Seth Holloway, PhD

Passionate technology leader with a lust for life

Selected Work Experience

February 2022 Present

Salesforce.com

Director, Software Engineering

Manage four great, distributed, mostly remote teams working on Salesforce mission-critical auth and identity products
Manage ~30 engineers of all levels across five timezones with specialties in software development (mobile, back-end, front-end, full-stack), distributed systems, DevOps, site reliability engineering (SR/SRE), and security
Own multi-factor authentication (MFA) in the monolith serving billions of verifications per month. Technologies include Java, Spring, Oracle, Perforce (P4)
Own the multi-factor authentication (MFA) microservice backing hundreds of millions of logins per month. Technologies include Python, Django, Django Declarative APIs (DDA), Node.js, Salesforce Lightning Design System (SLDS), Lightning Web Components (LWC), Cypress, Heroku, PostgreSQL, Redis, Git, GitHub
Own the Salesforce Authenticator mobile applications with over 3,000,000 monthly active users and ratings of 4.8/5 (iOS) and 4.4/5 (Android). Technologies include Swift, Objective-C, Android, Java, Kotlin, SQLite.
Own the microservices authorization service, a complex distributed system that handles over 1,500,000,000 requests per month with 5-9s (99.999%) global availability over multiple years. Technologies include Docker, Kubernetes (k8s), LDAP, Ping Directory Server, Java, Python, Bash, Jenkins, Git
Collaborate with product managers, support, designers, writers, data analysts, and other leaders to solve problems
Austin Site Lead for Technology and Product

February 2020 January 2022

Salesforce.com

Senior Manager, Software Engineering

Managed two great, distributed, mostly remote teams working on Salesforce mission-critical auth and identity products
Managed ~20 engineers of all levels across five timezones with specialties in software development (mobile, back-end, front-end, full-stack), distributed systems, DevOps, site reliability engineering (SR/SRE), and security
Owned the microservices authorization service, a complex distributed system that handles over 150,000,000 requests per month with 5-9s (99.999%) global availability over multiple years. Technologies include Docker, Kubernetes (k8s), LDAP, Ping Directory Server, Java, Python, Bash, Jenkins, Git
Owned the Multi-factor authentication (MFA) service backing millions of logins per month. Technologies include Python, Django, Django Declarative APIs (DDA), Node.js, Salesforce Lightning Design System (SLDS), Lightning Web Components (LWC), Cypress, Heroku, PostgreSQL, Redis, Git, GitHub
Owned the Salesforce Authenticator mobile applications with over 500,000 monthly active users and ratings of 4.8/5 (iOS) and 4.4/5 (Android). Technologies include Swift, Objective-C, Android, Java, Kotlin, SQLite.
Collaborated with product managers, support, designers, writers, data analysts, and other leaders to solve problems
Ran the Austin engineering office (sans Tableau acquisition)

January 2018 January 2020

Salesforce.com

Manager, Software Engineering

Managed two great, distributed teams working on Salesforce mission-critical auth and identity products
Presented "10 Easy Ways to Secure Your Org" at Dreamforce 2018, receiving a speaker score of 4.61/5.00 from 184 attendees.
Ran the Austin engineering office

April 2015 January 2018

Salesforce.com

Lead Software Engineer

Toopher was acquired by Salesforce.com on April 1, 2015.
Integrated Toopher's technology into the Salesforce Authenticator app and Salesforce Identity product.
Ported complex Django app from Google App Engine to Heroku, upgrading all packages, matching features, and improving the maintainability.
Developed new features and maintained existing features in our API (Python, Django) and iOS app (Objective-C, Swift).
Tuned database and queries to reduce average response time by 20% for our two-factor authentication (2FA) API.
Redesigned iOS user experience.
Created an artificial intelligence (AI) / machine learning (ML) API to assess risk of user logins (scikit-learn, pandas, Jupyter, TensorFlow).

May 2013 April 2015

Toopher

Senior Software Engineer, Evangelist

Developed and maintained software for Toopher's location-based two-factor authentication, including language libraries (Python, Ruby, PHP, Perl, Java, .NET), mobile apps (Android, iOS), and the backend API (Python, Django, Google App Engine).
Sped tests up by 300% ensuring they continued to be run and provide value.
Implemented self-service billing system using Stripe allowing the company to make money with little to no manual effort.
Owned developer experience (DX).
Mentored and guided multiple interns and peers.
Spread the word about Toopher through presentations and training sessions, white papers, blog posts, comments, and face-to-face client interactions.

