Phone408 420-9239
Emailmarktorrance@gmail.com
Websitelinkedin.com/in/marktorrance
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Mark Torrance

Chief Technology Officer


28 years of executive leadership, product and engineering strategy, engineering management, and hands-on software development including small business software, machine learning, big data, online advertising, robotics, user centered design, and data visualization

Experience
5/2021 — present
Meta — Social Network
Senior Staff Software Engineer for Meta Business Suite
  • Helping MBS team of over 200 in 5 pillars design and build next generation SMB tools to empower over 30 million businesses to achieve their goals on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp from a single UI on web and mobile.
  • Partnering closely, mentoring and providing guidance to Data Science, Product Management, Data Engineering, Product Design, Content Strategy and other XFN functions
  • Impacting our product through growth strategy and both server and client side performance optimization
  • Implementing Tailored Recommendations to provide businesses ML-powered advice tailored to their business objectives and the unique situation of their business
  • Taking a breather from management to be more hands-on, including setting technical and product direction and strategy, mentoring, and coding in React and Hack
2/2019 — 5/2021
Facebook — Social Network
Senior Engineering Manager for People Products
  • Managed 77 person engineering team across 9 internal HR products, working with cross-functional product develompent partners including specialists in design, product management, content strategy, user research, data science and data engineering
  • Responsible for enterprise products used by ~80,000 full time employees at Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus
  • Launched new modular Onboarding software used by hundreds of managers and new employees weekly
  • Maintained and enhanced PMT Performance Review software used for all peer, upward, downward reviews, and employee calibrations in biannual Performance Cycle
  • Maintained and enhanced Pulse survey software used for biannual employee sentiment survey and analytics review
  • Launched MicroPulse survey software providing continuous signal through sampling of the Facebook employee population
  • Supported Surveys on Workplace used by external companies who are customers of Workplace
  • Launched Manager Landing, new software to help Facebook managers show care to their direct reports with support for 1:1 meetings, reminders, quick actions
  • Launched Grow, new software to help employees manage and grow their careers at Facebook through assessments, learning opportunities, and community building features
  • These products include robust third party integrations with Workday, Salesforce, LinkedIn Learning, and Qualtrics
  • Strategic contributor to People Products leadership team, identifying new opportunities, growing team by 15% annually, partnering with stakeholders from People Growth (HR) to prioritize work, planning + running all hands events for 100+ attendees
  • Developed internal candidate into a successful people manager within the team
  • Ran weekly retrospectives to find root causes and engineering opportunities
5/2018 — 11/2018
Cox COMET — Online advertising SSP
Chief Technology Officer
  • Managed 30 person engineering and product teams including Big Data, Analytics, Machine Learning, Web Apps, QA, TechOps, and Product Management
  • Responsible for real time systems driving $45m annual run rate in top line revenue
  • Grew net revenue by over 2.5x in a 2 month period through engineering optimizations, to $10m annual run rate
  • Designed and implemented "bid checker" tool for inspecting and optimizing OpenRTB 2.5 protocol communications with partner SSPs and DSPs
  • Oversaw + provided technical guidance for internal projects including cross-device identity graph, Amazon Redshift, A/B testing framework, replacing Flume with Kafka
  • Led improvements to engineering culture + deployment practices including Agile, Scrum, sprint planning, weekly deployments, continuous integration, github, code reviews + required reviews by codedowners
  • Led technical and business evaluation of vendors including Looker, WhiteOps, Forensiq, Google Cloud Vision, Personagraph, Amazon Web Services
  • Led culture reinvention effort to improve morale and departmental relations
