily for their world marketing and technology division. Designed and developed module within a user management web application to bulk load / extract users profile information between LDAP and Microsoft Excel. Designed and implemented an integration system for the automatic loading clinical trials metrics from a remote data store into the main application’s database ensuring daily updates to the website; coordinated the efforts between the various divisions involved. Built key areas of functionality on a clinical trials web application using the Apache Cocoon / Avalon framework.

  • Viant Corp.

    New York, NY
    Developer / Consultant
    Aug 2000 to June 2002

    Develop and design back-end components to web solutions, with a strong commitment to quality, speed, and flexibility. Work cooperatively with other developers, and integrate effectively with teams in creative and strategy oriented disciplines, by means of support, sharing, and learning. Developed a Java API interface with Experian to communicate a Struts application. Developed and Implemented the front and back end components used to make major functional areas of a client’s site available/unavailable to the public. Developed key functionality for Viant’s knowledge management system, including a customizable personal page, and paginated list view for digital assets using advanced Intraspect template development techniques. Coordinated a load testing effort, analyzed application server logs, revealed problems in code architecture, and produced detailed reports for upper management for a top Global Investment firm. Supported an effort to lead a major media and entertainment player in the decision to purchase ATG Dynamo, a solution that would benefit their particular needs. Achieved an ‘Exceeds Expectations’ at annual growth review.

  • Education

  • Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science

    New York University
    College of Arts and Sciences

    College of Arts and Sciences Trustees Scholar

    1996 - 2000

Get in touch

Hudson Valley, NY

You might also find me in:
Oakland, CA
Nairobi, Kenya

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