DIRECTOR OF SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT AND OPERATIONS ( TECHNOLOGY / ENGINEERING/ DEVOPS )
As an experienced senior technology and business executive professional, I take responsibility for driving the company's business by delivering mission-critical services and solutions, combining corporate vision and technology for successful customer intimacy strategy deployment.
With over 14 years of managerial experience, I deliver a best-practices approach to channel enablement and enterprise development, building secure, highly scalable and performant multi-tenant SaaS commercial solutions in a high-traffic and transaction environment in the areas of financial systems integration, mobile, web, and ecommerce
I am well-versed in managing strategic initiatives and day-to-day operations of the product support, engineering, security, information technology, and quality assurance teams, improving engineering quality and efficiency, providing technical guidance, and coaching
WHERE I EXCEL
Ensuring the development of robust business continuity plans and maintenance for IT systems and infrastructure
Designing technology strategies based on business objectives and then translating such strategies into actionable plans
Recruiting, mentoring, and managing diverse teams of technical personnel from around the globe
Guiding product development strategy and making executive-level prioritization and resourcing decisions
Championing best practices, automation, and innovative thinking to maximize team productivity
Instilling rigorous software quality/security/compliance standards and driving the development of support documentation
Developing technology budgets (expense and capital) and monitoring expenditures
WORK EXPERIENCE
ADTALEM GLOBAL EDUCATION, ATLANTA, GA, 01/2020-PRESENT
DIRECTOR OF TECHNOLOGY
Adtalem Global Education: 1.24B USD in revenue and digital presence in 181 countries (audits and certifications)
Reported to the Vise President of Operations and managed 19 employees and 10 contractors, including develoment, QA, database, DevOps, business analysts, and customer service teams
Spearheaded the redesign and development of the risk-based compliance platform, which evaluates financial institutions controls to mitigate money laundering risks and establishes a foundation for training and certification programs
Secured a multi-million-dollar deal by fulfilling contractual obligations under tight deadlines (three months) by scaling the team and establishing essential development processes and best practices in the software life cycle (SDLC), product quality and delivery: Scrum (Agile and Kanban) principles, Code Sharing, Code Reviews, Code Quality Gateways, Backlog grooming, Defects triage, QA Automation, DevOps/Continues Integration/Delivery Pipeline Automation and Collaboration (GitHub, Atlassian Jira/Confluence, and Microsoft Teams)
Redesigned customer support, products knowledgebase, and marketing web sites to provide consistent cross-platform brand and unified shopping experience through Omni-channel enablement
Improvements in operational efficiency and Omni-channel capabilities (engagement tools) included streamlined customers and partners experience in onboarding (registration and self-service portal), shopping (checkout and payment), training (product demo and evaluation sites), education (eLearning and unified knowledgebase on product and services), campaign specific landing pages, and adaptation of A/B or Split testing practices
Founded international customer support services. Improved customer satisfaction while simultaneously reducing customer support costs by 31% by switching to customized Talkdesk cloud-based call center solution and integrating it with company's CRM and Atlassian Jira based help desk solutions
Established clear expectations, accountability, and the goals for all teams, including process improvements to support formal SLAs with business partners and internal SLOs
Developed infrastructure Readiness Assessment, executed risk mitigation plans to build DevOps-based operational teams, monitoring, and day-to-day operations to support business capabilities and ensure business sustainability
Directed the management and execution of the business's IT operations, service and support functions, including Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 infrastructure, application and world-wide customer support
Established best practices for the technology planning, capacity planning, operations improvements, and configuration standards to guarantee high-quality support of international customers and largest US financial institutions (such as MasterCard), founding the "Customer First" business strategy
Established business decision-making based on facts and data analytics, and cultivated a culture of continuous improvement (product quality, processes maturity, QA processes and capabilities, and monitoring standards)
Managed multi-million-dollar department budget, invoices, and allocations
Collaborating with cross functional stakeholders, led regular Client engagements to support sales objectives and client-vendor approvals
Notable Clients: Mastercard
WOLTERS KLUWER TAX AND ACCOUNTING US, KENNESAW, GA, 02/2008-01/2019
DIRECTOR OF SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT AND OPERATIONS
Wolters Kluwer: a large-scale, global organization with 4.6B EUR in revenue, operating in 40 countries
Reported to Wolters Kluwer's CTO and effectively managed onshore and offshore teams of over 47 employees and 15 seasonal contractors in 5 countries, including frontend and backend developers, database administrators, quality assurance, data analytics and development operations (DevOps) teams
Led the organization responsible for driving vision, strategy, and execution of strategic and operational business initiatives focused on timely delivery of the Tax Product Portfolio's high-quality technology deliverables to over 60,000 small professional firms and government agencies, generating over $175 million in revenue
Directed product and process improvements for leading high-traffic transaction processing technology (52% of all prepared tax returns in the USA: https://bit.ly/33xRnFx), customer relationship management, and eCommerce
Increased channel sales revenue by 32% as the result of new products and tools development for direct customers and business partners across areas including shared services, CRM, digital marketing, UX, eCommerce, social, mobile, personalization, and online shopping/merchandising
Worked closely with Channel Marketing, Channel Services, Customer Success & Sales enablement on Partner Enablement tools (self-service portal, customer onboarding, demo sites, and training platforms), Readiness Programs for Global Enablement for sales teams, Channel Enablement knowledge assessments and certification programs to measure partner learning and application of knowledge
Created an A/B testing strategy and use of feature-flags to improve the customer experience, optimize engagement, and drive efficiency across the business
Created a centralized Data Analytics repository and implemented the end-to-end tagging and products monitoring which allowed advanced tracking and analysis of changes in consumers behavior across business services, desktop, web and mobile applications. Tracked KPIs include products and marketplace use, purchasing habits, page views, changes in personalized search, sign-in rates, check out rates, and conversion rates.