  • Oversaw upgrades + migration of Hadoop and Spark to new versions and distributions
  • Administered PIPs for underperforming employees, managed several out
9/2009 — 12/2017
Rocket Fuel — Online advertising performance DSP and DMP
Chief Technology Officer
  • Hired and managed 70-person Machine Learning, AI/Optimization, and Web Apps teams from Series A (20 people) through IPO (4 years of 145% CAGR, 1200 people, $400mm+ revenue)
  • Invented and managed development of core technology including machine learning based predictive models, multi-objective optimization, automatic campaign pacing, bid strategy, global margin controls and fully automated model A/B testing resulting in "CPA" performance 8x better than Google
  • Managed onshore engineers in 3 offices plus offshore contractors through 2 firms
  • Invented and built key visualizations for transparency and analytics: marketing that learns, bid landscape, audience inspector, model attributes, analyze w/ pivot table, conversions globe
  • Instrumental to over $50m in sales in over 200 strategic meetings with executive decision makers at companies such as P&G, Mazda, Group M / WPP, Microsoft, BMW, Chase, Citi, Amex; also prospects, investors, industry and financial analysts including Forrester and Gartner
  • Wrote thought leadership pieces on LinkedIn, Ad Exchanger, and other industry publications, and serve as Chief Scientific Advisor of the Rocket Fuel Institute
  • Served as technical and strategic advisor as member of eStaff and reporting directly to 2 CEOs
  • Organized and led Architecture Review Committee for discussion of all major engineering initiatives
  • Organized and led monthly Innovation Council including management of product development backlog for advanced R&D project work by both Labs and regular engineering teams
  • Awarded 3 patents for inventions related to first party cookies in advertising and mobile app detection
2002 — 2009
Vinq — 40-person profitable web design and development consulting firm
Founder / CEO / Principal Consultant
  • Designed and built RADAR Mail for SRI as working demonstration of DARPA funded tech (sister project to Siri), employing AI and ML in a new custom web email client. Jointly own the IP. $4m
  • Designed and built Prior Art Workbench for Stanford Tech Licensing Office for patent research. $2m
  • Redesigned RWJF.org website for Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. $1.5m
  • Designed and built KnowledgePlex CMS, and DataPlace open source GIS tool like Claritas, for Fannie Mae Foundation. Subcontractor Placebase became Apple Maps team. $50m over 6 years
2000 — 2002
Knowmadic — Business process workflow and web scraping for energy sector
Chief Technology Officer
  • Designed and built new desktop UI in Java for business process workflow, OCR screen scraping
  • Pitched to VCs and secured Series A funding from Hummer Winblad and 3i
8/1993 – 6/2000
StockMaster.com — One of first 500 sites on web, first finance site
Founder / CEO
  • Grew from 0 to 1 million average daily unique users, averaging 50 page views per session
  • Built robust investor relations business with 30% of Fortune 500 as clients
  • Hired and managed 9 direct reports at VP or COO level
  • Grew to 80 employees; Sold for $77m stock to Red Herring in March 2000
Skills Product and Technology Strategy, Management, Innovation, Rapid Prototyping, Agile, Lean Startup
Big Data: Hadoop, Hive, HBase, Apache Spark, MLlib, Big Data, Deep Learning, Regression Models
Languages and Frameworks: JavaScript, Hack, React, Java, Scala, HTML5, CSS, Ruby, Node.js, Rails, Perl, d3, git, mysql
Design: User Centered Design, UX, Interactive Data Visualization, Nielsen-Norman principles
Gallup Strengths: Strategic, Ideation, Maximizer, Futuristic, Winning Others Over
Education Massachusetts Institute of Technology — S.M. EECS 1994: Thesis Natural Communication with Mobile Robots
NSF Scholar, “All-but-dissertation” completed in Ph.D. program through 1996, on “intelligent room”

Stanford University — B.S. Symbolic Systems 1991, with distinction. AI concentration.
Implemented TR Trees, robot sims, and Agent Oriented Programming demos for Nilsson, Shoham, Rosenschein
Patents US 9785974 — 2014. Identifying mobile application installations
US 9641632 — 2014. Method of storing a web user ID in first-party cookies
US 9875485 — 2013. First party cookie attribution
US 6615168 — 1996. Multilingual agent for use in computer systems