Talent

OpenCircle advocates a business philosophy that eschews hierarchy in favor of partnership.
Peter Atkins
Chief Executive Officer
A developer at heart, Pete founded OpenCircle to explore, realize and release the full potential of open source development.
Those who know him know that Pete is a goodwill magnet who not only promises the goods; he consistently delivers them. If a special accolade were to be awarded for “Entrepreneurial Magic”, Pete Atkins would be the de facto winner, every time. Pete on Pete: “The best thing about being the CEO, of course, is that I can get the CEO todo just about anything I damn-well pleases.”
Add one part Trusty Rainmaker with two parts Transparent Communicator. Mix in a smattering of Expert Web Developer and a pinch of “I Work with an Absolutely Superb Professional Team”. Stir slowly. Let sit for 24 hours. Serve chilled. Expect delicious results.
Mike Milano
Director, Application Architecture
As the Sr. Engineer for Application Architecture and Development at OpenCircle (a.k.a. our consummate go-to Web Ninja), Mike Milano forms the backbone of the OC workhorse. With nearly a decade of lucrative open source development experience under his belt, he’s also conversant in eight different languages, namely: Unix, MySQL, PHP, JavaScript, HTML and CSS.
If all of these acronyms mean anything to you, you know how much they mean to us. With a history at McAfee and Panasonic’s Avionics Division, Mike creates the back-end blueprints that become the architecture and helps to define and design OpenCircle’s problem-solving approach for each unique scenario. From the inception of a single idea to full-blown product deployment, Mike is constantly teaching Drupal how to perform slick new tricks — and teaching us how to genuflect regularly at the sheer magnitude of his smack-down talent.
During his spare time, Milano enjoys velocity. Specifically, flight. Airplanes, sailplanes or hang gliders — if it moves like quicksilver and defies gravity, count Mike in.
Susan Malmrose
Director, Front-End Development
Susan Malmrose is timeless...like a fully-restored, mint-condition, candy-apple red ’55 Porsche Speedster. Or, perhaps, like France’s infamous $160,000 bottle of 1787 Chateau Lafite Bordeaux — if only that delicate vintage were brimming with HTML and CSS code instead of grapes from the world’s most expensive vineyard.
As OpenCircle’s premier Front-End Developer, Susan confesses a unique attraction to and talent for theming — an aspect of open source design that essentially “skins” a website to maximize visual appeal and optimize GUI functionality. About as humble as they come, Malmrose could go the typical corporate bio route, listing her educational achievements and professional credentials, but we prefer that you simply sip the wine and decide for yourself.
When she’s not ensuring that even the smallest detail of your site displays correctly, Susan enjoys the pursuit of elegance and beauty through photography. She’s also a sucker for the always invigorating and enjoyable company of fresh strawberries (dipping chocolate is a plus).
Zachary Lazare
Creative Director
Word around the office is that Zac Lazare’s quite an accomplished graphic designer. Either that, or “he’s the guy who pushes pixels around” and “makes our pictures pretty”. Depends on the creative expertise of who you ask.
The story goes something like this: as a young lad, back in the green-screen days, he happened upon the novelty of a computer mouse. With the curious device firm in hand, Zac doodled around in Mac Paint for hours, fascinated by the program. The experience evidently activated his artistic genes. He hasn’t looked back since.
The Web is clearly a visual medium, but in its design there’s a fine line between practical creativity and a collection of flashy elements that simply try too hard; between clean and messy real estate; between seemingly effortless, transparent brand support and design that dominates user focus. Lazare walks that tightrope like a pro (or, at the very least, like someone who doesn’t realize he’s a pro, but absolutely is).
Zac is the anathema of the banal — a free-spirited culture nomad on a mission to squeeze the most out of life. He wintered kindergarten in the Swiss Alps. As a young boy, he called a small Caribbean island home. As a teenager, he settled among California’s redwood forests with his parents. Other than some especially meaningful time in Israel, one of Zac’s most recent escapades was a 30-day trip to India.
Eugene Chupkin
Technology Director
Without the Eugene Chupkins of the world, there simply wouldn’t be this fascinating alternate dimension we’ve come to call The Internet. Eugene is outrageously talented at constructing the nuts-and-bolts, behind-the-scenes infrastructure of hardware systems, servers and networks that power the World Wide Web.
Boasting a background cloaked in stealthy overtones — including stints at NASA and Sun Microsystems — Chupkin is a walking knowledgebase of proven methodologies for engineering your ideal data center. We lament that his intellect is light-years ahead of anyone else at OpenCircle, and we also apologize ahead of time for his peculiar tech-speak (phrases like “Cisco IOS switches”, “F5 BIG-IP web application load balancers” and “Red Hat Enterprise Linux” are not uncommon). In an effort to avoid any misunderstandings, we provide our clients with a cereal-box decoder ring to help them decipher his unusual musings.
When he’s not evaluating and building the infrastructure for our next open source solution, Eugene dabbles in IP telephony and cars. Definitely cars. Let’s also not forget that, had he been born a girl, OpenCircle would be relying on one “Jenna” Chupkin for our diverse technology needs. Thanks for being a “Eugene”, Eugene!
Add teamwork to talent, and our potential becomes exponential.
This perspective demands that our executive team demonstrate a rare combination of attributes:
Time-tested,...
proven expertise within their given specialization
A shared passion...
to engineer sophisticated open-source websites
Frank dialogue...
based on implicit trust and well-informed opinions
An obsession...
with solving complex, formidable web development issues, and
The ambition...
to innovate methods that push the envelope of current technology
In other words, we're a culture of business-savvy tech addicts and creatives who thrive on open, honest, long-term partnerships and who relish the idea of crushing the next big challenge.
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