Chris Fry

E-mail: jobs@cfry.net  

http://www.linkedin.com/in/chrislfry

Summary:

Software executive with over ten years leading teams in startups and enterprise companies building innovative web technology.  Expert in agile development, strong manager and technical contributor.

 

Highlights

 

Professional Experience

salesforce.com

Vice President, Platform Development                                                                                                 2008 – present

Senior Director, Platform Development                                                                                               2006 – 2008

Development Manager                                                                                                                             2005 – 2006

 

Engineering manager responsible for building the technology behind the force.com platform.  Lead a team of over 80 people and a budget of over 14.5M.   Key leader behind salesforce.com’s adoption of agile method and responsible for delivering 3 major releases a year at salesforce.  Managed over 20 scrum teams.  Worked with analysts, press, customers, partners and prospects.  Direct responsibility for the force.com platform, Apex programming language, Visualforce, API, and other groundbreaking technologies.

 

Managed the web service team at salesforce.com responsible for over 60% of the traffic to the salesforce.com site and all SOAP traffic. 

 

BEA Systems, Inc.

Engineering manager                                                                                                               2004 – 2005

Staff Engineer                                                                                                                          2001 – 2004

 

 

Designed, implemented and managed development of the XML & WebServices Runtime for BEA’s WebLogic Server.  Responsible for architecture, implementation, and testing of the WebService and XML Runtime.  Managed a team of twelve engineers, five QA engineers and two CCE engineers. Introduced Adaptive Development methodologies. Interfaced with Product Management and Customers.  Evaluated companies for partnership and acquisition.

 

 Led BEAs first successful JSR, a standard for pull parsing Java in XML (JSR 173).  Awarded two patents in XML processing architecture.  Participated in the JAX-B and JAX-P working groups. Implemented fast pull parser used throughout BEAs XML stack. Led open source implementation of JSR 173 RI at codehaus.

 

 Led XML & WebServices team through full product release cycle from WebLogic 6.1 to Weblogic 9.0.  Started as Staff Engineer and currently managing the WebServices development effort for the BEA platform technology suite.

 

Thrownet, Inc.

Chief Architect                                                                                                                                         2000 – 2001

 

Designed, implemented and managed development of a modular natural language search engine comprised of a parser, rules engine, vector-based search engine, and presentation module. Co-developed over 30,000 lines of code in approximately two months to realize a complete, fully functional, natural language search engine.

 

Managed three information retrieval engineers and three computational linguists.  Managed two client prototype implementations.  Served as the interface between management, linguistics and engineering.  Directed research and provided technical guidance during fund raising efforts.

 

University of California                                                                                                                        

Berkeley, Post-Doctoral Fellow                                                                                     1999 -2000

Santa Cruz, Research Associate                                                                                   1998

San Diego, Research Assistant                                                                                     1993-1996

 

 

 

Conducted independent research in the organization of songbird auditory cortex.  Mapped the auditory cortex using electrophysiological techniques.  Analyzed statistical output of neurons using linear and non-linear techniques.   Designed and constructed digital sound recording equipment for avian song research. Designed, implemented and trained non-linear system to translate from spoken speech to visual speech parameters of a computer animated human face.  Expanded neural network component of a speech recognition toolkit.  Maintained and designed components of an airplane navigation interface.  Implemented a simulation environment to study reinforcement learning in artificial neural networks.

 

 

Education

Ph.D.              Cognitive Science, University  of California, San Diego, 1998

M.S.                Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego, 1995

B.A.                 Cognitive Science, Minor Computer Science, Vassar College, 1993

Phi Beta Kappa, Departmental Honors, General Honors, Thesis Honors

 

Professional Associations

Certified Scrum Master

Technical advisory board for the Berkeley Electronic Press, Inc

 

Standards, Patents and Publications

JSR-173:  The Streaming API for XML

A System and Method for XML Parsing (Patent #6,880,125)

Selective parsing of an XML document (Patent #70,655,561)

Talk: Agile 2007: Big Bang Agile Transformation in an On-Demand World with Steve Greene

Massaro, D., Beskow, J. , Cohen, M. , Fry,  C.L., and Rodriguez, T. (1999)  Picture my voice: Audio to Visual Speech Synthesis using Artificial Neural Networks.  Proceedings of the International Conference on Audio/Visual Speech Processing.

Fry, C.L. (1996). How perception guides production in birdsong learning. In Touretzky, D.S., Mozer, M.C. and Hasselmo, M.E., editors, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 8.  MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.