Farzin Zaker

Farzin Zaker

About

Detail

Engineering Leader | Agentic AI & Cloud-Native SaaS Modernization | AI-First Culture, Mergers & Acquisitions | Velocity with Quality
Vaughan, Ontario, Canada

Timeline

work
Job
school
Education
auto_stories
Publication

Résumé

Jobs verified_user 0% verified
  • SPI Software
    Vice President of Engineering
    SPI Software
    Jun 2024 - Current (2 years 2 months)
    • Lead engineering for an enterprise hospitality platform serving thousands of resorts across North America, Mexico, Asia, and Australia, processing millions of reservations annually. Run a 15 to 20 person global team (development, QA, DevOps/SRE) reporting to the CEO with co-ownership of operations and budget. • Stabilized the existing product and automated customer support with embedded AI, enabling the support team to operate independently and freeing engineering capacity for the cloud-native transformation. • Architected a modular decomposition strategy to re-platform the product into a cloud-native, API-first, AI-enabled SaaS, personally driving the reference architecture (bounded-context design, event-driven integration, AI-agent inte
  • IgniteTech
    Vice President of Engineering
    IgniteTech
    Feb 2021 - May 2024 (3 years 4 months)
    • Led a 15 to 30 person globally distributed engineering organization (development, QA, DevOps, SRE) across a 50+ product enterprise software portfolio (ERP, content management, collaboration, marketing analytics, expert systems, embedded systems), reporting to the SVP of Engineering with weekly CEO exposure. • Architected and shipped 12 Generative AI Copilots ($2.5M+ new ARR), a hierarchical RAG AI assistant (30% faster ticket resolution, 10% CSAT lift), and an autonomous AI planning system (4 key accounts retained, $1.5M revenue). • Built and operated a multi-agent AI system that augmented the engineering team across product development and internal operations, delivering low six-figure annual savings and reducing overheads 20%. • Owned t
  • Aclate
    Senior Software Development Manager
    Aclate
    Aug 2018 - Feb 2021 (2 years 7 months)
    • Built and led a 10 to 15 person globally distributed engineering team from scratch (development, QA, DevOps) developing cloud-native enterprise SaaS products, reporting to the VP of Products. • Led post-acquisition integration of 16 products across 8 acquisitions, onboarding 4 to 8 engineers per acquisition, consolidating overlapping platforms and driving 20% cost reduction through SaaS optimization. • Hired 25+ engineers, built team culture from zero, and sustained engineering performance through growth and turnover driven by Mergers & Acquisitions. • Transformed process across engineering and customer-facing operations: DevOps/CI/CD foundations cut release cycles from monthly to a weekly cadence (SE7); issue-resolution and escalation-pa
  • P
    Director Software Development
    Pars System Co
    Apr 2013 - Aug 2018 (5 years 5 months)
    • Founded and led a 12 to 15 person software department (development, QA, DevOps, design) reporting to the CEO, delivering B2B2C enterprise platforms for banks, exchanges, government, and research clients. • Architected a national cloud computing infrastructure management system serving 100,000+ researchers across 150+ institutions. • Built and operated a B2C platform portfolio spanning banking (transaction switches and online/mobile platforms processing 40M+ transactions daily), e-commerce, and stock market analysis, reaching 10M+ end users across the portfolio. • Hired 20 engineers and promoted 5+ into senior roles, building team culture and capability from zero.
  • Knowledge Technology Era KTE
    Director Software Development
    Knowledge Technology Era KTE
    Sep 2010 - Mar 2013 (2 years 7 months)
    • Led and grew a 15+ person software department (development, QA) reporting to the CEO with weekly board exposure, delivering Business Intelligence and Machine Learning solutions to enterprise customers. • Architected and shipped an AI/ML platform extending the existing Business Intelligence solution, driving 30% ARR growth in year one. • Redesigned the Business Intelligence product architecture and user interface, delivering 95% positive customer feedback and 30% performance gains. • Implemented Scrum methodology and data-driven product optimization, accelerating delivery 20%, cutting support tickets 40%, and reducing resolution time 15%.
  • W
    Technical Manager
    WebNative Software LLCToorin Soft
    Mar 2007 - Aug 2010 (3 years 6 months)
    • Led technical direction for an 8 to 10 person R&D team, operating in parallel with the Engineering Manager and reporting to the Director, building information retrieval and knowledge discovery systems. • Drove $750K per year in recurring revenue from R&D deliverables across information retrieval and knowledge discovery systems. • Built a domain-driven application-builder that accelerated delivery of small and medium projects by 60%.
