QUALIFICATIONS

Peter Mierau currently works with software startups, but also worked many years at large companies like Adobe Systems in various software engineering management roles. He has been a founder or principal of several software startup companies, and has held VP and CTO positions at mid-sized software companies.

Qualifications

  • Education
    • Purdue University.
    • Bachelor of Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering.
  • Cloud computing
    • Hands-on devops for both Linux and Windows Server.
    • Created entire server architecture and wrote server software in PHP for printui.com including many RESTful APIs used by PrintUI clients.
    • Created server architecture to support a mobile news reader app.
    • Specialist in global, scalable, high-availability server solutions as well as small, pragmatic solutions for startups.
    • Extensive use of Amazon Web Services, especially EC2, S3, SQS, Cloudwatch, and DynamoDB.
    • Developed a private cloud computing environment that leveraged high-performance firewalls and load balancers in the data centers.
  • Business acumen
    • Principal at four startups as principal or founder, all acquired by larger companies.
    • Acquired angel and bootstrap funding.
    • Worked directly with many OEM customers such as HP, Xerox, and NEC.
    • Created and managed budgets of millions of dollars.
    • Ensured that product requirements were realistic, but that met business needs.
    • Developed business models.
  • Strong management expertise
    • Built ten teams from scratch both at startups and at Adobe Systems to create award-winning new software products.
    • Managed productive teams, both small and large, consisting of as many as 37 managers, software developers, and testers using agile and traditional methodologies.
    • Met integration milestones for huge software projects under exacting conditions (i.e. missing the milestone would have meant killing the project).
    • Successfully worked with geographically diverse resources in India, Japan, Romania, England, Canada, and all parts of the US, including transition of projects off shore.
  • SaaS data center design
    • Independently of IT, created three data centers for Adobe to support 39 SaaS teams with 6 million users, including specification and purchase of millions of dollars for equipment and co-location sites.
    • Used lean management techniques to avoid bloat.
    • Maximized usage of white-box servers and open-source software to substantially reduce costs.
    • Maintained a 99.97% data center up time.  Provided 24x7x365 support.
  • Innovator
    • Co-inventor on four issued patents.
    • Key contributor in defining new products--lots of feature brainstorming as well as profiling of potential customers.
    • Invented ways to overcome road blocks that would have torpedoed products.
    • Launched and guided several R&D projects with the goal of prototyping potential products, some of which were highlighted at company meetings to illustrate Adobe’s strategic direction.