Company: PayPal, San Jose, CA
Entry Submitted By: MSLGROUP
Company Description: At PayPal, is at the forefront of the digital payments revolution, processing almost 11.5 million payments for our customers per day. PayPal gives people better ways to connect to their money and to each other, helping them send money without sharing financial information and with the flexibility to pay using their PayPal account balances, bank accounts, PayPal Credit and credit cards.
Nomination Category: Management Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Tech Innovator of the Year

Nomination Title: James Barrese, CTO

Tell the story about what this nominated person has achieved since January 1 2014 (up to 650 words). Describe the impact he or she has had on your organization. Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms.

Under the leadership of CTO James Barrese, PayPal has unlocked the power of its technology platform and accelerated innovation to enhance its customers’ core product experience, creating technology that drives innovative shopping experiences in an evolving retail environment. From fingerprint authentication to replacing wallets with pay-anywhere capabilities, James worked to extend PayPal’s platform into uncharted territory, while allowing developers to innovate, drive disruption and lead global expansion.

James’s creative approach to redefining PayPal’s infrastructure and processes has enabled the company to drive innovation across payments – online, mobile and in-stores – and ship 54 new products in 2014, where in years past PayPal had typically produced two or three. These products include a combination of major core offering updates and net new solutions. The team unveiled a completely reimagined PayPal app to allow in-store payments, reinvented checkout, online merchant and consumer account experiences, as well as developed innovations such as fingerprint authentication on the latest Samsung smartphones and smartwatches.

James led the team to completely re-architect PayPal’s back-end infrastructure, in record time – a successful initiative that sped up payment processing by 50% in just the past year. After bringing in a group of highly accomplished, aggressive engineers and leaders who could rewrite the entire architecture, system, and experience, James’s first order of business was to speed up production cycles by converting 100% of PayPal’s front and middle-tier systems onto a private OpenStack cloud. As a result, product cycles are now 7x faster than a year ago, enabling PayPal to deploy products that reach consumers within a matter of minutes. PayPal was one of the first (and largest) companies in Silicon Valley to take this approach.

A key element of restructuring the IT organization involved co-locating engineers and product managers globally to work collaboratively on new products. With this effort, 3,700 people were relocated to completely revamped offices and cubicles to provide open-office seating. Within six months, PayPal’s global organization achieved a 76% agile maturity level. The agile implementation is 20-30x larger than any other company, and took place at an accelerated pace. At the same time, James’s team also moved from the waterfall method to agile. They were able to completely restructure teams and co-locate, incorporating DevOps (development operations).

Typically, operations teams are measured by a certain set of production goals and the engineering team is rewarded for a different set of goals. Instead, James cross-wired and gave shared goals to both teams: the operations teams have delivery goals as well as availability goals, and engineering teams have both delivery and availability goals. As a result of his redefining processes across the department, PayPal has one of the largest hybrid cloud deployments in the world and is working to eventually transfer all of its systems to this kind of topology.

PayPal also re-architected a number of our strategic back-end systems, and began leveraging open source technology. PayPal piloted Node.js, a platform that lends itself to building fast and highly-scalable network applications. Using Node.js, PayPal’s engineers use 60% fewer lines of code in 80% less time – freeing up resources to focus on more strategic and meaningful initiatives. PayPal is a supporter of the open source evolution of Node.js for the broader community.

Through this transformation, James has imbued operations with a renewed focus on the customer, challenging his teams to solve for customers’ unique problems vs. the traditional one-size-fits-all approach.

In bullet-list form, briefly summarize up to ten (10) of the chief accomplishments of this nominated person since the beginning of 2014.

• Led extensive re-architecting of back-end PayPal infrastructure and the complete transformation of PayPal’s software development process to a global enterprise Agile model

• Worked with the product team to roll out fingerprint authentication to Pebble, Android Wear and Samsung devices

• PayPal was granted 53 patents in 2014. Top examples include:
o 8,626,648: Ways to facilitate transactions over a mobile network.
o 8,626,650: Ways to link a secondary account to a primary financial account, with special access controls on the secondary account.
o 8,631,229: New encryption techniques.
o 8,756,657: Methods of mobile device authentication and tracking.

• Initiated major Open Source Projects (http://paypal.github.io):
o NemoJS: a selenium-webdriver automation for node.js
o SeLion: enabling test automation in Java
o HTML5 Accessible Video Player: supports captions and screen readers
o Card.io: fast, easy credit card scanning in mobile apps