Paul Normington

About Paul Normington

I\'ve spent most of my career building scalable backend systems.One highlight was building Pandora\'s media delivery systems, which included an in-house CDN atop 3 layers of media servers in multiple data-centers. Initially rolled out in 2009, the system has handled peak delivery of 6 million concurrent personalized audio streams. For the past 5 years the system has delivered over a billion audio tracks per day with no outages. The system provides high reliability and very low operational costs.I also designed and built the in-house mobile push notification system at Pandora. Capable of delivering 20 million personalized push notifications per hour to iOS and Android users. I\'ve also gained a lot of experience with asynchronous messaging systems, starting with JMS (ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ), then building a proprietary message bus for Pandora when ActiveMQ could not be made to scale, before switching to Kafka. I\'ve spent time on search, utilizing Lucene / Solr / Elastic-Search for some search solutions, and building a very fast autocomplete solution specifically to complete artist and track names at Pandora. I\'ve spent a lot of time tuning and optimizing systems, and that often takes me to the storage layer. I\'m very familiar with RDBMS systems, particularly PostgreSQL but also MySQL, SQL Server and Oracle. I\'ve also implemented features with noSQL (Cassandra) and have extensive experience with caching solutions (Redis, Memcached) at vast scale (100+ TB caches). And I really like to understand the operational aspects of systems I work on. This takes me to metric gathering and monitoring, alerting and disaster planning and response.

Experience

1. Led a Team of Architects, Responsible for Bringing Podcast Content into the Pandora Product Developing Voice Enabled Search and Control of the Mobile App and an Assortment of Monetization and Infrastructure Projects Led the Tools Team, the Dba Team, the Microservice Technology Team, the Service Reliability and the Release Engineering Teams Collectively Called Developer Enablement Championed the Creation of the Technical Apprentice Program, Called\'demo Tape\' in 2018 this Led to the on Boarding of 4 Apprentices as Full Time Engineers the Program is now in IT\'s Second Cohort, with a Third Planned Later in 2019 Played a Key Role in Expanding Pandora\'s Product Development Team to Atlanta, Georgia in 2018 we Hired 80 Tech Staff in a New Location i was Part of the Leadership Team that Visited Atl Throughout 2018 i Presented to an Audience of 200 People on each of those Visits Co-authored Pandora\'s Tech Career Framework, a Detailed Matrix of Behaviors and Capabilities that should be Exhibited by each Level of Individual Contributor and Manager at the Company this Provides a Standard to Discuss Promotions and to Hire People at the Expected Level Devised and Led a Large Technical Roadmap Initiative Created 16 Areas to Investigate a 3 Year Tech Roadmap, and Spread the Work Across 100 People in the Organization the Endeavor Completed in 3 Months, Producing a Single, Unified Technical Vision for the Company

   Pandora

   Present

Education

• University of St Andrews

  Bachelor of Science - BS, Computation Science

  1984 — 1988