Syed Hussain

• Design, develop, configure, and operate cloud‑native and hybrid application solutions and delivery processes, ensuring systems are reliable, secure, scalable, and aligned with architectural and operational standards.
• Provide technical oversight through design, code, and test reviews; enforce standards; and coordinate with third‑party vendors to ensure solution quality, security, reliability, and maintainability.
• Collaborate with internal teams, including infrastructure, security, and product stakeholders; provide technical guidance and mentoring to team members; and contribute to shared solution repositories, documentation, and reusable assets to support consistency and effective delivery.
• Prepare and communicate technical solution designs, status, risks, and outcomes to leadership and executive stakeholders to support transparency, alignment, and informed decision making.

As a Sales Engineering Solutions Architect, I was initially hired for demonstrating and coming up with use cases/sales plays for a new Enterprise AI Platform that will help customers build, deploy, discover, monitor and manage Machine Learning Models. I transitioned into a role of a Solutions Architect in the delivery organization doing digital transformation and app modernization projects for our customers. The following are the projects that I was involved in executing and managing:

• A Machine Learning application that automates the collecting, evaluating and processing of digitized paper documents and forms. The AWS architecture for this application consists of CloudFront distribution, S3 buckets, Cognito, API Gateway, Lambda, textract and RDS. Terraform Cloud is used for Infrastructure deployment and GitHub Actions is used for software workflow automation (CI/CD)
• An application that collects and normalizes SAP and ERP data and provides customer-centric dashboards across the Enterprise and its subsidiaries. The AWS architecture for this application consists of S3 Buckets, lambda, Glue, Redshift and Sagemaker.
• Led migration of a legacy data pipeline to cloud-based Airflow infrastructure (Amazon MWAA) resulting in cost reduction and improving resiliency and scalability.
• Setup a Business-to-Business personal care web-based marketplace for the Enterprise. Currently evaluating industry leading B2B platforms for this purpose.
• Develop an early stage model for predicting rig count into a fully interactive predictive model and simulation interface powered by Hypergiant’s Hyperdrive AI Platform.
• . Demonstrate Package Creation and Deployment process of cloud-native applications on air-gapped devices like AWS Snowball using Zarf
• . Migrate test management data from legacy test management systems HP ALM, Testrail and JAMA to Jira XRAY using REST APIs and Python

As a MCMP Sales Engineering Solutions Architect I worked closely with MCMP Sales, Center of Competency, other Enterprise and Sales Engineers to articulate the value proposition to current and potential IBM customers by providing subject matter expertise within the the MCMP platform. I architected custom solutions to bridge the gap between customer’s business / technical needs and current functionalities of the platform. MCMP was a platform that drove continuous cloud modernization, reduce on-premise and cloud expenditure and enhanced visibility, security and resilience. I worked with Sales to build and develop initial customer relationship and identify and qualify potential opportunities where multi-cloud management and observability solutions could bring value. I specialized in setting up proof of concepts or pilot implementation to show value of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud management using MCMP.

• I worked closely with Sales to create initial presentation of the MCMP products to the customers and provide strategic envisioning of a solution which will work with MCMP products and customer’s legacy systems.
• I Integrated Customer’s public and private cloud service providers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, OpenStack, VMware, etc. with MCMP.
• I provided integration technology concepts and create roadmaps to implement proof of concept (PoC) or pilot implementation to the customer.
• I provided in-depth product demonstrations and customization capabilities to current and potential customers. Product demonstrations included infrastructure deployments using templating and IaC technologies like cloudformation, Azure ARM templates, terraform and Ansible, deploying software to cloud and hybrid environments using CI/CD tools, deploying cloud native applications to various cloud kubernetes clusters (EKS, AKS, GKE, IKS, Redhat Openshift) and Cloud Expenditure Monitoring.
• I participated in sales initiatives acting as MCMP technical and integration expert.
• I coordinated with Sales and other Architects to map customer business needs to MCMP functionalities and needs for new functionalities development and integration.
• I worked with internal Product Management and Engineering organizations on providing feedback for new functionalities required by customers during deployment stage and on the roadmap to implement them.
• I was part of the due-diligence team that evaluated the Application Resource Management (ARM) platform Turbonomic that was eventually acquired by IBM.
• I presented MCMP integrations with other IBM products like IBM Cloud, Cloud Automation Manager, Redhat OpenShift, Redhat Ansible Automation Platform at the IBM Think Conferences.
• I owned the PoC delivery and ensure it is in-line with customer requirements.

Responsible for integrating public and private cloud service providers like AWS, MicrosoftAzure, IBM Softlayer, OpenStack, VMware, etc. with IBM Cloud Brokerage products. Worked on designing and implementing a suite of new generation brokerage products for IBM enterprise customers using public and private clouds.

