Measuring & Delivering Energy Savings

Our client  is a leading energy software company founded in 2007. Based in Boston, MA and privately held, The Company has developed patent-pending technology that enables them to retrieve utility data on behalf of virtually any household in America. Utilizing that technology, the company is the richest residential energy efficiency platform available today, and serves both customers and a variety of institutions that care about energy efficiency with its platform and the technology that underlies it. Its platform helps people to understand their energy use and be incentivized to save, as well as enables individuals to interact with and track their electric, gas, and water usage online.

The Position

The CTO/VP Engineering’s role is to oversee day to day activities of the software product development team for all of Company offerings. The role will build out and directly supervise a team of architects, software developers, quality assurance, and business analysts; identify risk and opportunity areas; and coordinate all software development activities.

This role will also work closely with Product Strategy and manage the Lead Technical Architect to envision and define features in the product roadmap and be accountable for the features development, deployment and support.  In addition to the technical leadership of the team, this role will have full management responsibility and oversight for a cross-functional group of engineering and quality assurance personnel.

Reporting directly to the CEO, the VP Engineering shall:

Be chief in charge of translating business goals and objectives into technical framework

Manage software architecture, design, development, procurement, and integration. Also manage tier-2 and higher support with business-to-business partners including utilities, etc…

Manage short- and long-term staff planning, recruitment, performance management, work assignments, training, mentoring, career development, and recognition or disciplinary action.

Achieve cost, schedule, technical and quality performance for delivered software. Compile, maintain, schedule, resource, execute prioritized lists of development projects, including planning and managing the budget and scheduling personnel and vendor contracts to meet project needs. Collect metrics on development performance and report on them.

Collaborate with other functional managers (customer facing business units, systems engineering, QA, and operations) to ensure architectural integrity, effective integration and test, and ongoing system stability.

Direct any technical subcontractor management including contract negotiation, technical support, budgetary management and program management of various contracts and associated budgets.   Coordinate vendor contracts, deliveries and schedule with affected company parties.  Contract with vendors for services to support engineering while addressing Intellectual Property, Non-Disclosures and Statements of Work.

The successful candidate must also have the ability and experience to lead a multi-disciplined organization in a multi-location environment.

Qualifications

Senior-level or leadership experience in a web-based software development environment with 10 or more direct reports.

Experience working with product managers and other business stakeholders to set timelines, budget resources, and manage expectations and quality of the development process

Advanced understanding of web application programming architectures, including standards for security, scalability and configurability

Expertise and experience in implementing and overseeing measures for data security, business continuity, disaster recovery

Deep understanding of load balancing and performance optimization  principals for cloud-based high volume/transaction web applications

Experience leading development efforts using a variety of different SDLC approaches (RAD, Agile, Scrum, etc.)

Experience developing service-oriented architectures for both business-to-business and business-to-consumer customer sets.

Outstanding collaboration skills, excellent communication skills, an ability to look at the big picture

Essential Job Functions/Responsibilities

Lead software and front-end engineers in the specification, design and development and support of all our applications, including websites/products, our core services and our internal and external tools

Provide hands-on technical management leadership and support to software development team soon to grow to 12 – 15 engineers

Identify skill and performance gaps in current organization and provide improvement plans

Improve existing processes and establish new processes for efficient development and high quality output

Evaluate and enhance overall development environment, release practices and Quality Assurance methodology

Instate and maintain development standards, code reviews, unit testing and integration testing frameworks

Maintain overall ownership / accountability for data security, business continuity, disaster recovery

Work in tandem with Technical architect and development team to identify and implement new measures for system performance optimization under high load using cloud backbone

Lead, recruit, develop and supervise the development team members

Evaluate and take accountability for decisions on key technologies adopted

Ensure proper development of technical specifications and documentation.

Estimate resource usage and timelines for development team

Review team members’ detailed design of components/modules/code

Provide a good balance of experience and skills in several front-end and/or back-end technologies

Strong relational database skills

Knowledge of latest web technologies with particular understanding of browser behavior when automating data scraping, open source development platforms like Ruby on Rails, etc.

Ability to translate technology choices into business implications

Ideal Candidate Profile

The diagram below illustrates the intersection of competencies critical in the position:

This executive search is for a private equity-backed, revenue-generating, 7-year-old high-growth company that represents the next generation in healthcare innovation—PatientsLikeMe brings together patients in e-communities who create insights on their diseases and treatments by sharing information that improve their conditions.  At the same time, these insights bring value to large pharma and biotech companies, influencing the way they develop and deploy drugs.  With more than 100,000 registered consumer patients, PatientsLikeMe re-balances the healthcare system, ultimately returning power to the patient.

BSG Team Ventures is  retained to identify the VP of Client Services.

Reporting directly to the CEO, the Vice President of Client Services will play a senior leadership role within the management team, overseeing all client project scoping, management and delivery.

