Director, Software Engineering
emaratech
Total years of experience :19 years, 6 Months
Currently lead the Visa Issuance G2B2C product spanning government, business and consumer sectors. This is a mission critical system built for the Government of Dubai (GDRFA) to issue and manage all entry permits and residencies pertaining to Dubai with tight integration with national security, the federal government, Emirates Airlines, among other local government entities. This system overall receives and processes over 60, 000 applications daily, reflecting high volume and high availability across web and mobile channels. The system spans multiple domains with a total of 36 software engineers, engineering managers and product managers.
Key Accomplishments:
• Lead the Modernization of Legacy Stack and Migration to Microservices: Led the enterprise level architecture and delivery plan to transform older legacy stack from tightly coupled domain monolith to balanced multi-domain microservices architecture.
• Successfully Launched the Mobile and Web Smart Channel Product: Replacing all legacy submission channels for consumers and businesses and spanning web and mobile platforms.
• Launched in house built TOTP (RSA replacement) Solution: Removing reliance on RSA vendor and associated cost.
• Developed MRZ Decoding Capability In-House: Replacing reliance on vendor solutions.
• Coached existing team to higher performance: Resulting in accurate and timely quality delivery of earlier stalled projects.
• Digital Transformation: During covid-19 lead the development and delivery of key services that were transformed from manual operations to online within days to accommodate client demand and support economic activities.
Technology Stack:
• Java, .Net, Python, Angular, Oracle, ODM, Outsystems, Kafka, Redis, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, Flutter, OpenCV, Tesseract, Swift, Kotlin.
CTO and department head of Property Monitor (www.propertymonitor.ae), the Middle East’s only RICS accredited source for real estate data and intelligence offered as SaaS. Powering top real estate agencies, developers, consultants and banks in the Middle East.
Key Accomplishments:
• Drive Technology Innovation, Strategy and Product behind Property Monitor: Responsible to grow Property Monitor and maintain its lead in the market. This included scaling the existing product technically and commercially in line with its regional growth strategy, defining new product segments, and crafting an innovative and leading product portfolio roadmap involving cloud architecture and mobile all while ensuring high availability of the platform to existing clients. Technologies involved: AWS, LEMP, python, MongoDB, React Native.
• Introduced Agile Scrum and Software Release Management: Growing demand for Property Monitor provided the need to put in place a structure to manage its process from ideation and feedback all the way through to software release and delivery built on Scrum process.
• Lead all In-House Built Software Development and Technology: Property Monitor also leads the market in Valuation and Real Estate Inspection software. The software suite involved mobile and desktop-based applications that power leading real estate consultancy such as Cavendish Maxwell and servicing 40 leading regional banks.
• Introduced Data Science for Strategic Insight and Product Advancement: Created a data science division with focus on multi-dimensional insight and analytics, data integrity, as well as predictive models.
• Introduced Offshore Development: Established an offshore partner to accelerate product development and better control cost of development.
• Oversee Internal IT department: Responsible for internal IT and network operations.
Established a technology consulting firm to assist new startups, and growing businesses, with strategy and execution in various strategic, technology and product areas.
Key Accomplishments:
• Property/Real Estate Technology (Proptech):
• Real Estate Technology Set up (Harcourts Dubai):
o Oversaw leveraging of Harcourts International technologies and information systems necessary for their Dubai’s branch operations.
o Designed and developed an internal suite of tools consists of various components and solutions to help agents in their day to day activities.
o Integration projects with various property portals via API.
o Streamlined business operations by leveraging SharePoint, InfoPath, and PowerApps, and Power BI technologies to implement sales and pipeline related tools and internal process workflow tracking.
• Worked with a leading real estate CRM provider on building a feature roadmap that is relevant to the local real estate market and in line with regulatory requirements. Provided testing and field feedback on beta features to help shape CRM features. In addition, provided an upcoming property portal with technology, scale and UX consulting to help optimize the user experience in a competitive property mortal market in Dubai.
