The University of Western Australia

University of Adelaide

Senior IT Leader  -  DevOps  -  Cloud  -  Security  -  Transformation

Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Leading a team of 70+ engineers in a multi-span and multi-layered organisation, that are responsible for delivering and maintaining 50+ systems.Leading engineering function in the following areas - Data Engineering, Cloud Engineering, DevOps and Release Engineering, and Digital Delivery Channels.Responsible for new product build + asset security, compliance, availability, architectural roadmap and costs.Responsible for hiring, skill-set currency and cross-pollination.Setting team and individual goals, coaching, career development and aligning teams with corporate vision, strategy and imperatives.

Equifax - Australia

General Manager, App Engineering

As a Senior Leader reporting to the CIO, I was responsible for establishing the Continuous Delivery practice from scratch, as part of organisational transformation. My strategy was to create and run a high-performing "ninja" team that would uplift the technology organisation's maturity by automating existing processes, leveraging public cloud and DevOps practices, and training people by way of cloud migrations, in-house training and real-life showcases. The role also involved taking key senior stakeholders on the transformation journey.

Head of Continuous Delivery

Led security remediation and uplift initiative with a team of engineers with the objective to secure and transform the SDLC process across the A/NZ region.Set and tracked KPIs for measuring organisation change and process maturity.Led a team of security engineers embedded within Agile development squads to enhance SAST, DAST and penetration testing practices and ongoing remediation.Assisted with other security initiatives, like IAM, Data Protection and Cyber Security, in a broader program of work.

Security Program Lead

- Management of people, cost centre budgets, technology, and project delivery.•	Working with the business to ensure joint understanding and ownership of technical roadmap.•	Serving on project steering committees to ensure effective delivery and management of risks and issues.•	Management of a diverse team of IT professionals across various disciplines including integration, shared services, DevOps, middleware, data analytics and full-stack development.•	Management of application performance management and capacity planning functions.•	End-to-end management of software asset from delivery, deployment, operations, growth to decommissioning.•	Set up and execute strategic technology road-maps.•	Build and manage ongoing relationships with software vendors and delivery partners.•	Negotiate enterprise agreements for master services, professional services, support and software licensing.•	Hire and retain talented staff members by providing effective leadership through coaching and technical engagement.•	Effective change management through periods of disruption resulting in zero staff turn-over and new opportunities for my teams.

Software Development Manager, ICC, Channels and Shared Services

- Successfully established a first-class delivery team from scratch with specialist middleware integration skills and overseeing SOA governance across the enterprise.• Kick-started a culture of continuous delivery and established a relevant working group that has delivered measurable improvements in the way software is engineered and delivered.• Managing the foundation and ongoing delivery of the VedaCheck Visual channel based on leading-edge technologies and frameworks.• Managing diverse, multi-disciplined teams across Software Tooling / DevOps, Integration, Cloud and Data Analytics.• Managing resources across several projects and programs, working closely with project managers.• As IT Systems Owner of key assets, proactively managing technical debt by measuring it and ensuring software currency, automation and use of digital technologies to stay ahead of the game.• Deepened enterprise relationship with software vendors and partners like Red Hat and Amazon to maximise value and create long-term partnerships.• Established and chaired an effective and pragmatic Integration Governance Board that ensured little to no impact on delivery timelines due to process overheads.• On-going management of cost centre budgets, resources and project deliveries.• Mapped out a per-system TCO to assist in setting budgets for BAU and perfective changes for future planning.• Set up a “tri-modal” support structure, offering bronze, silver and gold service levels to business stakeholders based on their needs and requirements.• Perform due diligence prior to bolt-on acquisitions or partnering endeavours.• Assist and facilitate smooth integration of Veda’s acquisitions by providing a platform to integrate with core enterprise capabilities, like billing, data assets and tools.

