Director's Fellow MIT Media Lab Boston, MA
Joined a cohort of amazing people to be a 2018 Director's fellow.
- Work within the various groups at Media Lab
- Work with the E14 fund to help their entrepreneurs
- Work directly with Joi Ito
Senior Director, Software Development Paypal, Inc Chicago, Il August 2015 - April 2018
Through the acquisition of Modest, inc by Paypal, Harper joined the Braintree team to help lead the commerce initiatives
- Helped establish and define contextual commerce and an emergent commerce function.
- Did research about commerce in South East Asia
- Helped facilitate build engineering teams and Braintree, Venmo and PayPal
- Focused and fostered diversity efforts at the Chicago office of Braintree and PayPal
Founder / Chief Executive Officer Modest, Inc Chicago, Il December 2012 - August 2015
Modest is a mobile commerce platform that gives consumers the ability to buy from anywhere in just a few taps.
- Built a platform that enabled retailers to launch and support mobile buying apps.
- Hired amazing team.
- Launched beautiful and highly converting apps into the iOS app store
- Sold company in late 2015 to PayPal, Inc
Chief Technology Officer Obama for America Chicago, Il April 2011 - December 2012
Obama for America is the re-election campaign for President Barack Obama.
- Hired world class technology team to build the technology platform for the reelection campaign.
- Worked with team to help define and architect the solutions that helped reelect the president.
Customer in Residence Rackspace Hosting San Antonio, TX October 2009 - April 2010
Rackspace is an IT hosting company with a focus on cloud.
- Worked with professional services department to help clients find the right solution.
- Worked with executive staff to help define better customer experience
- Represented Rackspace at conferences and small events.
Chief Technology Officer skinnyCorp, LLC Chicago, IL August 2005 - October 2009
skinnyCorp is the parent company of the Threadless.com.
- Acted as technology leader for a company of ~60 people with revenue of ~20-30M
- Worked in a close team to design, execute and manage community websites
- Lead the technology to support Threadless.com growth.
- Grew Threadless.com from 2 barely functioning servers to over 45 devices.
- Helped bridge the gap between the internet and reality with 2 retail stores.
- Spoke about our technology at various events and conference, representing skinnyCorp and the Threadless vision.
- Managed a small team of engineers to handle the day to day maintenance and projects.
Summer Intern Squidoo June 2005 - August 2005
Squidoo is a community website that allows users to create pages for subjects of interest.
- Worked with Seth Godin and an amazing team to help build an design the initial version of Squidoo.
- Helped define initial vision and technology for Squidoo before core staff was hired
Web Programmer Cramer and Krasselt Chicago, IL October 2004 - July 2005
Cramer And Krasselt is an industry leading medium sized advertising agency.
- Lead technologist and technical liaison to account management and creative staff.
- Lead architect for client web applications. Worked with clients Airtran.com, Careerbuilder.com, and Barton Beers. (PHP, MYSQL, LINUX)
- Lead engineer on full life cycle of Super Bowl viral campaign, Yeknominc.com. (PHP, MYSQL, LINUX)
- Managed legacy operations for client web application management. (Perl, Navitaire SkyLights, JAVA)
Security and Software Engineer World Book Publishing Chicago, IL June 2001 - October 2004
World Book Publishing is a leading publisher of encyclopedias and children's learning material.
- Lead development staff and managed offshore engineering team. Worked to develop and maintain World Book Publishing's client facing web presence. Helped usher in new technology and standards - moving from AIX, DB2 on IBM hardware to Solaris, Oracle on Sun Hardware. Introduced open source technology and solution. (Solaris, JAVA, DB2, AIX, XML)
- Wrote desktop content management utilities to aid in management of XML content by non-technical staff. (C#, PHP)
- Developed practices to insure content accessibility and data portability. (JAVA, XML, XSLT, C#, DB2)
- Helped develop a solid software security plan. Worked with system engineers to architect a secure production environment. Deployed production servers using open source software to meet budget constraints. (LINUX, NMAP, NESSUS, SOLARIS, AIX)