Who We Are

Tom Mornini

Founder and CTO

Tom Mornini co-founded Engine Yard to provide the infrastructure and support necessary to fuel development of Ruby on Rails applications. He has spent nearly 30 years as a software programmer and software architect and 20 years leading companies as a serial entrepreneur. Prior to starting Engine Yard in 2006 with co-founders Lance Walley, Ezra Zygmuntowicz and Jayson Vantuyl, he created FaceBridge Research, Inc., a billing service for video-over-IM systems, and InfoMania Printing and Prepress, Inc., an innovator in Internet print procurement. He also served as software architect at Quios.com, responsible for designing the platform that allowed the mobile messaging company to grow into a global provider with more than 130 employees.

Lance Walley

Founder and CEO

Lance is CEO and Co-Founder. He started working with computers in junior high school (1982), and although he’s been a software and hardware developer about 50% of the time, Lance’s interest is more on the business and organizational side of things. This leads him to start and grow businesses with partners who have greater technical vision. He started an embedded computing business with a friend in 1987, then followed with several businesses: 1) mobile phone text messaging; 2) billing systems for instant-messaging; and 3) staffing and recruiting for Perl and Ruby on Rails. Lance co-founded Engine Yard in 2006 with Tom Mornini, Ezra Zygmuntowicz, and Jayson Vantuyl.

Jayson Vantuyl

Founder and Software Architect

Jayson is an amazing Linux system administrator, designer of Linux OS’s, clustering, and networking—among many other things. He’s responsible for much of the magic that makes the cluster run.

Ezra Zygmuntowicz

Founder and Senior Fellow

Ezra Zygmuntowicz is a founder and developer at Engine Yard, the leading provider of fully managed Ruby and Rails Hosting and Deployment. He has been active in the Ruby community for over four years, and has contributed to many open source projects, including Rails, Merb, Rack and Rubinius. He is co-author of Deploying Rails Applications, published by The Pragmatic Programmers, and speaks at Ruby, Rails and Cloud Computing related events throughout the country.

Sunil Pareenja

VP of Finance

Sunil Pareenja is the Vice President of Finance at Engine Yard with responsibility for managing the company’s accounting, financial planning and analysis, treasury, tax, and human resources functions. Sunil is a financial executive with extensive experience in mergers and acquisitions, public company reporting and compliance requirements, international finance, and helping to grow technology companies . Prior to joining Engine Yard, Sunil was Vice President and Corporate Controller at Tumbleweed Communications Corp. where he managed all aspects of finance for a global, publicly-traded company. Prior to Tumbleweed, Sunil held senior finance positions at Hewlett-Packard Company and Arthur Andersen LLP. Sunil is a Certified Public Accountant in the State of California and holds an MBA from the Walter Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley and a BA in Business Economics from the University of California, Los Angeles, graduating with honors.

Joe Arnold

Director of Engineering

Joe Arnold has a background in growing and leading engineering teams. He brings expertise from enterprise network management and a long history of building web-based applications. Prior to Engine Yard, Joe brought his longtime experience with Agile development methodologies to Yahoo!.

James Ash

Director of Sales

James joined our Management team in May of 2008. James has years of Sales and Account Management experience in the Software and Services markets. In the past, he has built teams to facilitate the early success or new market penetration at companies like Oracle, Netscape, Loudcloud and SAP. James is now helping Engine Yard build a world class Sales and Account Management team to facilitate the continued success of our rapid customer adoption.

Taylor Weibley

Director of Support

Taylor joined our application support group in October, 2007. Taylor has years of engineering and administration experience in Linux, Windows, and networking. In the past, he virtualized data centers and created unique web sites utilizing Rails. Taylor is now helping Engine Yard customers engineer solutions and deploy applications.