As part of the ongoing business initiative to identify and prioritize the product features, significantly improved consumer experience, engineering teams productivity and systems performance by redesigning and refactoring processes, products, services, and in-store experience (implementation of new global UX, migration from monolithic websites and internal systems to a refactored global API platform and shared technical components, scaled to support highly trafficked marketing sites and transactional platforms)
Aligned standard procedures and policies in Application Development, Quality Assurance, and Data Center Operations to meet audit, security, compliance, and service level expectations(SOX, SSAE, HITRUST, ISO27001, GDPR, NIST, PCI)
Launched a cross-divisional business analytics platform, providing customer and business insights for day-to-day operations and product development decision-making supported by facts
Guided the product delivery decision-making, facilitate product portfolio delivery scheduling and scoping for customer-facing applications, back office, and backend systems. These systems include client-heavy cloud-native applications, high-volume transaction processing API platform integrated with government and largest financial systems, iOS/Android mobile companion applications, B2B/B2C/G2B integration services with e-commerce, corporate CRM and accounting services (Salesforce, EBS, and SAP), feeding real-time business insights metrics to the corporate data analytics services
Transformed organization from a waterfall project methodology to Agile Software (Scrum) by implementing sustainable, repeatable, and reliable processes (code reviews, pipeline automation, code sharing), achieving the "Capability Maturity Model Integration" certification (CMMI, level 1 and 2), driving customer-facing defects down by over 41%, decreasing time to market by 28% and increasing customer satisfaction (NPS 68% increase). Later completed a successful transition to the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) for the development organization and migrated the DevOps teams to the Kanban methodology
Developed and executed the platform engineering initiatives required to enable legacy, on-premises business systems migration to the cloud, architecture new cloud-native solutions, and support for ongoing cloud migration engagements
Consolidated four data centers in two geographically redundant IBM data centers moving cloud-ready compute resources to a cloud environment and migrated over 200 hosted legacy systems across 900+ servers (Windows, Linux) with virtually no impact on business operations, achieving business continuity objectives. Datacenter and development operations improvements reduced MTTR by 30%
Launched first cloud-based tax compliance software in the professional accounting industry, featuring sophisticated web user interface with real-time, entry-based tax calculations for federal and state income tax returns. The solution won a multimillion-dollar federal government contract providing exclusive tax software to IRS and military personnel. The software was compliant/certified with all major security and regulatory standards, including accessibility guidelines (US Section 508)
Executed post-acquisition integration of three tax software companies, transforming and running complex business operations at scale, streamlining technology operations, integrating products, consolidating API frameworks, restructuring teams, and standardizing business processes
Managed multi-million-dollar department budget, invoices, and allocations
Responsible for contract negotiation, formalization, and ongoing vendor management
Notable Partners & Clients: IRS, HSBC, TPG (Santa Barbara), River City, Republic Bank, PwC, H&R Block
CCH SMALL FIRM SERVICES, KENNESAW, GA, 01/2006-02/2008
MANAGER, APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT
Translated complex technical, functional, and business requirements into architectural designs
Performed cost/benefit and trade-off analyses of design alternatives
Defined high-level development backlogs, provided estimates, and identified a pool of qualified technical talent necessary for the implementation
Guided IT and operations teams in the design of deployment environments and automation
Acted as the technical liaison for internal Sales, Marketing, Support teams, and external business partners/vendors with respect to product development, requirement gathering, quality testing, systems performance, operations and data analytics.
RELEVANT EXPERIENCE
UNIVERSAL TAX SYSTEMS INC., ROME, GA
Software Development Team Lead
Senior Software Architect
Software Developer
TECHNICAL SKILLS
Product & Technology Leadership (Strategic Planning, Product Development, Process Improvements)