Russ Nemhauser

I started my career on Wall Street in the early 1990s as a programmer and analyst. After five years in Manhattan I moved to Los Angeles in 1997, working in commercial real estate before landing in online commerce in the late 90s, where I had a hand in shipping stores for Spencer Gifts, Captain Morgan, the Universal Studios Store, Crown Royal, and a few others.

A stint at Microsoft as a Program Manager followed, where I worked with vendors and teams around the world to bring Microsoft tools to students, including the Imagine Cup competition site and a student social network. In 2006 I returned to entertainment to architect a home video production system for a major movie studio, and it was there that I first developed a real affinity for usability and the craft of building things people actually enjoy using. A return to Microsoft and then a stretch at MySpace deepened my interest in code quality and testability, the less glamorous foundations that good products quietly depend on.

In 2011 I joined lynda.com as Director of Engineering, which led me to LinkedIn in 2015, and to Dublin, where I've been ever since. I spent six years at LinkedIn working on the Economic Graph and the enterprise Learning product, then moved to LearnUpon as VP of Engineering, helping shape the company through a few years of meaningful growth and change.

These days I run Merano Studio, a small outfit through which I design and build apps for the Apple platforms as well as SaaS applications.