Francis Shanahan[.com]

SVP of Engineering @ Audible.com

"...a player-coach, building teams and shipping software."

Audible.com

I lead the Core Engineering group at Audible, an Amazon company. My group owns the technical direction for the company. That includes our service platform (https://api.audible.com) and frameworks like our multi-tenant globalized web stack and our Android and iOS frameworks among other things. As an example I designed the streaming platform for Audible that's used everywhere, including the Amazon Echo. I also oversee the architecture group, our hiring process, our engineer mentoring programs, developer onboarding and the occasional Hackathon.

Amazon

Audible was acquired in 2008 and we've fully integrated into the Amazon eco-system. We're on a mission to bring the spoken word to everyone in the world. We provide the largest catalog of audiobooks (100TB of data) across multiple marketplaces and surfaces including Fire, Kindle and the Alexa platform (via Amazon Echo). It's an awesome team and you should come check us out.

Extra Curricular

You can't restrict curiosity to 9-5 so there's always some side project going on. In 2007 I wrote a book on Web Services and I've had a bunch of patents issued over the years (e.g. http://bit.ly/lPraUm). I also sit on the advisory board of The NYC Media Lab. In April 2016 we held our first public Hackathon event for Audible at Civic Hall. It was a huge success, checkout the highlight reel.