David Gitman

Cooper Square Ventures

Managing Partner | Chief Technology Officer (CTO) • Sep, 2011 — Present

E-Commerce development firm providing a cost-efficient way to bring even the most extensive catalogs onto the web.

Identify and purchase e-commerce properties and develop highly engaging, efficient e-commerce sites leveraging deep experience and industry best practices. Gather catalog information from hundreds of providers and oversee ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) efforts leveraging Pentaho and e-commerce site development utilizing Magento. Increase traffic, page-views, conversion rates and sales by optimizing the user interface and experience, SEO and SEM.

Leadership & Strategy

• Turned around a $400K/year firm and grew it to $8.5M in annual revenues.
• Manage a Agile, Scrum and Kanban software development team across 8 countries and 7 time zones.

• Scaled a Magneto site to over 500K products and 40M landing pages in Amazon Web Services (AWS) using EC2, ELBs, S3, CloudFront, RDS (MySQL), ElastiCache (Redis), VPC, Route 53, and IAM in multiple availability zones via load-based OpsWorks (Chef) Cookbooks.
• Created an ETL process digesting 200+ sources of non-standardized hierarchical data into an ecommerce catalog.
• Developed and implemented on-page and off-page SEO strategies that drove +130K/monthly organic unique visitors.
• Improved e-commerce conversion rate 165% by analyzing the data-driven insights of A/B testing.

Medialink Worldwide

Director of Infrastructure and Operations • 2007 ‐ 2009

Recruited to drive a major transformation of IT organization and eliminate downtime issues, meet regulatory requirements, and effectively align technology investments with business goals for this global leader in video distribution services utilized by more than 250,000 media outlets in 190 countries.

High profile IT leadership position orchestrating the identification and resolution of technical, business and operational issues. Defined technology direction; restructured team; introduced ITIL and SDLC best practices; renegotiated contracts with vendors; and championed a major automation and modernization of systems, processes and platforms to enable rapid growth. Led internal/external teams in designing, implementing and ensuring uptime of multi-platform environments.

Leadership & Strategy

• Established and led the execution of technology strategy that achieved SOX compliance within 3 months.
• Built a fully automated, high-availability environment, enabling the reduction of IT staff by 75%.
• Drastically reduced IT costs through process improvement, automation, and vendor management.
• Built a dedicated Help Desk Organization and established Service Management procedures based on ITIL standards, improving quality of services to users and clients by 620%.
• Instituted procedures for physical and network security, user access and password controls, anti-virus / malware, patch management, data backup/recovery, change control, problem management, and end-user computing.
• Created and implemented product development, release management, change management, and configuration management lifecycles across development, quality assurance and staging environments for over 150 products.

• Architected and centralized infrastructure from 8 global locations into a strategic tier-one co-location facility. Replaced 150 servers with 6 virtualized blade servers; consolidated 15 Terabytes of storage across 23 storage devices into a single storage area network; and sold old equipment, enabling infrastructure upgrade with only $500K in costs.
• Strengthened security infrastructure to minimize vulnerability and potential risks. Migrated from WatchGuard firewall and VPN to a Cisco security solution; introduced auditing and vulnerability assessments; and deployed IPS / IDS systems to achieve regulatory compliance and ensure safe computing.
• Introduced availability and continuity management framework and processes, delivering 99.999% uptime of services for internal and external customers across complex environment.
• Collaborated with customer’s technical teams to integrate platform into customers’ websites and applications.
• Successfully transitioned Medialink’s proprietary Teletrax platform to Philips environment following acquisition.

Digital Managment Services

Co-Founder / Chief Technology Officer (CTO) • 2004 ‐ 2006

Launched an entrepreneurial venture to provide custom hosted voice / data services, and value-driven technology solutions to clients throughout the United States.

Defined strategic business plan and growth strategy, developed market vision, created service offerings and delivery models, established strategic partnerships, and built teams and operating infrastructure to deliver professional and managed services. Consulted with clients to introduce and deliver custom hosted VoIP, business technology assessments and auditing, IT security, digital and wireless infrastructures, storage and business continuity strategies, and applications, middleware and data warehousing solutions with strong ROI.

Leadership & Strategy

• Built and managed 2 data centers providing integrated voice and data services to 20 clients.
• Instituted quality of service best practices, enabling the capture of Mean Opinion Score rating of 4+.

