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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

  • 1Life Healthcare, Inc.

    Staff Software Engineer
    San Francisco, CA
    SEP 2019 to Present

    Staff Software Engineer focused on Behavioral Health Programs; driving initiatives within the org a focus on collaboration, engineering process and continuous improvement.

    • Front-End Integration with Amazon Prime: Key contributor to the successful front-end integration with Amazon Prime, enabling the implementation of lower-cost memberships for customers. Key organizer in the onset of the front end work; Facilitate processes resulting in an increase in team velocity to meet expected deadlines.
    • Behavioral Health Programs and Automation Architected and lead the feature development of a feature scaling our Behavioral Health Programs at One Medical. Designed an idempotent service that would automate the mass sending of depression and anxiety screeners, with failover and retry protection. Worked with product on necessary scope trade-offs leading to an on-time outcome, scalable to various mental health programs in the organization.
    • Technical Excellence Working Group: Founded and led a working group dedicated to fostering Technical Excellence at One Medical. Successfully developed a series of resources to facilitate the prioritization of Tech Excellence work alongside Product features. Currently spearheading the creation of an internal coaching program, demonstrating a commitment to continuous improvement and knowledge sharing.
    • Strategic Contributions during the Global Pandemic: Architected and served as the Technical Lead for features aimed at promoting customer conversion and projects directly related to the organization's COVID-19 response during the global pandemic. Lead and designed a series of data clean-up scripts, and data integrity practice to ensure backwards compatibility of new membership types with our existing system. Worked closely with Data Engineering teams to ensure downstream compatibility with existing reports.
    • Mentorship and Knowledge Sharing: Distinguished for mentoring engineers across the organization, fostering a collaborative and growth-oriented culture. Engaged in both informal mentorship and formal contributions to the company's mentorship program, emphasizing the importance of knowledge transfer and skill development.
    • Technical Debt Reduction Initiative: Led a cross-team effort to reduce technical debt by establishing a repeatable process for identifying, cleaning up, and testing the removal of legacy code paths. Contributed significantly to system efficiency and maintenance improvements.
    • Alignment and Workflow Transformation: Architected and implemented a multi-year, cross-functional effort to align business data with Schema.org standards. Pioneered a change in the workflow for data input, resulting in a self-serve process that is backward compatible with all client apps.
    • Department Transition Facilitation: Defined and facilitated the roll-out of team processes during a major department transition and staff change in 2021. Ensured continuity of delivery and maintained a focus on team collaboration and efficiency.
    • Collaborative Marketing Initiatives: Architected and implemented a multi-year, cross-functional effort to align business data with Schema.org standards. Defined a data workflow between Marketing and Product development, and defined a pilot to allow the departments to try a low-cost experiment to demonstrate the impact of such a workflow.

  • 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

    Lead Applications Engineer
    San Francisco, CA
    MAR 2010 to AUG 2019

    Lead Applications Engineer at Traackr, building the company's SaaS Influencer Marketing Product for the Enterprise. Leading a Team of Engineers who are responsible for the development and maintenance of customer facing apps. Stack: CakePHP, MySQL, Redis and JQuery, VueJS, NodeJS, MongoDB. Committed to ongoing strategic planning around the implementation of business initiatives by engaging in close collaboration with other engineers among the various teams, as well as with VPs of Engineering, and the Heads of Product and Data. Responsible for delivery on bi-weekly sprints, feature design, technical architecture, and development, as well as ongoing support and maintenance.