October 2011 May 2013

Blackbaud (formerly Convio)

Senior Software Engineer, Team Lead

Worked on a large SaaS CRM application contributing to various features like duplicate management and direct response. Worked in Java (JEE, Spring), JavaScript, HTML, CSS, SQL, and Salesforce (Apex, SOQL, VisualForce), Ruby, and Node.js. Continually drove quality inside and out by leading and organizing training sessions and developer discussions, mentoring peers, and creating widely used internal tools.

May 2011 present

Vaczoway Solutions, Inc.

Co-founder, VP of Engineering, CTO

Created applications and custom solutions using a variety of technologies, including Facebook, iOS, Twitter, Java, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, Ruby on Rails 3, PHP, Python, MySQL, SQLite, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Node.js, Google App Engine, Heroku, Amazon EC2/AWS, and other Cloud platforms, data mining, machine learning, information retrieval/web crawling, and search engine optimization (SEO).

September 2006 June 2011

IBM

Software Engineer

Architected, designed, developed and managed the automated build verification test (BVT) using STAF/STAX, Python, UNIX shell, Rational Functional Tester (RFT), and VMware saving over 80 person-hours per week. Side projects included teaching and documentation, an automated status page, and build improvements.

August 2005 May 2011

The University of Texas at Austin

Research Assistant

Applied cutting-edge web development techniques to create a RESTful architecture that allows novice developers to quickly and easily create mobile and pervasive computing applications. Combining this architecture with multiple user studies (surveys, paper prototypes, focus groups, and direct observation) I was used to build a usable smart home using Java ME on embedded hardware and Ruby on Rails. The work was presented to hundreds of people at numerous conferences and workshops.

Fall 2005 May 2011

The University of Texas at Austin

Lead DevOps, Webmaster and Systems Administrator (sysadmin)

Created and maintained several departmental web pages. Developed a system utilizing Java, XML, and HTML to quickly update the Publications page. Designed and managed laboratory computing infrastructure supporting SVN, htaccess, and MediaWiki.

August 2009 December 2010

The University of Texas at Austin

Teaching Assistant

Instructed and graded assignments for about 100 students over three semesters of Management of Projects and Processes, Project Management and Evaluation. Ultimately, I received approval ratings of 3.8/4.0.

Education

June 2007 May 2011

The University of Texas at Austin

PhD, Software Engineering

Dissertation: "Simplifying the Programming of Intelligent Environments" (research into usable RESTful smart homes)

August 2005 May 2007

The University of Texas at Austin

MS, Software Engineering

Thesis: "Sliverware: A Framework for Developing Collaborative Applications" (rapid application development with vertical slivers of middleware)

August 2001 August 2005

The University of Texas at Austin

BS, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Completed degree after co-oping for a full year with Texas Instruments

Skills

Technologies
Python, Django, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, jQuery, AngularJS, Java, Ruby, Jekyll, Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Flask, PHP, Python, Pandas, scikit-learn, Jupyter, Data Science, Data Analysis, Clojure, R, Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, SVN, Git, Bugzilla, Rally, PivotalTracker, Bash, Tmux, Vim, Eclipse, JetBrains IDEs, Maven, Salesforce, Docker, Kubernetes (k8s), Jenkins, CI/CD
General
Technical management, leadership, strategy, cloud-based application engineering, DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), growing teams, teaching individuals and organizations, product management, Agile development

Honors and Awards

  • President's Award Winner -- 2023
  • Patent "Conversational authentication" -- 2023
  • Trust Champion -- 2022
  • Patent "Automating responses to authentication requests using unsupervised computer learning techniques" -- 2021
  • Patent "Conversational authentication" -- 2020
  • Startup (Toopher) Acquired -- 2015
  • "Golden Globe" for Responsive Design -- 2012
  • Patent “System and method for user skill determination” -- 2012
  • Thrust Fellow -- 2005-2009
  • MCD Fellow -- 2005-2007
  • College Scholar -- 2002-2005
  • Runner up, Moore Elementary Slogan Contest

Leadership and Community Involvement

  • Salesforce Austin Site Lead
  • Summer of Learning and Teaching, Creator, Lecturer
  • Talk Tuesdays, Co-organizer
  • Students in Software Engineering, Founder, President
  • Austin Software Mentorship, Founding Member
  • Texas Instruments Campus Liaison
  • Texas Instruments Co-op Social Committee, President