IRFAZ SAIT
Whitby,ON
Summary
Seeking a challenging position requiring demonstrated skills in leadership, planning and communication, thus utilizing interpersonal skills with my experience, educational qualifications, and technical expertise.
Technical Manager offering a proven record of success with over 20+ years of experience specializing in Solution Design, Product development (including building New Products, Custom Enhancements, and Integration Projects), Implementing new initiatives, Project Planning, Team Building, Team Mentoring and Cross functional collaboration, IT Delivery and Release Management, Agile Methodologies. 17+ years’ experience in the Casino Gaming domain and proficient in Azure/AWS Cloud Solutions, Java/JEE, .Net platforms, Embedded C/C++ and SQL server Technologies and has in depth understanding of Land based, Casino Systems and Casino operations as well as Online Sportsbook/Casino. 2+ years’ experience in Telecom Domain creating Enterprise applications using Java, .net and C++. Technical management/Solution Architect with expertise in leading a team around 10 members – Development team – Java, .net and Business Intelligence. Cloud MSP/NOC teams. Release and Compliance Management. Project Managers etc. Understanding the customer needs, elaborate planning & tracking, building & working with teams, problem solving and overcoming challenges makes the game interesting for me. I enjoy my work and strongly believe in people and their capabilities. I believe that fabulous teams, working as one, constantly adapting to changes & learnings, deliver results. My curiosity & instincts, substantiated with data (and at times without), have always worked in my favour.
Overview
21
21
years of professional experience
1
1
Certification
Work History
Solution Architecture Manager/Application Specialist
Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation, OLG
02.2024 - Current
- As an architect, deployment specialist, and delivery specialist with expertise in Application, Infrastructure, and Security architecture, effectively handle the GMS suite of products.
• .Net and Java Suite of applications architecture, deployment, and go-live activities:
- Analyze requirements and design scalable architecture for both .Net and Java applications.
- Plan and execute go-live activities with minimal downtime and risk.
• Central Bally GMS product knowledge:
- Acquire in-depth knowledge of the Central Bally GMS product to effectively integrate it into the architecture.
- Collaborate with stakeholders to understand business requirements and tailor the solution accordingly.
• Interface with site GMS application knowledge:
- Coordinate with site GMS application teams to understand specific requirements and ensure seamless integration.
- Provide support and guidance to site teams during implementation and troubleshooting.
• Integration services:
- Design and implement integration solutions to facilitate communication between different systems and applications.
- Utilize appropriate protocols and technologies for efficient data exchange.
- Configure and manage F5 load balancers to distribute traffic efficiently across servers
• Overall knowledge of complex deployment and go-live activities:
- Develop detailed deployment plans considering various factors such as infrastructure, dependencies, and risks.
- Conduct thorough testing and validation before executing go-live activities to mitigate issues.
• Overall knowledge of Testing and regression and non-functional testing:
- Define comprehensive testing strategies covering functional, regression, and non-functional aspects.
- Automate testing processes where possible to improve efficiency and accuracy.
• Complete understanding of SDLC:
- Adhere to SDLC methodologies and ensure proper documentation and version control throughout the development lifecycle.
Technical Compliance/Release Manager
PointsBet Canada
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
02.2022 - 01.2024
- Lead Development and Compliance team to ensure quality products are delivered to be released into Production.
- Track and implement technical regulations for sports betting and online casino in areas where PointsBet is operating a sportsbook/online casino or will operate a sportsbook/online casino.
- Responsible for Release Management Life Cycle – Development, Test, Scheduling Release to Production; maintaining multiple lab environments and multiple release versions.
- Communicate the project-related tasks such as plans, timelines, requirements, etc. between different teams.
- Identify the risks that can delay the release and manage them, such that the scope scheduled, and quality of the release is not affected.
- Monitor potential impact of upcoming changes to PointsBet products on regulatory compliance and partner with internal technology team to appropriately address any necessary responses.
- Build documentation of technical regulations by jurisdiction for easy access and distribution to key individuals.
- Develop, implement, and maintain testing protocol for effectiveness of relevant policies, procedures, and processes.
- Lead and co-ordinate Go-Live activities such as building, and the execution of implementation plans and checklists.
- Maintain record retention processes for effective and compliant record retention.
- Oversee all regulatory IT compliance tasks by state including regulator monitoring, security assessment, app compliance.
- Oversee client due diligence with third party providers from a compliance perspective.
- Communicate changes to federal, provincial, and regional laws and gaming regulations affecting the management, operations, and product offerings of the sportsbook to the technology team.