• Built and managed 2 data centers providing integrated voice and data services to 20 clients.
• Led the design, installation and management of custom network infrastructures, data centers, network operations centers, security systems, and office networks and Internet infrastructures.

The FeedRoom

Senior Network Engineer • 2002 ‐ 2004

Brought in manage, scale and optimize environment to support rapid growth for this start-up new media company.

Researched, deployed and supported co-located secure LAN / WAN infrastructures, including routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers and SANs. Administered internetworking infrastructure, UNIX and Linux production / development environments, and Windows 2000 / Exchange platforms. Developed network and system management processes leveraging open source tools.

Technology & Business Solutions

• Designed and implemented security infrastructure policies and procedures to mitigate potential risks.
• Led the technical design and production of several high-profile Internet broadcast events, including the NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Championship “March Madness” for CBS / Sportline and CSTV.

eBay

Senior Network Engineer • 2000

Recruited as the 1st Senior Network Engineer for start-up company to strengthen infrastructure and stop revenue losses.

Administered Cisco-based network infrastructure supporting 2,000 internal users and over 64 million site users. Designed and implemented security and network management tools; and built connectivity with B2B partners.

Technology & Business Solutions

• Successfully optimized infrastructure, increasing overall to 99.999%; and led the auditing and integration of 2 acquired companies into corporate infrastructure.

ToysRUs.com

Senior Network Engineer • 1999 ‐ 2000

Selected as the 1st technical employee to create and support eCommerce infrastructure for newly launched retail site.

Technology & Business Solutions

• Selected, architected, and led the build out of Data Center to support ToysRUs eBusiness site, including systems, security, applications, and policies and procedures.
• Implemented LAN / WAN and security infrastructure to enable the launch of ToysRUs.com within 3 months.

NYC Magento Merchant Group

Co-Organizer • 2105 — Present

NMMG is a local monthly meetup in New York City where we share all the latest tips and tricks for dat donut lifestyle. I organize the group, and typically eat most of the donuts.

Operating Systems

Cisco IOS, MS Windows, Linux, Sun Solaris, BSD

Languages & Databases

HTML, CSS, PHP, PERL, Bash, BASIC, MySQL, MS SQL, Oracle, Sybase, PostgreSQL

Software & Tools

MS Exchange, IIS, VSS, Office, Visio, Project, Backup Exec, NetBackup, Amanda, Bacula, SVN Resonate, Symantec Antivirus, Mcafee VirusScan, Trend Micro Officescan, VMware Enterprise, Blackberry Enterprise Server, Atlassian JIRA, Confluence, Remedy, Apache, Tomcat, BIND, Sendmail, Qmail, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, F5 BigIP, 3DNS Ghost, Asterisk, , Ethereal, tcpdump

Security

Cisco PIX/ASA, Policy Manager, Access Control Server, VPN, Intrusion Detection, Security Scanner, CheckPoint Firewall-1, Raptor Firewall, Watchguard, ISS Real Secure, Internet / System / Database Scanners, RSA SecureID / Keon, Snort, Nessus

Network & Application Monitoring Platforms

OpenNMS, Zenoss, Splunk, Nagios / Net Saint MRTG, Cricket, Big Brother, Nmap, RANCID, NetFlow Monitor, Webalizer, AWstats, Cisco Works, HP OpenView, Concord Network Health, MicroMuse Net Cool, Solarwinds Orion, SiteScope

Storage

EMC Symmetrix, Clariion, Dell Equallogic, 3par InsSrv

Protocols

ARP, IP, ICMP, RIP, OSPF, E/IGRP, BGP, TCP, UDP, FTP, SSH, Telnet, SMTP, WINS, WHOIS, GRE, TACACS, DNS, TFTP, HTTP, Kerberos, POP3, SFTP, NNTP, NTP, NetBIOS, IMAP, SNMP, BGP, IRC, LDAP, HTTPS, ISAKMP, Syslog, RIP, RPC, DHCP, iSCSI, rsync, NFS, IPSec, RADIUS, RTMP, HSRP, SCCP, MGCP, SIP, Active Directory

CodeBrooklyn

Volunteer • 2015 — Present

Hour of Code Data Analyst