NABEEL AFZAL

Oversee Global Data Governance and Sensitive Data Intelligence:

• Oversee a portfolio of data governance delivery projects across Americas, EMEA, APAC, and Strategics, ensuring each project aligns with the customers' data governance objectives and compliances.
• Manage a 10+ person delivery team, ensuring optimal performance and adherence to data governance best practices.
• Drive the alignment of Securiti's data governance solutions with customers' existing business processes and data management frameworks.
• Enhance sensitive data intelligence by leveraging the advanced analytics and reporting capabilities of the deployed data governance solutions.

Integration with Customer Business Processes:

• Lead the integration of the Securiti solution, ensuring robust data governance and privacy controls are well-implemented and configured to the unique needs of each customer.
  

Coordination of Contracted Solutions Delivery:

• Ensure timely delivery of contracted solutions at the project level while adhering to the outlined cost, scheduling, and quality terms.
• Foster a collaborative environment to ensure project objectives are clearly communicated and understood by all stakeholders.
  

Integration of New Technologies and Best Practices:

• Stay updated with the latest technologies and best practices in data governance and privacy domain, integrating them into the delivery management processes to improve efficiency and effectiveness.
  

Customer Collaboration and Product Utilization:

• Engage closely with customers to share information about available products and services, ensuring they are well-informed to maximize utilization and delivery effectiveness.
• Explore opportunities to enhance the value delivered to customers through continuous feedback and improvement initiatives.
  

Engagement for Increased Sales Opportunities:

• Work closely with the sales team to understand customer business needs, exploring opportunities to increase sales by demonstrating the value proposition of the data governance solutions.
  

Transition Management:

• Facilitate a smooth transition from sales processing to delivery team by assigning roles and responsibilities effectively, ensuring a well-coordinated kickoff and continuous communication throughout the delivery lifecycle.

• Participated in system development life cycle from requirements analysis through system implementation.
• Reviewed business success drivers, applying strategic prioritization to feature enhancements required for customer success.
• Participated in weekly meetings with client to discuss project direction and milestone achievement.
• Developed application architecture strategy to specifically align with customers' business goals.
• Formed deployment strategies for software updates at multi-platform organizations.
• Designed architecture strategies for large-scale system-wide application deployments.
• Customized software solution to clients' environments.
• Authored guidelines to expedite application deployment efforts through ready-made frameworks and runbooks.
• Drafted visual representations of software architecture design for presentation to stakeholders.
• Provided 2nd and 3rd level technical support and troubleshooting to internal and external clients.
• Wrote and maintained custom scripts to increase system efficiency and performance time.
• Managed use of various types of databases and configured, installed and upgraded new ones.

Solutions Engineering – Cloud Solutions, DevOps, CI/CD, and Professional Services Team

• Perform multiple responsibilities which include planning and documenting product/pricing proposals, interacting with customers to understand their requirements, architecting and designing solutions based on the required feature set, finalizing the various milestones of the entire project effort in the form of tangible deliverables for customers, and finally implementing the entire plan by delegating appropriate tasks to all team members and conducting regular technical, design, and status update meetings to ensure the project gets delivered to customer on time with the required quality.
• Work collaboratively with existing customers and partners to identify potential opportunities to expand current business.
• Interact with potential customers and partners (remote and on-site) on pre-sales activities for multiple upcoming projects and business opportunities.
• Oversaw operations and provided corrective feedback to achieve daily and long-term goals.
• Managed daily operations while overseeing multiple cross-functional to foster increased productivity.
• Worked closely with organizational leadership and board of directors to guide operational strategy.
• Established departmental performance goals and provided feedback for underperforming areas.

