Location Denver, Colorado, United States Regions Greater Denver Area, Western US Gender Male
Website iandouglas.com LinkedIn View on LinkedIn Twitter View on Twitter
Ian is a self-professed "serial startup employee" who enjoys the vibe of small companies and working on scale solutions.
He's moving into a role as a "growth hacker" with Stream (GetStream.io), an aggregated news feed and activity feed API startup. Stream will be Ian's third position within TechStars companies.
Most recently, Ian was the Director of Engineering at Simple Energy in Boulder, CO. Prior, Ian worked at SendGrid Inc, an Email deliverability leader based in Boulder, CO, as a Sr Lead Engineer and Sr Web Architect.
He brings a great deal of programming experience, including Perl (1997-2011), PHP (1998-2013), MySQL (1997-2013), Python (2009-Present) and tinkers with Go, Ruby, and Java for Android development. He loves open-source, is a hard-core Google fanboy and loves the idea of Linux-on-the-desktop. He's often tinkering with new technology in his off-hours. He loves mentoring (especially code school students and startups), teaching about Agile, public speaking, and revamping the archaic technical interview process.
Prior to SendGrid, Ian worked on the user platform of Armor Games including API development, front-end development, devops work, and on his off time, community manager. He helped develop some Python-based tools for managing the company's AWS infrastructure to ease deployments, and a customized full-text search solution in Postgres.
Ian worked at The Rubicon Project from 2009 to 2010 where he built a custom map-reduce data aggregation system which scaled horizontally by introducing hardware and configuring its data source. 3 years after leaving Rubicon, Ian was informed that his 4-system cluster had scaled to over 80 servers with nearly zero code change and recently processed its 5 trillionth piece of data. While the system wasn't quite real-time, it could process gigabytes of ad impression data into business data which drove other systems in under 20 minutes.
For 2.5 years before Rubicon, Ian worked as a freelance engineering consultant for various startups, corporations and small businesses to handle everything from Flash development, devops work, custom programming, emergency notification systems, marketing systems for Toyota, and lots of data aggregation. He also worked for several years at PriceGrabber, and a private online university building an online education platform.
In 2000, when Ian moved to Los Angeles from Canada, he worked at a B2B platform processing credit reports, building and managing a data center and networking to the three federal credit bureaus. The data center management included securing hardware and software against malicious attack and needed to pass a security audit from all three bureaus. 9 years after leaving the company, the security setups put in place continue to pass the annual audit review.