Veda

Software Development Manager

Veda offers a number of value-added data products for lending and marketing clients. I am responsible for a suite of Veda products that are provisioned primarily using data from land registries in various states, ASIC and the ATO. The role required architecting, designing, building and supporting the website portal, the middleware and back-end connections to various systems, both internal and external. To fulfill my role I worked with the sales, product management, marketing, legal and compliance teams. The offered products can be accessed at: <a href="http://www.vedacheck.com">www.vedacheck.com</a>. Some specifics below:• Charged with end to end product delivery - from inception, design, construction to functional (not QA) and performance testing.• Managed code integrity, including setting policies for protection of intellectual property and version control.• Lead and mentored a team of software engineers.• Part of a SME committee, responsible for steering the team's technology direction.• Played a key role in steering the technology direction of the Java stack to open-source technologies like JBoss.• Established ETP best practices and drove standards and consistency in the team.• Led and delivered several strategic projects core to Veda B2B business – Land titles, Company File and Property valuations.• Technical Lead on the strategic Commercial Acceleration project that ushered in the use of service-oriented architecture (SOA) style patterns.• Technical Lead on VedaCheck Visual project – assisted in the vendor selection process, selected technology components to use, established an operating model with the offshore partner, and documented standards for code acceptability.• Performed code review and assure quality by measuring code coverage, defect rates and bench-marking against performance SLAs/OLAs.• Awarded Pinnacle Performance Award 2013.

Development Team Lead, ETP

Al Rajhi Bank is second biggest bank in the Middle East, with approximately 6 million customers, a third of whom are actively registered phone banking users. I was responsible for the phone banking channel and was also the lead for the CVP Migration Project, which involved overhauling the legacy voice platform and replacing it with Cisco CVP8, along with state-of-the-art IVR and CTI systems to increase self-service usage and agent efficiency. The contact centre boasted 350 agents, 80 IVR self-services and 2,500 IVR ports.Some specifics below:• Responsible for design and delivery of the phone banking channel (IVR/CTI).• Managed a team of four software and system engineers, with offshore team in India.• Designed several value-added Java-based systems around the Cisco infrastructure for the voice channel.• Implemented a framework for easy migration of the voice platform from legacy technologies to Cisco platform.• Integrated with the share trading platform to enable fast, time-critical and secure means of trading shares via phone banking.• Involved in ongoing improvement of IVR and CTI systems including introducing dynamic flows and platform migration.• Set up the bank’s DR phone banking system and implemented graceful transition of calls, by using distributed caching technologies.• Piloted leading-edge speech technologies platforms to enable speaker identification, speech recognition and text-to-speech technologies.• Enabled reuse by extending phone banking applications to serve SMS banking channel.• Presented quarterly reports to COO regarding application performance, volumes and production incident frequencies.

Al Rajhi Bank

Phone Banking Tech Lead

IST is a Cisco ATP operating in the Middle East, Egypt, Levant and Turkey, with R&D offices in Australia, India and the US. I was responsible for delivering a suite of products for the enterprise contact centre, aimed at improving the company’s ability to successfully integrate enterprise systems. It also involved working with the customer and professional services teams, in identifying opportunities for product placement. The product suite was deployed at eight customer sites.Some specifics below:• Tasked with developing next generation products for the voice and speech markets, ensuring they are platform agnostic.• End-to-end testing and 3rd level support for all products.• Provided full documentation, including samples and white-papers on the developed technologies, including participating in pre-sales, when required.• Kept cost of development low by using open-source frameworks, platforms and libraries.• Consulting and providing development advice to customers, hinging on business needs, risk management, estimation and resource planning.• Facilitated and led product development across distributed development centres in Australia and the Middle East.• Offered technical advice and long-term maintenance plans to the management, by way of promoting the company’s product suite.• Developed reference implementations for several standards – RTP, SRGS, VXML, SSML, SIMPLE, MRCP.• Designed and developed several software solutions, some pending patent, others bought by Cisco and Avaya – iSD, SIP Proxy, MRCP Server, iSecure.

IST Networks

Senior Product Developer

- Design and development of server-side systems and web applications, primarily for customers in the government and banking sectors.• Interacting directly with business analysts and test teams to deliver custom solutions.• Project lead for major banking application, aimed at reducing manual work-flow, by automating complex debt calculations (Project PINNACLE). The project comprised of a three-tier J2EE application, perusing JDO, Hibernate2, IBM Websphere 5.0 and XML/XSLT.• Solved a major problem with a decision flow engine for loan eligibility calculations, by using the Simplex Method from discrete mathematics• Developed a licensing and e-registration system for managing motor vehicles and firearms in South Australia. It was a three-tier J2EE-based application in a client-facing environment. The application comprised of a Swing front-end, BEA Weblogic 8.0 middleware, XML communication channel and Oracle 10g Enterprise database farm.• Incorporated and followed quality standards to ensure the operation maintains its CMMi level 3 status and moves on to level 4.

EDS Group

Information Analyst

Worked on QoS modelling of Mobile Adhoc Networks and satellite tracking modules.

Asad Nasir

Asad Nasir