Overview
Work History
Timeline
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Suresh Pillay

Suresh Pillay

Cleveland,Ohio

Overview

30
30
years of professional experience

Work History

Chief Technology Officer

Purple Wire (Pty) Ltd
06.2022 - Current
  • Oversee the technical resources, provide training and technical consulting
  • Projects include Enterprise Architecture Solutions and Full Stack Development training and support
  • Incorporation of Machine Learning Algorithms into Business Processes, specifically in the Manufacturing and Logistics Sector.

VP of Engineering

Jaasuz.com
Greater New York City Area
06.2017 - Current
  • The primary role that I play in this position, is to support the different machine learning algorithms
  • These algorithms range from detecting gender, detecting fraud and 12 different emotions from natural language (currently English)
  • I am also responsible for developing the frontend which is done in react using JavaScript, and the middle tier is implemented as a play web service using Scala
  • In order to optimize the processing of the algorithms, we make use of spark to parallelize certain aspects of the algorithms in order to derive the best performance.

Managing Director and Founder

WorkSpace Africa
Pretoria Area
01.2007 - 03.2017
  • A software solutions company providing customers with customized applications smarter, cheaper and faster
  • This led us to develop various tools and methodologies which would allow us to develop software solutions in a manner that minimized the risk of getting poorly performing code in our applications; as well as making full use of the concept of re-usability
  • One of our flagship products is the International Parcel Management System, which is still being used to this day
  • The system was built using our platform and methodologies, we can safely say we delivered a quality solution on time
  • This very same product was reviewed by Royal Mail, who came to South Africa to take a closer look at the opportunities within the clearance and assessment process
  • Our team went on to re-write some of the systems, and we also added new systems as well as integrated some systems to make the business environment more effective.

Managing Partner

Orchestrating Components
01.2005 - 01.2007
  • I was the founding member of this company
  • I took on two partners who had worked with me previously
  • The company was structured as software solutions and consulting services
  • I was the managing director of the company, but my core focus was focused on the software solutions side of the business
  • The company grew and was employing approximately 12 consultants and 10 developers.

Managing Director

LiveBet
01.2003 - 01.2004
  • This was a typical internet start up at the time, with great global potential
  • Finally as a team we managed to raise funding and could all operate under one roof
  • I was MD of the company, as well as chief architect and technical guide for the team
  • It took a year to finalize and complete the project, at which point it was sold.

Chief Technical Officer

All Things Digital
01.1999 - 01.2003
  • I was offered the position of head of development at All things Digital (ATD)
  • This company provided web site and software solutions
  • The technologies that were used included Perl, PHP, Java and they also used Netscape's server environment as their hosting and application environment
  • Within a period of six months I was in charge of all development projects in the company
  • Later I was promoted to Chief Technical Officer
  • This company was than sold to Grey Advertising, which is a multi national advertising company
  • The shareholding was held by Grey (SA) and Grey (New York), I was asked by the board of the company to act as managing director while the new shareholders were putting in place a new strategy for the business
  • The shareholders being all from a media and advertising background felt the focus should be on designing corporate web sites and focusing on the marketing angle
  • I was not in complete agreement with the development of such a strategy as I felt that the market in SA was too small compared to the US, as well as the fact that the companies in SA did not have huge marketing budgets set aside for internet projects
  • I continued as Managing Director of the company, with the given mandate
  • I joined a team of developers, external to the company, with the intention of building a sports betting site, later called livebet
  • I made a full disclosure to the board about this opportunity, even offered them the opportunity to participate, however they believed it was not inline with their strategy and so they granted me permission to continue this as a separate venture in my private capacity
  • The board decided that ATD should be incorporated into Lasso which was a Canadian company, with a similar strategy as ATD within the group
  • At which point I stepped down and joined livebet and took up the position of Managing Director of livebet.

Senior System Developer

Peregrine Holdings Limited
01.1997 - 01.1999
  • Peregrine(Pty) Ltd, IT and Software Department}{Bryanston, Johannesburg}{}{Peregrine (Pty) Ltd was a brokerage company, which wanted to enter the market space of providing its clients with online trading information such as share prices and market movements
  • I was appointed as a senior systems developer, and went on to develop an online application for brokers, that would allow the brokers to interact with their customers by means of using the internet as a channel of communication
  • This application was developed using java and technologies like RPC and CORBA
  • These technologies together with internet protocols like HTTP and FTP allowed Peregrine to engage it's customer base in a totally new way.

System Developer

Internet Solutions
01.1996 - 01.1997
  • Internet Solutions (Pty) Ltd, was one of the first Internet service providers in South Africa, the company provided Internet connectivity, security and web site development
  • I joined the web site development team as a system developer
  • I was assigned the responsibility of managing and maintaining the ananzi search engine; which was the first south African search engine
  • Ananzi was a pioneer in South Africa as this was a rather new type of application in a rather new world of the Internet
  • The backend database was Sybase and the engine was predominantly driven by perl scripts
  • The gathering and indexing processes were dependent on a number of scripts to accomplish its task, this was based on the Harvest Open-source Project
  • I set out to convert the critical scripts into C++, with the aim of improving the performance, as it was critical to ensure that the system resources were focused on delivering content during peak hours
  • My responsibilities also included working with the marketing team, to ensure that revenue could be generated from advertising on the search engine
  • Which meant that I had to develop scripts to monitor clicks and click through traffic, as this was the early days of the internet many of these processes had to be created from scratch.

Analyst Programmer

University of the Witwatersrand
01.1995 - 01.1996
  • The universities computer and administration department, provided computing facilities to the administration of the university as well as managing and maintaining the computing infrastructure for students
  • The administration functionality was provided by a Natural/Addabas Mainframe environment
  • Whilst the support for students were mainly Mac and PC based equipment
  • I joined the team that provided support for Natural/Addabas, as an analysts programmer
  • In this role my duties consisted of providing support to the administrative staff, and also to enhance and update the environment as the requirements changed
  • I was asked to implement a solution for the department which would allow the integration of some of the reports between the mainframe environment and the PC environment
  • This was implemented on the Linux platform, the flavour being slackware
  • I successfully extracted the data using natural and then wrote a c++ converter to transform this into Latex, which could be used within the PC and MAC environment in postscript formats
  • This effectively provided a mechanism to share data between the two environments
  • At the conclusion of this project I decided to move on.

Timeline

Chief Technology Officer

Purple Wire (Pty) Ltd
06.2022 - Current

VP of Engineering

Jaasuz.com
06.2017 - Current

Managing Director and Founder

WorkSpace Africa
01.2007 - 03.2017

Managing Partner

Orchestrating Components
01.2005 - 01.2007

Managing Director

LiveBet
01.2003 - 01.2004

Chief Technical Officer

All Things Digital
01.1999 - 01.2003

Senior System Developer

Peregrine Holdings Limited
01.1997 - 01.1999

System Developer

Internet Solutions
01.1996 - 01.1997

Analyst Programmer

University of the Witwatersrand
01.1995 - 01.1996

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