Achievements:

• Defined, managed and maintained IBM Cloud Brokerage products within the Service Provider (AWS, Azure, OpenStack, IBM Cloud, Google Cloud Compute, VMware) Integration Domain.
• Defined Product Strategy and Roadmap for the Integration Bus (wrapper for a message hub Apache Kafka and a event mechanism tool OpenWhisk) that connected brokerage products with external cloud providers.
• Was the Product Owner for all Integration APIs for the brokerage products.
• Acted as a product analyst for a new IBM Cost and Asset Management tool for Public and Private clouds.
• Worked on implementing a Centralized Encryption Key Management Store for all brokerage products using Hashicorp Vault.
• Worked with Various IBM teams to integrate brokerage products with other IBM products (IBM Cloud Private, IBM Cloud Automation Manager, IBM Bluemix, IBM IMI Services) to provide a single offering called Hybrid Cloud Management Solutions to our Customers.
• Worked closely with DevOps to integrate the brokerage applications into their build system (build docker images with the application artifacts, check into the docker registry, pull down latest images from the registry, build containers and deploy to a Kubernetes cluster).
• Setup and evaluated competitive open source multi-cloud management systems and cost management systems (Scalr, Netflix Ice).
• Working on streamlining and automating the complicated IBM Request for Service (RFS) process for IBM SO customers using brokerage products.

Responsible for running a highly configurable and highly scalable cloud based SaaS product on Openstack private cloud. The suite includes products that revolve around applicant tracking and talent management for higher education and government. These tools are used by millions of users and applicants across nearly 600 institutions. The applications are written in Ruby on Rails with MySQL in a Linux (private cloud) environment. We also use Redis, Resque, Phusion Passenger, SQS, S3, Memcache, and various other tools developed in-house and open-sourced for use by the Ruby on Rails community.

My primary role is to implement strategies optimized for high availability, scalability and reliability and reduce the total cloud infrastructure expenditure.

Achievements:

• Managed and trained a highly motivated and productive DevOps team.
• Reduced the total cloud infrastructure expenditure by 25% by migrating the application from Rackspace Public Cloud to Rackspace Openstack Private Cloud.
• Conducted extensive POC projects to migrate the application from public cloud to OpenStack.
• Deployed and supported applications in Rackspace Private Cloud (OpenStack) and Canada Data Center.
• Deployed and supported autoscaling applications in AWS.
• Established a scalable monitoring solution to catch any potential risks using a variety of monitoring tools like nagios, sensu, monit, new-relic, graphite, wormly, solarwinds.
• Implemented a highly efficient infrastructure automation/configuration management process using Chef for faster provisioning and scaling of servers.
• Implemented a continuous delivery process (deployment with no downtime) using Capistrano and Enterprise Passenger which tremendously improved the deploy frequency.
• Successfully migrated to a 12-factor application where config was extracted from code and stored in env variables.
• Supported large scale mysql percona databases.
• Implemented an efficient log aggregation solution using splunk.
• Implemented a Web Server Log Analysis solution using Apache Spark and PySpark
• Developed several internal tools for automation.
• Setup source control systems like github, gitlab and bitbucket.

Responsible for architecting the OnDemand capability of Callidus Compensation Solutions. As a Principal Applications architect, I was responsible for architecting, installing, upgrading, securing, testing and documenting the Callidus Compensation Suite in the On-Demand datacenter. I am also the lead for training and supporting the operations team in all operational areas like deployment, upgrades, new tenant on-boarding and customizations. I work with a team of architects to achieve optimal functioning of the Software. I also work closely with engineering and product management to provide feedback and improve product features.

Roles:

• Applications Architect and facilitator for new installations, upgrades and customizations
• Train and support the On-Demand Operations Team in all operational areas including deployment, upgrades and new tenant on-boarding
• Facilitate Best Practices Sessions and Center Of Excellence Sessions with On-Demand Team
• Participate in weekly architecture meetings and contribute towards On-Demand topology
• Work with the release managers to make sure customer software patches and fixes are tracked within our internal system for tracking and future usage purposes for upgrades.
• Plan for future growth and expansion of the customer base and optimal functioning of the On-Demand organization while keeping cost under control
• Work with customers directly to solve the most complex issues
• Support the sales engineering team during demos for potential customers

Worked as a level 3 Support engineer responsible for solving complex product related issues. My responsibilities included leading projects to improve team functionality and performance, mentoring team members and creating opportunities for them to improve their knowledge. I interacted and collaborated with the Technical Support Management to ensure issues are resolved within contractual service level and timeframe agreements. I reported design, reliability and maintenance problems, bugs or enhancements to Callidus Engineering and Product Management. I combined technical acumen with refined problem solving and communication skills to deliver the highest level of problem resolution to Callidus Software customers, consultants and engineers.

Achievements:

• Led troubleshooting efforts for complex software issues, ensuring timely resolution and customer satisfaction.
• Mentored junior support engineers, fostering skills development and enhancing team performance.
• Collaborated with product management to identify customer feedback and drive product enhancements.
• Conducted root cause analysis on recurring technical issues, facilitating improvements in product functionality.
• Provided expert guidance on system integrations and configurations to optimize client usage of software solutions.
• Maintained strong relationships with key clients through regular communication and personalized support strategies.
• Achieved high client retention rates through consistent delivery of excellent technical support services tailored to individual needs.
• Increased customer satisfaction by efficiently resolving technical issues and providing exceptional support.