Former Grubhub Executive Named SVP of Engineering in NYC and Amazon Veteran Appointed to Lead Rokt’s New Seattle Development Center

Rokt , the leading ecommerce technology company using machine learning to make transactions more relevant to each shopper, today announced that it has appointed two veteran technology executives to its leadership team. Former Grubhub executive Noel Curtis has joined Rokt’s New York City office as SVP of Engineering, while Amazon veteran John Walzer has been appointed to lead Rokt’s new Seattle Development Center.

Curtis will be responsible for all engineering efforts in New York, including demand-side systems and machine learning, reporting infrastructure, campaign management solutions, upsell systems, the experimentation platform, and user research and design. Walzer will be in charge of opening and staffing a new office in the Seattle area that will focus on accelerating development of new solutions for Rokt’s Ecommerce marketplace. Both Curtis and Walzer will report directly to Bill Barton, Chief Product and Engineering Officer at Rokt.

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“Noel Curtis and John Walzer are two notable leaders in technology and Rokt is excited to welcome them both to our team as we look ahead to a year full of new opportunities and growth,” said Bill Barton, Chief Product and Engineering Officerat Rokt. “We look forward to seeing Noel accelerate progress in our New York office and for John to usher in a new stage of growth for Rokt in Seattle, an incredible tech hub where we’ll be able to access a whole new pool of talent.”

Before joining Rokt, Curtis was Vice President of Technology at Grubhub, where he oversaw a large portion of the ecommerce marketplace with initiatives in discovery, subscriptions, loyalty, pricing and experimentation. He will draw on his experience applying machine learning to search and recommendations and working extensively with product and business teams on feature development and iteration in his new role overseeing Rokt’s engineering efforts.

Walzer is an engineering and technology leader with 20 years of experience in the ecommerce, telecommunications and multimedia industries, most recently serving as a Senior Software Development Manager for Amazon. He brings significant experience leading cross-functional and multi-team organizations with a focus on innovative, high-performing solutions to his new role at Rokt.

Rokt has also recently welcomed Google veteran Reuben Kan as Distinguished Engineer. Based in Sydney, Kan helps lead projects focused on system architecture, subsystem design, performance optimization, and client-facing APIs and SDKs. He previously served as Principal Engineer/Engineering Director of Google Maps and as Principal Engineer for Google Apps. Before joining Google, Kan was a Research Engineer for Silverbrook Research and a Software Engineer for CISRA.

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