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JohnS

Senior Software/Technology Executive

About Me

I build software products and the teams, processes, and infrastructure needed to ship them. I've done it before and after product-market fit, and led rebuilds where growth outran execution. Most recently I was VP of Engineering at Mimic, an AI security startup that stops ransomware at the kernel level, even after a breach. Previously CTO of an enterprise SaaS platform serving the NFL, Warner Bros., and NBC, and co-founder/CEO of a venture-backed company. I've owned multimillion-dollar P&Ls, raised capital, and chaired a board. I'm as comfortable on a customer call as I am in a code review.

Jurisdiction

United States

Experience

Seniority LevelExecutive
Years of Experience20+ years
Current StatusActive
VP EngineeringMimic
2023 - 2026

Mimic protects large organizations against ransomware and cyber extortion at the kernel level, even after their infrastructure has been compromised. As employee #12, I led development of the management-plane platform from whiteboard concept through enterprise production deployments, enabling real-time ransomware protection and AI-driven analytics. I built and scaled the engineering, DevOps, and UX teams from 3 to 19 people in 24 months while owning the platform end to end. Its architecture met demanding requirements for a secure, petabyte-scale data pipeline, a zero-RPO target on Google Cloud Spanner, resilience against state-sponsored threats, and FEDRAMP High/Class D certification. I also established AI-native engineering practices based on Claude Code, proprietary agent skills, custom tooling, and purpose-built workflows. New AI-assisted migration tooling moved our E2E suites to Playwright and our CI infrastructure from GitHub Actions to Buildkite, cutting CI runtime in half and PR cycle time by one-third.

CTOQwire
2021 - 2023

Owned technology strategy and execution for an enterprise SaaS platform used by major media organizations to manage music clearance and licensing. • Rebuilt the technical organization while transforming a legacy code base with a decaying CI pipeline into a platform the business could sell and the new team could build on. Hired Qwire’s first Principal Engineer, VP of DevOps, and Director of Design. • Partnered with product management, the CEO, and customers on roadmap priorities. Delivered commitments that stabilized and grew key accounts, including the NFL, Warner Bros., and NBC. • Retired critical technical debt and built the security, governance, disaster recovery, and development controls enterprise customers required on AWS.

Education

Degree of EconomicsUniversity of Pennsylvania
1984 - 1988
Masters of MBACornell University
1994 - 1996

Skills

Core skills0
Interests0
Languages1

Languages

English