    • 2015-2018 Engineering Lead, Growing and organizing the team of engineers responsible for building Traackr's customer facing applications. Optimized the team based on function and skillset, creating areas of ownership and facilitating best practices for better technical implementation and team collaboration.
    • Designed and Developed, in partnership with Head of Product and VP of Engineering, a repeatable process for large cross-team project delivery that encompasses: clear roles and areas of ownership, activities, deliverables, and interdependencies. The Engineering Teams have delivered 4 large scale projects using this method this year alone.
    • Implementing quarterly and semi-annual goal setting for members of my team. Responsible for performance reviews and feedback.
    • Helped double the team size through strategic hires, increasing the team UX Engineering capacity. UX Engineering group has coverted half the front-end code base from jQuery to VueJS without disrupting the customer experience.
    • Created a process that allows for the frequent prioritization and execution of large technical debt projects where the capacity for completing them is very slim. As a result the team continues to meet its commitments around technical debt work that would otherwise not be able to be completed using the regular SCRUM process
    • Completed SCRUM Master Certification Training in Feburary 2015. Collaborated in implementing a SCRUM process within Traackr Engineering.
    • 2013-2015 Apps Team Individual Contributor, transitioned from the backend/platform team to a the team developing customer-facing applications, including the company's main SaaS product.
    • Designed and implemented framework for the management of communities and collections of people-data-sets. Allowing the application to scale from allowing users to manage 100s of entities to several thousand, with an emphasis on API integration, caching strategy using Redis, with milisecond response times.
    • Architect and primary contributor of "Notify", Traackr's internal app-to-user notification service. The system collects and aggregates application data, into responsive and visually rich HTML emails, delivering a daily email digests to over 1500 users. Notify was a response to a business need to push relevant information to end users to increase stickiness of our app. Notify was designed to be application independent, abstracting the notion of app-user notifications, so any number of applications can integrate to easily notification features, without the need to fully bake this functionality in every respective app.
    • 2010-2013 Backend/Platform Team Individual Contributor, hired as the 2nd Engineer at Traackr, and member of the company's founding team in 2010.
    • Designed and developed the Influencer Relationship and Network Analysis feature set. Architected and implemented within two months. Mechanism involves the analysis of 500,000 entries of social data daily to discover key relationships of each person in our database. Architected and implemented both the display of relationship data, as well as the interactive force-directeg graph on the customer app, using D3js. This Network Analaysis engine is still being used today.
    • Designed a system of daily content and metrics updates across our entire database of relevant people. Scaled the acquisition of data, from 50k profiles over every two weeks, to 100k user daily.
    • 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.
    • Lead and implemented key vendor partnership for the acquisition of realtime social data. Implemented an Akka-based client, to handle the processing of realtime Twitter data via GNIP, at a rate up to 100 messages/sec.
    • First employee to move from Boston to SF and was a key figure in the seeding and growing our new headquarters in San Francisco in both logistics and cultural development;
    • Supervised university intern, and guided him in the transition of his NodeJS prototype into a production ready application. Taught him the disciplines of test-driven development, and helped guide the transformation to a more optimized implementation.
    • Internal team evangelist on various platforms and toolsets. Lead a presentation and effort to introduce GIT rather than SVN to improve our development, and collaboration.

  • 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 / Board Secretary
    SEP 2004 to PRESENT

    Co-Founder and Board Member, responsible for USA fundraising initiatives and outreach, with almost yearly trips to Kenya to document and help implement certain programs and initiatives.

    • 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

    Technical Lead Consultant
    MAY 2006 to MAR 2010

    Technical Lead at an international solutions firm. Experience leading content management, publishing, and e-commerce solutions using a combination of open source and commercial components, with an emphasis on client relationships, and team building

    • Technical Lead on a project with the MCCA (Mass. Convention Center Authority), managing the successful delivery of a multi-tiered J2EE event management system powered by Spring and Hibernate, with GWT front-end, that runs daily operations for key departments, as well as customer online ordering.
    • Own the planning and schedule of over 100 new features into 12 major releases over the course of one year, including requirements gathering, scope-management, development, UAT, and deployment to production.
    • Manage team of 2-3 developers through twelve cycles of major-feature releases, operating within an agile-flavored methodology
    • Concurrently manage a small team of remote developers doing production support.
    • Work closely with client IT management and support teams in risk mitigation and future planning.
    • Application received RedHat Innovation Award in 2009
    • Engage team-members in code-reviews and knowledge sharing activities, as well as cross-discipline communication with client developers and staff.
    • Work closely with key business users to manage scope, develop prioritization of requirements, and develop new ideas for future work.

  • 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

  • Master of Arts in Music Composition

    New York University

    Degree progress currently on hold

    2002 - 2005

  • 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

Drop me a Line