Northwestern University - Kellogg School of Management

Technion - Israel Institute of Technology

VP Engineering at Next Insurance

Israel

Constantly recruiting great people to join our team - Backend and Frontend developers, Data Engineers and Team Leaders / Squad Leaders! Get in touch if you're interested. All open positions: <a href="https://grnh.se/66f386733us">https://grnh.se/66f386733us</a>

Leading the Product Engineering org. Responsible for the delivery of technology that enables us to provide great insurance products, that help entrepreneurs thrive. Starting with how we get the right info about the businesses we insure, through pricing the policy, billing, all the way to providing phenomenal service for policy changes and claims. We're doing all that using a lot of data, through a data-driven culture, delivered by the Data Engineering team, as part of the Product Engineering org.

Note to marketers: I'm not responsible for the cloud infrastructure nor security at Next. Please don't send me emails about it :-)

Next Insurance

VP of Engineering

Technion Alumni

Entrepreneurs' Mentor

Manager of several teams, responsible for delivering Phenomenal Service through technology, and helping our customers thrive. Grew a few areas from an existing product to a scalable solution. Initiated and drove initiatives from 0 to 1, creating revenues of multiple million dollars per month.

Engineering Group Manager

Fostered innovation across the company.
Facilitated ideas generation, evaluation and experimentation.
Focused on Ad-Tech and Search Monetization.
Scouted for great ideas and companies leveraging disruptive technologies.

Perion Network

Chief Innovation Officer

Formed a strong group, with culture based on ownership, craftsmanship, and high standards.
Utilized Machine Learning and prediction algorithms to optimize ad delivery and deliver business results. Technologies in use: Java, Spark, Python,  Hadoop, Couchbase, Node, React, AWS Stack (EC2, EMR, RDS, RedShift), micro services architecture.

Senior Director of R&D

Lead R&D, QA and Support of Grow Mobile Acquisition business unit (a startup within Perion).
Turned around an R&D organization. Implemented Agile Scrum. Shortened release cycles (from months to daily releases).
Brought the team from zero automation to Continuous Integration and Automatic Deployment.

VP R&D

Managerial Achievements
- Worked directly with Sears CEO/Chairman and several VP's, presenting concepts, road maps and deliveries.
- Managed teams and teams leaders in the following domains: Data Sciences / Information Management domain, Application Platform and e-Commerce.
- Grew the group through defining new roles and recruiting (data analyst, customer-oriented QA, freelance developers, student developer).
- Focused on customer-centric development, both by reaching out to customers and delivering superb service, and by using A/B testing and Lean principles for developing new features.
- Initiated and established innovative ways to increase the R&D capacity, using outsourcing (external teams and in-house developers), freelancers and students. Lead the work with 3 outsourcing companies, recruited 3 freelancers, defined the tools and methodologies for co-working (task management, source control, software development process and quality standards).
- Mentored in hackathons and university courses, presented in conferences and universities and organized a Developer Conference for evangelizing the application platform. Several apps developed through these effort, one student and one intern recruited.
- Formalized applications relationships framework, from idea inception, through development escorting through go-live, support and monitoring.

Technical Experience
- Information Management domain: responsible for delivering a highly personalized experience, through building a user profile, personalized newsfeed, recommendations (product recommendations, pages to follow, people to follow, features to use). Extensive usage of A/B testing, algorithms, and research methodologies.
- Application Platform domain: responsible for creating a framework for partners and start-ups to create applications that enrich the user experience and capabilities of the <a href="http://ShopYourWay.com">ShopYourWay.com</a> eCommerce site and the ShopYourWay mobile application. See: <a href="http://developers.shopyourway.com">http://developers.shopyourway.com</a>

Sears Israel (Delver)

R&D Group Manager

Worked with customers and internal customer-facing teams to take an abstract vision into a set of features for the next release of the product. Defined the features, created mockups, validated with customers, and drove the development of the features to a successful release.
Used Agile methodologies to drive changes and show value throughout the release process.

VMware

Product Manager

Did 'whatever it takes' to make customers successful, and grow the business.
Defined the company’s strategy and vision, turning it to an innovative and unique player in the workforce management market.
Lead the marketing, sales, partnerships and fund-raising activities. Closed a deal with Israel’s biggest drug store chain. Created active partnership agreements with three partners. Increased the traffic and conversion rates of web customers. Lead the company to win Israel’s WEBI Award 2011 -  Best Website for SMEs/SMBs.

Otipo

CEO and co-founder

Working from the Microsoft India Development Center, was part of the team that developed the first version of Visual Studio Lab Management - a solution that creates streamlined integration of the Application Life Cycle, by automatically deploying an application of production-like environments for testing and development. Leveraging Virtualization technology making it very easy to create complete environments, reverts them to known state, and deploy and test applications.
As a program manager, I was responsible for defining and driving the execution of end-to-end scenarios, creating a coherent workflow that works out of the box. Also responsible for other areas of the product such as security and maintain-ability.
Lead the work with Beta customers across the team, using scorecards, surveys, blog and twitter channel, as well as on going direct interaction with customers. That lead to successful adoptions before the release, and generated multiple case studies.

Microsoft

Principal Program Manager

Responsible for the technology, architecture and design of the Quality Center product ($200MN revenues).
Was responsible for defining the processes, deliverables, milestones and customer interactions for the R&D organization, as well as driving the day-to-day execution, using Agile development process.
Managed System Architects, Functional Architects (=Product Managers), Database Architect and the Project and Release Manager for the group.

Chief System Architect, Quality Center product

Built a group from scratch, taking ownership on 3 out of 8 modules of Mercury's IT Governance Suite (the other modules were developed in the U.S.).
Lead the formation of two next-generation products, and delivered 3 integrated products.

HP (formerly Mercury Interactive)

Group Manager, R&D

Managed a team of senior developers, including a Functional Lead and a Technical Lead. The team handles all the data processing (server logic, aggregation, calculation engines) for the BAC / Topaz product.
Facilitated the development of a best-of-breed online aggregation engine, handling 1000s of events per second, and aggregating the data into a business view.
Managed the design and implementation of next generation aggregation engine, adding robustness, high availability capabilities and performance boost while keeping backward compatibility and providing solutions to the applications that use the aggregated data.
Managed the integration of the aggregation engines with the Mercury CMDB (configuration management database).

Senior R&D Team Manager

Managed a team of 8-15 developers, creating a web-based, interactive (aka AJAX) administration application for Mercury's Application Management product.
Lead all the foundation aspects of Mercury's monitoring product (BAC/Topaz): software infrastructure, administration, monitoring, deployment, staging, upgrade and security. Managed 2 activity leaders and their reports.
Worked in tight cooperation with an off-shore U.S.-based team.

Software R&D Team Manager

Architected, designed and implemented infrastructure components and management APIs for Mercury's Application Management solution. Used and gained extensive knowledge of J2EE, database querying and optimizing, and Object Oriented Design and Programming. Trained and educated more than 30 people on using the J2EE in general and the libraries and APIs I created.

Senior Developer

Senior developer in a team of four developers in a start-up company. Created a white-label search engine and directory for demographic-specific communities.
Re-factored the hosting solution to improve its customization abilities and reduce the time and effort in adding new customers.
Improved the search engine and the tools for the editorial staff using linguistic solutions.
Responsible for the integration with customers' sites, including single sign on solutions design and implementation.
Gained extensive experience in the following technologies: Web services, PHP, Linux, Apache Server, Java, Oracle TextSearch.

Quiver Inc.

Developed an HTTP server in Java on top of a router. Used open-source HTTP lightweight server and JNI to make it work on the router.

Shay Mandel

Shay Mandel