- Schedule the CAB meetings to discuss the release schedules with the team and find roadblocks, if any.
- Maintain documentation related to procedures on build and release, various notifications list, and dependencies.
- Make improvements in the methodologies used for configuration management and development of software that helps to find ways to use in configuration management.
Technical Manager
NetNumber
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
08.2021 - 02.2022
- Oversees development of a subset of Net Number’s products and ensure releases are delivered on time and within budget, and are of high quality, meet stringent performance requirements and are secure.
- Leads the team in the practical application of software development best practises.
- Supervises a team of 6 Engineers, sets the employee goals and objectives to help challenge and grow their skills sets. Performance management is done on an ongoing basis and constructive feedback given to identify and improve skill gaps as well as to highlight and exploit employee strengths.
- Utilizing their technical background, the Technical Manager acts as a coach and mentor to engineers on their team and helps navigate problems that are particularly challenging or complex.
- Manage team staffing (for example, hiring new talent, retaining and growing existing engineers).
- Perform ongoing performance management (for example, give feedback/guidance often on employee performance, execute annual reviews).
- Create and adjust goals and objectives that challenge and grow engineers.
- Proficient in data-driven decision making (for example, using a variety of reports and dashboards to assess team performance and identify bottlenecks or inefficiencies).
- Collaborate with Product Owners and Release Engineers on software roadmap and capacity planning.
- Ensuring that products evolve with the addition of new features and that high levels of product quality, security and performance are maintained.
- Collaborate with Product Owners and Software Architects to set technical vision and ensure the team is writing software that is simple, maintainable, testable, performant, and secure.
- Collaborate on process definitions to ensure practices around software development, testing and release are inline with current or emerging best practices.
- Apply Technical knowledge and experience to help the team overcome challenging or complex software problems.
- Coach team members to higher levels of coding proficiency and quality by participating in code reviews and providing actionable feedback.
Technical Manager
Scientific Games (Bally Technologies)
Mississauga, Ontario, Canada
12.2017 - 07.2021
- Successfully managing the conversion of SG Gaming systems and products into multiple Casino operators (Gateway, OGGTA, OGELP, Hardrock etc.).
- Managing a team of 10+ members and handled issues across the various suites of products in Embedded, Java and .net platforms and working for the client OLG (Ontario Lottery Gaming – Government body).
- Maintain and track the service packs, compliance management, testing with the AGCO body, resource calendar etc.
- Strong knowledge of Slot machines functions and provides training on Casino operations and excellent leadership skills.
- Playing the role of programmer and involve in end-to-end design & development of Gaming applications.
- Application Development using Core java 8, Spring Boot Microservices, and Azure Cloud platform & MySQL database, .net, C, C++ etc.
- Gaming application development using Java and migration from JBoss to Wildfly.
- Plan the release of project deliverables and release life cycle.
- Communicate the project-related tasks such as plans, timelines, requirements, etc. between different teams.
- Coordinate the release schedule and resources required depending upon the third-party applications, defect backlogs, planned releases, and infrastructure updates.
- Identify the risks that can delay the release and manage them, such that the scope scheduled, and quality of the release is not affected.
- Track the progress and find issues, if any. Always work to improve the process of release.
- Make sure that the release is planned, according to the requirements and budget.
- Schedule the release readiness reviews before deployment and milestone reviews after each release.
- Used SOAPUI to write mock services, automated test scripts using groovy for response / database validation and load testing.
- Application support during UAT/SIT phases and performance monitoring using java mission control.
- Designed the Database schema for the application.
- REST API design, development, and testing.
- Day to day expertise in project tracking tools like Jira & Confluence.
- Maintains Code repositories – Git, Stash, Source trees, GIT bash.
- Handled different Java products and its maintenance.
- JBoss application server configurations.
- Installation and configuration of Bally Gaming products in different casinos in Ontario.
- Root cause analysis and resolutions done on the application bugs raised by the users.
- Actively interacted with application users to clarify the functional and technical aspects.
- Patch deployment on server which includes database changes also.
- Database activities include creation of Jobs and procedures.
- Payment processing development and unified wallet solutions.
- Travel to onsite at Casinos to implement and support the UAT and production Go Live activities.
Technical Manager
Scientific Games (Bally Technologies)
Johannesburg, South Africa
01.2012 - 01.2017
- Handled a team size of 12 members and training them to work on the SG products and assist on the customer issues.
- Handled different Java products and its maintenance.
- JBoss application server configurations.
