Randy Shepherd

Recurser, Recurse Center Brooklyn, NY

Jan 2025 – Present

CTO, GIPHY → Meta → Shutterstock New York, NY

Mar 2015 – Dec 2019 as VPE; Jan 2020 – Aug 2024 as CTO

Scaled the engineering team from 8 to 54, establishing a culture of innovation that supported two successful acquisitions.
Implemented organizational structures—including product planning, technical strategy, team structure, career ladders, and technical practices—that aligned with company objectives and promoted employee growth.
Spearheaded many technical infrastructure improvements, including the migration of from monolith to microservices and transitioned infrastructure to Kubernetes, reducing production API servers from 25 to 6 and achieving a 14% reduction in AWS ECS costs while serving 70 million daily API requests and a billion pieces of media served daily.
Built and led the ad technology team, generating $19 million in revenue in its inaugural year.
Managed key technical relationship with the largest social media and messaging platforms.
Served as a key member of the acquisition team during Meta’s due diligence process, producing discovery documentation and participating in interviews with Meta’s legal and acquisition teams to ensure compliance with security, IT policies, and regulatory standards (COPA, CCPA, GDPR).
Oversaw diverse teams responsible for media ingestion, API development, microservices, AI, full-stack dev and data infrastructure.

Clinical Assistant Professor, NYU New York, NY

Aug 2016 – Apr 2018

Taught undergraduate courses in systems, programming languages, and computer science to classes of 50–199 students.
Developed and delivered courses such as:
- Object Oriented Programming – An upper-level elective project course in which students implemented a transpiler from a subset of Java to C++.
- Computer Systems Organization – A 200-level course covering the internal structure of computers, assembly language programming, pointers in high-level languages, and other topics.
Advised students on academic and career advancement.

Director of Engineering, Tapad New York, NY

Feb 2013 – May 2016

Led two engineering teams (4 direct reports overseeing 10 engineers) focused on developing software for online advertising campaign management.
Drove hiring initiatives—including resume screening, interviews, internship hosting, and recruiting through specialty programs such as HackNY—to strengthen the organization.
Collaborated with the Product Manager to define product roadmaps and develop features for the ad DSP business, including an internal CMS and distributed systems for real-time bidding.
Oversaw the decomposition of a monolithic bidder application into microservices, achieving a 20% reduction in operating costs.
Developed a domain-specific language for authorization and authentication in Scala, adopted across internal applications.
Directed teams that built products generating over half of Tapad’s $57.3M revenue in 2015.

Staff Engineer, iWin Inc. San Francisco, CA

Oct 2010 – Aug 2012

Senior Software Engineer, Donovan Data Systems New York, NY

Jun 2008 – Oct 2010

Senior Software Engineer, iWin Inc. San Francisco, CA

Apr 2002 – Dec 2007

Software Engineer, Mindseye Inc. Boston, MA

Feb 2001 – Dec 2001

Summary