Cloud Solutions and Professional Services Team

• Technical lead and manager for multiple critical customer projects
• Engaged in regular customer interactions for requirement gathering, resource allocation and planning, project planning and costing, product architecture and design, and project management
• Managed cross-functional teams involving UX designers, Full Stack, DevOps, and product documentation resources to design, architect, implement, deploy, and support customer specific products and tools based on their required use case
• Engaged team in multiple in-house projects to encourage continuous technical growth of individuals and development of industry best practices by adopting latest technology tools and trends
• This included a prolonged effort on Kubernetes, which involved creating adequate deployment and technical documentation, 3-day training workshop material for customers, investigation of Kubernetes CNI plugins and storage solutions, and migrating internal CI/CD infrastructure services to an on-premise Kubernetes dogfood cluster
• Additionally, enforced packaging improvements for multiple customer projects (Dockerization of customer applications), stability enhancements, and bring up of a test infra with CI/CD pipelines for automated testing of new commits and code merges
• Worked with team to migrate multiple monolithic architecture applications to a micro services based architecture.
• Analyzed client business processes to propose optimal software applications for unique requirements.
• Researched and adopted new technologies to add value to existing offerings.

Product Deployment, Training, Support, Professional Services, and Solutions Engineering Team for Customers

• Technical lead of Customer Solutions and Services Engineering Team in PLUMgrid
• Worked extensively on multiple SDN/NFV based cloud infrastructures and orchestration frameworks to identify business and technical needs/requirements for public/private clouds, drive design discussions, architect the physical and virtual layouts, and integrate/implement the solution deployment in customer environment
• Responsible for end-to-end proof-of-concept, pilot, and production deployments which include pre-requisites completion, installation of cloud/container management solutions (OpenStack, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes) along with integration of PLUMgrid Open Networking Suite as the SDN layer, and implementation of required test plan
• Worked on customer use-cases to integrate PLUMgrid ONS (Open Networking Suite) with various OpenStack cloud solutions as well as VMWare, AWS, and Container cloud orchestration environments
• Hands on experience with neutron plugin integration, LBaaS integration, OpenStack Kuryr, and Multi-hypervisor deployments (ESXi and KVM) in OpenStack environments
• Engaged in regular customer interactions and provided trainings to on-board customer and partner companies on PLUMgrid Platform in North America, EMEA region, and Japan
• Worked closely with a telco customer in EMEA region to help design, architect, and deploy the largest PaaS public/private offering in the world at the time, along with providing onsite and remote support for the issues they faced during and after the deployment
• Helped create entire customer support and solutions engineering team along with 24/7 global support structure for PLUMgrid
• Conducted research to test and analyze feasibility, design, operation and performance of software, components, and systems.
• Provided remote and on-site support for issues and resolved customer and partner queries and tickets
• Debug and resolve issues faced by field engineering teams.

Product Testing and Development Team

• Design and development of the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) for Broadcom Trident switches in C Language using Broadcom SDK and ICOS Open API
• Responsible for implementing, testing, and bug-fixing of PLUMgrid CI Infrastructure for Testing and Automation (PITA) for various platform and VNF modules using bash and python language
• Gained expertise on setting up end-to-end physical infrastructure (rack servers and L2/L3 TOR switches) for data centers and deploying OpenStack and VMWare cloud environments specifically integrated with PLUMgrid Platform as the SDN layer
• Involved in various project management activities where I trained and led different cross-functional teams for internal projects to provide support for customer POCs or critical issues.

• In charge for complete supervision, monitoring, and maintenance of electronic communication devices.
• Conducted research to test and analyze feasibility, design, operation and performance of equipment, components, and systems.
• Prepared action plans for problematic processes and assets.

System Analysis and Verification (SAVE) LAB - Industry Projects

• Worked on multiple industrial projects focused on embedded system designing and manufacturing.
• Worked with fabricators to test prototypes and develop production processes.
• Tested and analyzed equipment design and performance feasibility to determine potential ROI.
• Collaborated with cross-functional teams to conceptualize and refine product concepts.
• Conducted engineering studies on design for products, associated and subsystems components and structures.