(Austin, Texas) February 15, 2023 – The go-to video workflow company for broadcasters around the world, latakoo, is delighted to announce two new hires who will be leading the company’s innovation and technology team into the future.
latakoo has named Kristen Mallory as Vice President of Technology and Thomas Rognon as Principal Engineer.
Both Mallory and Rognon come with a proven track record of success at multi-billion dollar companies within the technology sector, including Workday and DoorDash. Mallory and Rognon have a deep passion for helping companies grow efficiently, problem solve, and create new innovations for the end user. The two will work hand-in-hand at maximizing efficiencies at latakoo, building new systems to improve the latakoo experience for users.
“We’ve been recruiting both of these talents for some time. To get both Kristen and Thomas at the same time is sort of like having Batman AND Batman. And we think this duo will be just as dynamic in building cloud infrastructure that will help us scale at speed. They will make big changes and lead the dream team that we have been assembling to take latakoo into the future,” said Jade Kurian, Co-founder and President of latakoo.
As Vice President of Technology, Mallory will lead the engineering side of latakoo.
He gravitated towards computers and technology from an early age – breaking through his first security system on his parents’ PC at just eight years old.
Prior to coming on board at latakoo, Mallory was the Infrastructure and Security Manager for Zimit, a price quote configuration company that was acquired by Workday in 2021. At Zimit, Mallory rebuilt the Amazon infrastructure, leading to enormous scaling.
A veteran of the start-up scene, Mallory has helped generate growth for companies in the travel, finance technology, and search engine marketing industries.
As a Senior Developer and Development Manager for defi SOLUTIONS, a finance technology company used by automotive companies such as Toyota, Mazda and Yamaha, he helped to build a sophisticated platform that remains an industry standard nearly a decade later.
Mallory’s other roles include a leadership position with Vitacost that involved managing an integration with grocery giant Kroger. Under his leadership, Kroger began running its e-commerce website on Vitacost’s technology.
Rognon was also drawn to computers at an early age. Instead of spending every waking hour outside on his family’s ranch in Texas, he was fixated on his mom’s work computer.
As a teenager, he spent time coding and writing programs. He built video games that his peers could play on their classroom calculators, and quickly realized he enjoyed making the games more than playing them.
Rognon served for five years in the U.S. Navy, winning awards for the software he wrote while serving – even though that wasn’t part of his job description as a yeoman.
After leaving the military, Rognon began taking classes at the University of Texas-San Antonio, where he also worked as a researcher and was published twice. When he started receiving job offers in tech, Rognon left the university and took a position with cybersecurity firm Def-Logix, where he wrote advanced security software.
Rognon has also worked in digital asset management for OnPrem, where he led projects for companies such as Fox and Disney, and he also led the design and implementation of a global platform supporting millions of users as the cloud architect for gambling giant Aristocrat. Rognon’s design for Aristocrat accomplished greater scale while using significantly fewer people and less infrastructure costs than a similar system. Rognon had recently started at DoorDash, when he decided to join latakoo as its principal engineer.
Link to full release: https://tinyurl.com/3na2paaa
About latakoo
latakoo is the fastest, easiest way and most secure way to transfer high-quality video files from anywhere to anywhere, regardless of file size or Internet connection. Based in Austin, Texas, the company was founded in 2010 by two award-winning journalists (Paul Adrian and Jade Kurian) for journalists. latakoo enables professional broadcasters and production companies to automate delivery of video content to different asset managers and digital platforms and ingest or playout servers seamlessly. latakoo’s clients are some of the world’s largest media organizations, including Nexstar Media Group and Euronews. In 2020, The International Trade Association for the Broadcast & Media Industry (IABM) named latakoo its Company of the Year and selected latakoo President Jade Kurian as a finalist for its Technology Leader of the Year award.