• Higher Education (www.highereducation.ae): Co-founder and CTO to a start-up platform promoting higher education in the UAE. Built and delivered technology and product roadmap including web and apps. Worked with financial institutes on innovative student products to support student life in the UAE. Assisted multiple higher education institutes in their digital strategies including marketing technologies and website consulting.
• Insurance: Replatformed a leading national insurance’s online channel to open source technology to reduce operating costs. Integrated with internal underwriting systems.
• Ecommerce: Delivered the foundation of an ecommerce site focused on luxury interiors. Set up a roadmap for inventory management and integration with global vendors and optimized speed and scale of web presence. Trained internal IT staff on site management and integration.
Pelmorex Media Inc., a private Canadian media company, was voted as Canada’s most Influential Brand - also named one of Canada’s 50 best managed companies. Responsible for leadership and strategy of Software Development (50 in-house/contract developers, including development Managers in Oakville and Montreal). Oversaw the architecture, design, development and support of a wide range of technology products, infrastructure, and services.
Key Accomplishments:
• Replatform of Canada’s Top News and Information Desktop and Mobile Web Sites (www.TheWeatherNetwork.com & www.MeteoMedia.com): an average of 7.2 million unique visitors per month, and supported continued growth by establishing an innovative plan (for desktop web and mobile web) to re-build the sites, port to CMS/WCM to reduce reliance on development resources to publish site content, and reduce overhead cost to run the site by 60%. Accomplished successfully within 18 months and with a total team of 21 members (including two vendors) - on time and budget - total budget $3m.
• High Performance Development Team: Transformed the large development team into a high performing group via talent assessment and nurturing, raising collaboration amongst various technology and business units to achieve better alignment of developers to the business strategy. Raised the bar on performance reviews, and coached managers and leaders on how to develop their respective teams. This resulted in better quality of solutions delivered, application design, infrastructure, team morale, and the level of satisfaction from business clients.
• Spearheaded Architecture Roadmap: Worked closely with various business units to understand long term business vision, to establish and develop a roadmap to build a highly scalable unified infrastructure to address current shortcomings (cost, performance, duplication, and continuity), and facilitated cost-effective growth and faster time-to-market business initiatives, with low on-ramp cost and effort.
• Established SDLC Practices and introduced Agile: Shortly after joining, quickly identified opportunities to optimize the software development process and addressed gaps in several key areas from the delivery chain that contributed to previous project timeline delays, and budget impacts. Built and introduced a Development Schedule Framework that catered for key areas in the SDLC such as iterative development, early feedback, code reviews, unit and integration testing, code freeze, User and Client Acceptance Testing, and Beta. Leveraged my Scrum certification and experience as a certified ScrumMaster to use SDLC for certain application groups and projects.
• Introduced Offshore Augmentation: Partnered with external vendor to establish a small staff (developers and project managers) augmentation group in India which allowed business units to maximize their respective investments to achieve their fiscal objectives.
Spearheaded planning, execution, and support of strategic business-critical development and infrastructure projects incorporating ADP Canada’s suite of hosted Employee Services Solutions (Payroll/HR/Group Benefits and Insurance) - lead a team of 32 direct reports on and offshore and up to 55 in matrix across various projects.
Key Accomplishments:
• Insurance Benefits Administration - New Product Offering: Assumed control of 6-month old, $2.5M project to build the company’s strategic Benefits Administration Solution, enabled ADP to penetrate the Group Life and Health Benefits market ahead of competition. Undertook leadership role in getting troubled project back on track and delivering on time to meet a key launch schedule. Met critical timeframe by organizing and motivating a multi-functional team of 25 (on/offshore) to work closely together in a highly dynamic and agile iterative execution model and in full alignment towards the product’s objectives. Worked closely with the Service organization and PMO to ensure a smooth product rollout and full support of product Marketing, Sales, and Launch.
• Payroll/HR integration Product Optimization: Brought on board to rescue stalled $1M project improving integration of company’s core hosted solutions, critical to future growth and client retention. As the company’s integrated solution comprised 80% of sales, the project was critical to strengthen clients’ trust and better position ADP as a provider of world class integrated services. Propelled the replacement of an over-engineered Biztalk-based integration platform with a lighter weight solution that significantly reduced administration overhead and eliminated frequent server/service backlogs. Guided the design team in deciding the right solution path, facilitating maintainability and eliminating complexity in the integration platform.
