Dan O'Connor

Experience

• 

  Altana AI

  Director of Engineering, Core Graph

  Oct 2022 - Mar 2024

  Altana builds a dynamic, intelligent, universal map of the global supply chain based on AI-powered insights into global trade data.

  • Led the evolution from prototype to production of a comprehensive map of the global supply chain, capturing physical movements of goods across the planet to drive value.
  • Reported directly to the Chief Technical Officer. Doubled the team size from 6 to a peak of 12, significantly enhancing the team's talent by hiring skilled Data Analysts, ML Engineers, and Software Engineers.
  • Transitioned manual database updates to a product-driven approach, enhancing data accuracy and accessibility. Oversaw expansion of the data platform from 0.5B edges on the graph to 3B edges, allowing for greater scalability and insight.
  • Increased software releases from one per week to multiple releases per week, a 3X+ increase in efficiency. Enhanced data update frequency from quarterly to 5 times per week, providing more real-time insights.
  • Developed key features that served as differentiators for Altana, providing unique value to customers. Established a high-confidence testing environment to improve product quality and reliability.
  • Conducted cost of business analysis, resulting in a 50% reduction in engineering and operational costs in the past year.
  • Served as key member of a self-organized cross-functional team of organizational leaders, meeting weekly to propose impactful solutions, represent interests, and build strategic plans for engineering.
• 

  Meta Corporation

  Software Engineer (L6)

  Dec 2021 - Oct 2022

  Meta builds technologies that help people connect, find communities and grow businesses.

  • Appointed technical lead on the Privacy & Security team responsible for data access control of a user base of over 10K platform users, overseeing data privacy and consent order compliance.
  • Streamlined the data warehouse's interface, creating one unified system for access management and administration without impacting production operations.
  • Identified issues with the data warehouse system, engaged experts across domains, and developed a proposed solution that persuaded teams to allocate resources to build the technical solution.
  • Led the implementation of Rust programming at Meta, pioneering its first production use and enhancing the company's technical capabilities.
• 

  Wayfair

  Associate Director

  Aug 2019 - Nov 2021

  Wayfair's mission is to empower everyone, anywhere to create their ideal home environment. They achieve this by offering a vast selection of home goods across various styles and budgets, along with helpful customer service and innovative shopping tools. They strive to be a one-stop shop for all your home furnishing needs, making the shopping experience as smooth and enjoyable as possible.

  • Led early strategic work for various projects and joined other projects as needed to provide critical technical expertise and guidance.
  • Assigned as the technical lead to transition data center operations, including 30K servers and 20 core enterprise databases, from on-premises to the cloud within 18 months.
  • Managed the involvement of Principal Engineers and Architects across 60 different groups, each with a unique path to the cloud.
  • Outsourced and built a custom solution to facilitate the transition of core enterprise databases to the cloud. Avoided potential costs of $25M-$40M (equivalent to $1B of sales) by successfully executing the migration project within the given timeframe.
  • Spearheaded the transition from a legacy self-managed infrastructure to cloud-native services such as Spanner, CloudSQL, BigTable, and PubSub. Created a self-service, secure, and scalable data-as-a-service environment spanning public and private clouds.
  • Built and lead new team providing technical and architectural leadership during transition from a monolithic application stack to a distributed, service-oriented architecture based on GCP and Kubernetes.
• 

  Naviga, Inc

  Vice President, Enterprise Software

  Jan 2018 - Jul 2019

  Naviga Global is a software company that develops solutions specifically for the media industry. Their software helps media companies manage content, deliver it to audiences, and generate revenue through advertising. They offer a Content Engagement Platform (CEP) that helps businesses create, enrich, deliver and monetize content. In short, they help media companies operate more efficiently and profitably in a digital age.

  • Led the migration of the NewsEdge.com infrastructure to Google Cloud, leveraging ElasticSearch and Kubernetes to modernize the underlying technology.
  • Managed the NewsEdge product suite, including the destination website, REST APIs, and customer integrations, ensuring seamless operation and enhanced performance.
• 

  Acquire Media

  Senior Vice President, Engineering

  Dec 2007 - Dec 2017

  Acquire Media, Inc. was a digital media services company that focused on technology-driven news and related data analytics. They provided real-time news management and distribution tools to various clients including those in the news media, financial services and corporate communities. Their technology platform would gather information from a wide range of sources and then distribute curated real-time feeds and alerts to their customers. In December of 2017, Acquire Media was acquired by Naviga Global. In October 2020, Acquire Media was acquired by Moody's.

  • Architected scalable, redundant server system for text and video news collection, classification, indexing, and distribution based on Apache, Tomcat, Lucene, and MySQL, effectively guiding a team of 15-20.
  • Led the migration from an ad hoc development process to Agile utilizing JIRA software, implementing custom workflows tailored to match release structure.
  • Specified sprints, tracked story progress, and oversaw planning, documentation, and execution of QA and production releases.
  • Served as the primary technical point of contact for significant revenue customers, managing pre- and post-sales integration work.