  • S
    Software Developer
    Shayen Informatics Co
    Mar 2007 - Aug 2010 (3 years 6 months)
    • Developed banking and B2B enterprise solutions in a startup environment, reporting to the team lead. • Used incremental prototyping with modern technologies to resolve long-standing client issues, surfacing previously unknown data and assets, and winning new clients. • Resolved security vulnerabilities in two enterprise systems using a pluggable rule-based security guard.
  • W
    Software Developer
    WebNative Software LLCToorin Soft
    Aug 2002 - Feb 2007 (4 years 7 months)
    • Developed enterprise office automation and warehouse management systems for B2B customers, reporting to the Engineering Manager. • Shortened development time by 15 hours per week by encapsulating shared functionalities into reusable components across application layers. • Re-engineered legacy modules and shipped cutting-edge features, improving system maintainability, customer satisfaction, and retention.
Education verified_user 0% verified
  • York University
    Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Computer Science
    York University
    Sep 2018 - Current (7 years 11 months)
    Part-time doctoral research in Artificial Intelligence and Distributed Systems, on hold while serving as Vice President of Engineering.
  • Shahid Beheshti University
    Master of Science (MS, Software Engineering
    Shahid Beheshti University
    Sep 2003 - Jun 2007 (3 years 10 months)
Projects (professional or personal) verified_user 0% verified
  • B
    BEHSA ENTERPRISE
    Now we can develop any "Data oriented application" or any "Process oriented application" much more faster, and using junior developers (cost management) for that. changes will be easy to make and deployments will be done in a few swcconds without bringing the application server down.
  • F
    Farabar Business Intelligence Web Application
Publications verified_user 0% verified
  • A
    Formally Verified Scalable Look Ahead Planning For Cloud Resource Management
    ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems
    Dec 2022
    In this article, we propose and implement a distributed autonomic manager that maintains service level agreements (SLA) for each application scenario. The proposed autonomic manager supports SLAs by configuring the bandwidth ratios for each application scenario and uses an overlay network as an infrastructure. The most important aspect of the proposed autonomic manager is its scalability which allows us to deal with geographically distributed cloud-based applications and a large volume of computation. This can be useful in look ahead optimization and in adaptations using complex models, such as machine learning. We formally prove the safety and liveness properties of the implemented distributed algorithms. Through experiments on the Amazon
  • I
    Look Ahead Distributed Planning For Application Management In Cloud
    IFIP Open Digital Library IEEE Xplore
    Oct 2019
    In this paper, we propose and implement a distributed autonomic manager to maintain service level agreements (SLA) for each application’ scenario. The proposed autonomic manager seeks to support SLAs by configuring bandwidth ratios for each application scenario using overlay network before provisioning more computing resources. The most important aspect of the proposed autonomic manager is scalability which allows us to deal with geographically distributed cloud-based applications and large volume of computation. This can be useful in look ahead optimization and when using complex models, such as machine learning. Through experiments on Amazon AWS cloud, we demonstrate the elasticity of the autonomic manager.
  • S
    From Object-Z Specification to Groovy Implementation
    Scientia Iranica
    Dec 2018
    So far, valuable researches have been conducted on mapping object-oriented specification notations, such as Object-Z, to different object-oriented programming languages, such as C++. However, the results of selecting JVM-based programming languages for mapping have not covered most of basic Object-Z structures. In this paper, the Groovy language, as a dynamic JVM-based language, is selected to overcome some of the existing limitations. As the main contribution, the rules required for mapping Object-Z specifications to executable Groovy code are introduced. The proposed rules cover notions such as multiple inheritance, inverse specification of functions, functions defined on generic definitions, and free type constructors. These notions have
This is a community-created genome.