Kevin Scott is LinkedIn's senior vice president of engineering. The University of Virgina graduate is credited with saving LinkedIn's back-end systems from the brink of destruction.
BusinessWeek reports in a profile of Scott that by November 2011 he had enough. His company's system was taxed as the website began to attract more users and the engineers were burnt out.
So Scott froze development of new features so that his team could overhaul the professional social network's architecture.
While this may not seem like a big deal Scott tells BusinessWeek that, “You go public, have all the world looking at you, and then we tell management we’re not going to deliver anything new while all of engineering works on this project for the next two months,” Scott says. “It was a scary thing.”
Scott's decision has propelled LinkedIn's website to the forefront of technology. "Under Scott, LinkedIn has embraced modern Web software," BusinessWeek says. Even more impressive, Scott's data storage and messaging systems have been open-sourced and used by other companies.
Scott has only been with LinkedIn for two years, but during that time he has strengthened the company's foundation. Before LinkedIn, Scott worked at cloud storage company Box.net, Google, AdMob, and even had an internship at Microsoft.
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