Paul Parker

About Paul Parker

Paul Parker is Chief Technology Officer at Heyday. Location: New York, New York, United States.

I build technology organizations that can survive success. Over the past two decades I’ve helped build and scale technology organizations at companies including Apple, HBO, Time Warner, Compass, CLEAR, Nomad Health, and Heyday. My career has largely been spent helping companies scale through periods of rapid growth, transformation, and complexity. Sometimes that means modernizing enterprise systems. Sometimes it means building security programs from scratch. Sometimes it means untangling years of well-intentioned decisions that made sense at the time but don’t scale anymore. I lead the functions that sit underneath nearly every business outcome: IT, cybersecurity, enterprise applications, infrastructure, data platforms, and increasingly, AI enablement. I’ve worked across healthcare, consumer brands, franchising, and high-growth technology companies, partnering closely with executive teams to build technology foundations that support growth instead of slowing it down. A few beliefs that have served me well: • Technology should make the business more effective, not simply more impressed with itself. • Scale without governance is usually just a future outage with good PR. • Security works best when it’s embedded into operations and engineering, not treated as a department people call after something goes wrong. • Most technology problems are actually ownership, process, or communication problems wearing a technology costume. • Great teams don’t happen accidentally. Clear standards, trust, accountability, and a healthy intolerance for ego tend to outperform heroics every time. I enjoy operating at the intersection of strategy and execution. I like building roadmaps, but I also like understanding how things actually work. The best technology leaders I’ve worked with could discuss board-level strategy in one meeting and dive into technical details in the next. I’ve always tried to do the same. Areas of focus include enterprise technology strategy, cybersecurity, AI enablement, infrastructure and cloud operations, enterprise applications, technology governance, M&A integration, and building high-performing teams. At the end of the day, my job is pretty simple: build systems, teams, and processes that allow the business to move faster with fewer surprises.

Skills

• Systems Engineering
• Jamf

Additional experience

• Vice President of Technology

  Heyday

  April 2024 – May 2025

Education

• Bachelor of Science - BS, University of Scranton