• Growth Management: Pivotal player in maintaining productivity and coordination as department continues to grow (from 40 in 2008 to 115 staff in 2010 and up). Entrusted with leadership of Parallel Project Delivery initiative, leading a group of Managers/Directors to optimize/automate the different processes within ADP’s SDLC (Build/Code/Packaging/Deployment/Environment & Test Data Management) to accommodate overall significant growth in volume of projects and number of environments required to facilitate software development.
• Offshore Team: Successful in building and strengthening results/relationship with offshore team in India, creating a highly productive group that works seamlessly with the onshore team.
Drive software development on flagship product for this fast-growing Customer Experience Management service provider. Provide business intelligence solutions to global financial, retail and food service clients in the US, Canada, UK and Japan, based on client survey feedback (Empathica surveys over 30M retail customers annually, reporting to 70, 000 retail managers partnering with over 90 retail brands). Manage and mentor on/offshore team of software developers; partner with QA, IT Systems and Operations teams on IT projects.
Key Accomplishments:
• Rebuilt and coached team into a top-performing group with a quality-first approach to development.
• Established software development processes (SDLC) that maximized production capabilities and efficiency, as well as enhancing quality. Introduced agile development approaches on key product development projects.
• Played central role in standardizing software requirements gathering procedures, improving on spec, on time and within budget development.
• Established client SLA (service level agreement) for both response time and availability of client solutions. Assisted Service organization in rolling out SLA to clients.
Presided over software development and support for this leader in supplying data generation, supply chain, business intelligence and ERP integration solutions. Key clients in telecom businesses in Sweden, Norway, India, Finland, Slovakia, Germany, Australia and New Zealand. Managed and mentored team of software engineers, architects, QA based in Dubai. Coordinated UK and Sweden development teams and global IT infrastructure group.
• Developed technical project plans and managed implementations for international clients and business operations.
• Worked closely with major ERP consultants to integrate company’s software solutions with IFS, Great Plains and JD Edwards.
• Implemented data warehousing and business intelligence solutions.
Key Accomplishments:
• Transformed a weak, underutilized and unmotivated development group into a highly skilled, focused team. Revamped recruitment, hiring and development processes and tied them to quality control. Introduced an agile approach to software development.
• Directed development of eXequor, a powerful, flexible rapidly deployed serialized logistics management system, built in parallel in the UK and Dubai.
Managed release and support of client installations, delivered on time and seamlessly integrated with IFS ERP system.
Success led to further development work for existing clients, and was instrumental in positioning company for acquisition by Brightpoint.
Clients: Niagara Parks Commission, Jasper Tramway, NSW2K, Omprela
Driving force in establishing firm to supply software solutions to retail, marketing, hospitality and tourism clients. Built and managed a team of software engineer’s support staff, QA and business analysts.
Key Accomplishments:
• Niagara Parks Commission: Selected to develop an enterprise-level ticketing and reservation system spanning 10 tourist attractions.
Landed contract despite competition from major software houses.
Designed a system still recognized as one of the most user-friendly and trained all end-users, facilitating transition from a DOS-based application.
• Jasper Tramway: Produced a flight-based client/server software system to sell tickets and track visitors in the Rocky Mountains in Alberta.
• NSW2K: Established an e-marketing strategy to increase Website traffic; redesigned Website and incorporated a search engine optimization plan.
Developed COM/COM+ and .NET applications for this global firm specializing in electrical engineering software of medium voltage distribution systems. Debugged, tested and designed software add-ins. Provided technical support to programmers and users worldwide. Supervised 2 software engineers.
Key Accomplishments:
• Rewrote the company’s flagship product, DESS 6, from different layers of technology (C++, Delphi, VB, COM) to C# and .NET.
• Performed critical architectural R&D for the rewrite using .NET technologies.
• Rapidly learned, built and implemented DESS 5’s protection module, requiring a thorough knowledge of detailed electrical engineering concepts.
• Efforts played a major factor in determining the architecture for DESS 6.