- Installation and configuration of Bally Gaming products in different casinos in Ontario.
- Root cause analysis and resolutions done on the application bugs raised by the users.
- Actively interacted with application users to clarify the functional and technical aspects.
- Patch deployment on server which includes database changes also.
- Database activities include creation of Jobs and procedures.
- Travel to onsite at Casinos to implement and support the UAT and production Go Live activities.
- Configuration of Log Archiver jobs in Windows Task Scheduler.
- Track and updates statuses through Jira.
Senior Software Lead
Scientific Games (Bally Technologies)
Bangalore, India
01.2007 - 01.2012
- Working in Embedded division for developing the GMU (Game monitoring unit) which is a software application in C/C+ that runs on the Arm Hardware, residing in the Slot machine to fetch the Slot/player events.
- Travelled to multiple locations (Macau, US, Africa) to support the GMU installations in the casinos and train customers.
- Played key part in the development and support of in-house insurance software applications (Slot Accounting, Audit, Alert Grid etc.) using Core Java and Database technologies.
- Involved in analysis of technical information to design, develop and modify the software following Scrum and Agile methodologies.
- Lead a team of five java/embedded developers and focused on mentoring and up skilling their talent by constantly monitoring and assessing them.
- Experience in test driven development.
- Root cause analysis and resolutions done on the application bugs raised by the users.
- Actively interacted with application users to clarify, collect, and document the business requirements.
- Created informative documents for the operation and maintenance of the application.
- Prepared statistical reports based on the requests from the business users.
- Track and updates statuses through Jira.
Senior Software Engineer
Huawei Technologies
Bangalore, India
01.2005 - 01.2007
- Worked in Telcom domain in the Embedded Division for DOPRA (Distributed Open Programmable Real Time Architecture): a Virtual OS used by products and platforms that runs over Win32, Linux, VxWorks etc. using language C and C++.
- Debugging tools using Java and rest services.
- Documented functional requirement document (FRD).
- Analysis done on the gathered requirements by doing business and technical studies.
- Involved in design and development to achieve the reusable business solutions.
- Analysis of feasibility of reusing the already existing application code and areas.
- Develop and implement reusable functional components for the gathered business requirements.
Education
BTECH - Computer Science
TKM College of Engineering
Kollam, Kerala, India05-2005
Skills
- Gaming
- Telecom
- AWS
- Azure
- SQL
- Oracle
- Core Java
- Embedded C
- C
- net
- Python
- Pascal
- REST Webservices
- Spring MVC
- Spring Boot Microservices
- Hibernate
- Lombok
- Spring Security
- OAuth2
- Json Web Token (JWT)
- HTML
- JSON
- XML
- CSS
- NetBeans
- IntelliJ
- Eclipse
- Visual Studio
- Jenkins
- Git
- Stash
- Bit Bucket
- SVN
- Perforce
- Azure Devops
- JIRA
- Confluence
- Postman
- MySQL Workbench
- Git Bash
- Source tree
- Putty
- FileZilla
- WinSCP
- SoapUI
- JMeter
- Maven
- TestNG
- Miro
- ADP
- Edays
- Culture Amp
- Mockito
- JUnit
- JBoss
- Wild-fly
- Apache Tomcat
- Windows
- Linux
- Ubuntu
- Feren OS
Certification
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Work Status
Canadian Citizen
Personal Information
- Title: Technical Manager
- Visa Status: Canadian Citizen
- Nationality: Canadian Citizen
Training
- Microsoft Azure AZ900 - Training completed, Certification preparation in progress.
- Project Management Professional – Training completed for 35 PDUs, PMP Certification preparation in progress.
- AWS Solution Architect: Certification preparation in progress.
- Java/Design Patterns – Linked-In Trainings completed.
Languages
English
Full Professional
Malayalam
Native or Bilingual
Hindi
Native or Bilingual
Tamil
Native or Bilingual
Timeline
Solution Architecture Manager/Application Specialist
Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation, OLG
02.2024 - Current
Technical Compliance/Release Manager
PointsBet Canada
02.2022 - 01.2024
Technical Manager
NetNumber
08.2021 - 02.2022
Technical Manager
Scientific Games (Bally Technologies)
12.2017 - 07.2021
Technical Manager
Scientific Games (Bally Technologies)
01.2012 - 01.2017
Senior Software Lead
Scientific Games (Bally Technologies)
01.2007 - 01.2012
Senior Software Engineer
Huawei Technologies
01.2005 - 01.2007
BTECH - Computer Science
TKM College of Engineering