It’s no secret that PayPal is undergoing a major transformation across its technology platform to create more innovative product experiences. You saw this with the building of PayPal’s private cloud leveraging OpenStack. You’ve experienced it through our Battle Hack series and the upcoming NodeDay (a conference all about using NodeJS in the Enterprise). There’s more to come this year too, and here’s one way we are bringing on more talented technologists to help us continue the momentum.
We are excited to announce that a major open source leader, Danese Cooper, has joined as PayPal’s first-ever Head of Open Source. Danese comes to PayPal with an incredible track record as a technologist, strategist and evangelist. And if this doesn’t say it all, she was the first Chief Open Source Evangelist at Sun and the first female Chief Technology Officer of Wikimedia Foundation. She has strong open source roots that began with a decade of service on the Board of the Open Source Initiative, and extend into current board memberships with the Drupal Association and the Open Source Hardware Association. Danese also serves as a Member of the Apache Software Foundation.
Why PayPal?
Besides using PayPal for online shopping and organizing philanthropic fundraising efforts in her personal life, Danese sees that a technology sea change is happening at PayPal. She is eager to contribute game changing open source strategies for the company, and we can’t wait to see what she brings to PayPal.
Late last year, PayPal saw huge success with the open source release of our node.js application framework, kraken. Moving our frontend application framework into the public sphere was a major step for us as a company in not only giving back to the node community through our contribution, but in engaging with the external engineering community in a new way.
Bringing Danese on board will continue to extend this success. The addition of Danese to our PayPal team strengthens our world-class engineering organization. She will work to help us deploy best-in-class open source technology across our stack and drive contributions back to open source projects to increase our technical impact globally. -- Kirsten Wolberg, Vice President, Technology Business Operations, as posted on the PayPal Forward blog.