Douglas A. Balog

Valor Equity Partners

Chicago, IL

Director, Data Engineering

Valor Equity Partners

Chicago, IL

Contractor - Data Engineering

Tulco Labs

Pittsburgh, PA

Target

Pittsburgh, PA

Principal AI Engineer / Principal Data Engineer

IBM Watson

Pittsburgh, PA

Advisory Software Engineer

• Worked on Watson Explorer (aka Vivisimo Velocity), a high performance search engine written in C.
• Created library to encrypt communication between servers using OpenSSL.
• Created python library to capture and graph linux performance counters.
• Ported Watson Explorer specific features to Apache Solr/Lucene.

kWantera

Pittsburgh, PA

kWantera was a startup that helps clients purchase energy at the lowest possible price in the wholesale markets.

Senior Software Engineer / VP of Engineering

• Was Responsible for development of kWantera's cloud based energy management applications.
• Developed interactive HTML5, run anywhere (Desktop, Tablet, Mobile), web application.
• Developed custom visualizations using D3JS.
• Utilized Amazon Web Services to minimize capital costs while providing a fault tolerant, scaleable backend infrastructure.
• Was responsible for all operational issues for all of kWantera's products.

Conviva

Pittsburgh, PA

Conviva is a startup that specializes in real time monitoring of Live Video Streams.

Member of Technical Staff

• Designed and implemented near 'Realtime' application monitoring and alerting system. This system was integrated with NAGIOS to provide DevOps with valuable information about production system performance.
• Designed and implemented large scale multi dimensional data analysis system using Hadoop and MySQL.
• Designed and implemented HTTP/XML application gateway to MySQL database.
• Designed and implemented multi threaded database loader to read Hadoop job output from HDFS and load into MySQL.

Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC)

Pittsburgh, PA

Advanced Data Systems Specialist

• Member of PSC's Advanced Systems Group.Responsible for design and development of high performance storage systems for the centers Cray Xt3 supercomputer.
• Senior developer on center's Zest project. Made significant contributions to first working prototype demonstrated during the SC 07 Storage Challenge
• Lead the centers research effort in running the Lustre file system across the Teragrid's high speed (30Gb/sec) research network.

Akamai Technologies

Cambridge, MA

Akamai is a content distributions networks and they maintain the largest geographically distributed system on the Internet. The network contains over 75000 servers in over 1000 different locations around the world.

Network Intelligence, Senior Software Engineer

• Lead developer of component that provides first level mapping from clients to Akamai servers. Rewrote parts of the component to make it more scalable and reduced cycle time by 10x.
• Developed scripts to monitor and alert Operations of problems in the system.

Halosoft Inc.

Pittsburgh, PA

• Developed virtual operating system 'Viva' that is similar to Java.
• Responsible for developing demo applications, testing, and debugging of Viva.
• Implemented TechMetrix's TMBench in Viva and benchmarked it against available application servers, out-performing all of those tested.
• Implemented classes to support FastCGI, and HTTP.
• Built Redhat Linux cluster using Linux Virtual Server to evenly distribute workload across nodes.
• Wrote shell scripts to fully automate installation of new nodes.

Lycos Inc.

Waltham, MA

One of the Internet's first Search Engines

Search Research & Development Group, Principal Software Engineer

• One of four engineers responsible for designing/implementing Lycos's search infrastructure.
• Personally responsible for catalog and indexing software, developing tools to distribute a single 150GB+ index to a cluster of Linux workstations; developed tools/procedures to speed indexing on large multiprocessor Compaq Alphaserver 8400 developed test harnesses and test suites to verify integrity of distributed catalogs.
• Worked with Compaq engineers to improve IO performance of Digital Unix.
• Internationalized the indexer and catalog tools to handle Unicode, (Japanese, Korean, and Chinese.)
• Developed the Internet's first pictures and sounds catalog, mentioned in Dec 1996 Byte Magazine.
• Developed a Spam filtering system based on statistical analysis of web documents.
• Maintained portable development environment across Digital Unix, Linux, FreeBSD, Irix, Solaris.