Randal Budnikas
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Director, Digital & Web Experience

Platforms that run with fewer vendors, fewer manual steps, and fewer meetings.

More than twenty years running large web and email platforms across Amazon, Rosetta Stone, and James Madison University, turning platform work into measured outcomes and building the tools, in Python, Ruby, and AI agents, that remove the manual work.

~$90K/yr
Vendor Cost Eliminated
42%
Conversion Lift
34,000
Page Platform
12 yrs
No Downtime
Open to opportunities · Remote-first
Randal Budnikas
Ex-Amazon Engineer
97% Across 72 Rollouts
97% DubBot Accessibility
Python & Ruby
About

Running platforms end to end, and building the systems that keep them running.

More than twenty years across Amazon, Rosetta Stone, and James Madison University turned platform work into measured outcomes. Starting as an Amazon software engineer built a root-cause-first, customer-first habit that carried into every role after. Today that means owning quality, uptime, and cost for a 34,000 page platform serving more than 500 content owners.

At JMU, retiring two paid platforms by building their replacements in-house eliminated roughly $90,000 a year in vendor and manual cost. Redesigning three strategic pages around request-information and schedule-a-visit lifted prospective-student conversions 42 percent. Minute-level homepage monitoring and a daily 404 report have sustained availability with no downtime in 12 years, surfacing issues before the system administrators.

Recent work leans on AI directly. Prototyping design directions with AI turns ideas into reviewable mockups quickly, and an agentic content-QC pipeline keeps the platform clean: Python watchers flag new or changed pages and capture a screenshot of each change for visual review, then a daily LLM agent proposes editorial fixes, SEO title improvements, and content tags for human approval.

Platform scale34,000 pages
Content ownersMore than 500
CMSCascade
Legacy risk retiredMore than 360,000 files, 41 GB
Builds inPython, Ruby, AI agents
Measures inGA4, Looker, Tableau
Randal Budnikas
Amazon-trained engineer
Root-cause first, customer-first
Retiring the paid platforms meant building their replacements in-house, then keeping them up with no downtime in twelve years.
On owning quality, uptime, and cost
Platform

Twelve years, no downtime.

Every filled cell is a month held up on a 34,000 page platform, twelve years without downtime and counting into 2026. Brighter cells mark the year a paid tool was retired, a platform was rebuilt in-house, or a milestone shipped. Select a year to see what shipped.

0
Months Up, No Downtime
$0
Recurring Cost Eliminated
0%
Conversion Lift On Key Pages
2014

Select a year

Hover or tap a year column to see the platform milestone that shipped that year.

Career

Experience

Director, Digital and Web Experience
James Madison University
Jan 2014 to Present

Owning quality, uptime, and cost for a 34,000 page platform serving more than 500 content owners, retiring paid tools by building in-house replacements, and governing the CMS to 71 canonical object types.

  • Retired BrightEdge with an in-house SEO toolset (removing $50K per year, 2021) and replaced Adobe DPS with a CMS-driven mobile app platform (removing $34K per year, 2015), near $90K per year combined.
  • Raised prospective-student conversions 42 percent from 2017 to 2025 on three strategic pages, measured in GA4, by redesigning around request-information and schedule-a-visit.
  • Built minute-level homepage monitoring and a daily 404 report, sustaining availability with no downtime in 12 years and surfacing issues before system administrators.
  • Cut the home page from 1.4MB to 142KB, ran a navigation A/B test that raised page views 10 percent and cut bounce 9.53 percent, and removed more than 360,000 legacy files, freeing 41GB since 2020.
  • Built an agentic content-QC pipeline: Python watchers flag new or changed pages and capture screenshots for visual review, then a daily LLM agent proposes editorial fixes, SEO title improvements, and content tags for approval, and prototypes design directions with AI to reach reviewable mockups faster.
  • Migrated 223 sites to a new navigation standard and raised SEO site health to 90 percent in 2025 and to 96 percent in 2026.
  • Drove accessibility to a 97 percent DubBot score against WCAG 2.1 AA, cutting known issues from 13,424 to 6,475 ahead of the April 2026 Title II deadline, and auto-assigned 13,413 broken-link fixes over four years.
~$90K/YR ELIMINATED 42% CONVERSION NO DOWNTIME 12 YRS 97% DUBBOT
Principal Program Manager
Rosetta Stone
Feb 2013 to Jan 2014

Coordinating online and mobile product delivery for teams of up to 45 across engineering, QA, and stakeholders, and shipping the Rosetta Stone Kids product.

  • Delivered 9 initiatives in 9 months across 6 teams, all on time.
9 IN 9 MONTHS 6 TEAMS
Senior Manager / Product Owner
Rosetta Stone
Mar 2008 to Feb 2013

Leading a 5-person engineering team delivering 13 production services and 24 libraries, and replacing Adobe LiveCycle Collaboration with an in-house build in 9 months.

  • Reached a 97 percent success rate across 72 production rollouts, defined as no rollbacks and on time.
97% SUCCESS 72 ROLLOUTS
Software Development Engineer
Amazon.com
Jan 2003 to Feb 2008

Building the org's first developer training program and owning 42 code packages across 11,863 files, earning Outstanding, the highest rating.

  • Cut defect count from 160 to 15 and new-developer ramp from 3 months to 1 month across a few dozen developers.
  • Authored more than 350 reference documents.
OUTSTANDING RATING 160 TO 15 DEFECTS
Earlier Engineering & Web Roles
Morse Best Innovation · Emercis · Mindcorps
Morse Best InnovationWeb developer delivering .NET solutions for Microsoft and Wells Fargo.
EmercisWeb developer building ASP and Java Servlet e-commerce software in Seattle.
MindcorpsWeb developer building IIS e-commerce applications for clients including Microsoft and Universal Studios.
Proficiency

Core Skills

Recognition

Awards, credentials, and background.

Awards & Recognition

  • Featured in The Chronicle of Higher Education for biometric eye-tracking research on user experience.
  • CASE District III Grand Gold, Stop the Spread campaign.
  • Best of CASE District III, multichannel storytelling.
  • Education Digital Marketing Gold, Madison Magazine App.
  • JMU IMPACT3 Leadership Development Program.

Certifications

  • Certified Scrum Master
  • UX Design Certification
  • Advanced Google Analytics
  • Google Data Studio

Education

  • Biola University, Bachelor of Music, Music Composition
AMAZON ROSETTA STONE JAMES MADISON UNIVERSITY MORSE BEST INNOVATION EMERCIS MINDCORPS
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Remote-first · Harrisonburg, VA