MORE COMPANY DETAIL:

The roots of the company are anchored in one of three brothers who developed ALS, a neuromuscular disease that ultimately proves fatal.  Ben and Jamie wanted to do all they could to help their brother Stephen, and—leveraging their prior career experience and entrepreneurial leanings—decided to try to help their brother gain insights from other patients with ALS in order to improve the understanding of how the disease progresses and what might be done to ease and improve one’s condition.  And so was born PatientsLikeMe, a health data-sharing platform.  The Heywood family’s fight to save Stephen has been chronicled in the book His Brother’s Keeper as well as the documentary “So Much So Fast.”  For more, preview an interesting short video piece on their story athttp://www.patientslikeme.com/about.

THE ROLE

This position will be responsible for the overall success of all commercial client engagements including those with pharma, payers, providers, and other related healthcare NGOs.

In addition, as the key liaison between PatientsLikeMe and the business customer,  the VP of Client Services will be responsible for driving key account relationship development, deepening the understanding of the customer’s needs with an eye to expanding PatientsLikeMe’s strategic role in providing data and analytics to further the customer’s knowledge of patients, conditions, outcomes, and insights.

Below is a bubble diagram outlining  key career & functional attributes critical to success for this role:

Specific responsibilities:

Drive PatientsLikeMe project scoping during project definition and contract development and execution phases.

Manage the engagement estimating function in order to drive , pricing consistency, accuracy, and profitability from engagement to engagement.

Coordinate overall internal project management across R&D, analytics, and technology development

Create and manage internal and external delivery timelines.

Communicate, in tandem with PatientsLikeMe business development staff, project progress against timeline, scope changes, and other periodic updates.

As necessary, build and lead client services function by hiring, motivating, and managing internal teams assigned to specific projects.

Lead the budgeting and execution of all client services-related activities.

Manage external third-party partnerships engaged to help deliver on PatientsLikeMe client related projects, including consulting firms, valued-added resellers, or other strategic engagement or delivery partners.

Work closely with internal business development, leadership & engineering resources, knitting together collaborative and energized cross-functional project teams.

Qualifications & Experience

Prior successful experience in a client engagement and delivery leadership role in the broadly defined healthcare consulting and/or healthcare data & analytics industry.

A strong understanding of the overall business frameworks of PatientsLikeMe customers, including pharma, biotech, healthcare payers & providers, and government & medical & health research and academic organizations.

Successful experience in an entrepreneurial, growth-stage corporate environment of less than 100 employees.

Success in scaling organizational and functional processes related to client engagement management that balance the drive for efficiency, innovation and creativity.

An unusual combination of proven analytical ability with strategic business savvy

B.A. or B.S. required; M.B.A. or other advanced degree strongly preferred

Skills & Personal Characteristics

Defined by others as smart, capable, hands-on, energetic, and someone who possess a strong entrepreneurial spirit.

A client ombudsman with outstanding strategic and conceptual thinking skills. Someone who is able to adjust rapidly to changing market conditions and new opportunities.

A strong, assertive personality, able to make a creative contribution and build buy-in for ideas, as well as integrating with the ideas of others

The Company

Becoming the leading content provider of geospatial imagery for mapping & monitoring applications

Our Client has its roots in rocket science… literally.   Since the first image was collected from space over 30 years ago by classified government imaging systems, only a limited number of people have been permitted access to highly detailed photos of the Earth, and the industry was tightly regulated.  Since its deregulation in the 1990’s, The firm is changing this historical usage of Earth information through the commercialization of high-resolution satellite imaging and an innovative approach to conducting business with customers, partners and resellers. The company was founded in 1992 to launch satellites into space for the purpose of taking high-resolution photos of the earth for defense and intelligence, government, and commercial use.   In early 2000, the US government awarded its first significant contract for satellite imagery, to our client.  Currently the company offers the world’s highest resolution commercial satellite imagery, the largest image size, and the greatest on-board storage capacity of any satellite imagery provider.  In addition, the company’s comprehensive ImageLibrary houses the most up-to-date images available.

In 2004, the firm struck an exclusive portal agreement to supply much of its satellite imagery to Google’s new product launch, branded Google Earth. This deal served as both validation for a broader explicit push as well as anchor tenant into the non-federal government, commercial sector.

Continued growth in 2009 is punctuated by an IPO in May, and the launching of their third imaging satellite, WordlView 2, in October.  With this satellite joining the prior two, the firm has the most powerful ability to add global imagery to its imagery library faster than any other company on the planet.

The company is headquartered near Boulder, Colorado, with other offices and facilities in key geographies throughout the world.

Market Opportunity

Popular business and technology soothsaying magazines have trumpeted mapping as the next “killer app.” Even as far back as 2005, the MIT Technology Review dubbed it “Killer Maps” in their article– More…