Philip Sahyoun

Plai Labs is leading the development of cloud-based AI development solutions for businesses, and professionals who are looking to bring cost-effective AI applications to their businesses.

As the VP of Engineering, I lead a team of software engineers, site reliability engineers, QA engineers, product managers and delivery managers in shaping and building out the company's product and technology roadmaps.

Major Accomplishments

• Developed and executed against a technical strategy aligning with Plai Labs mission of democtraizing AI for everyone.
• Partnered with the open source community in sponsoring and sharing co-development efforts in the AI community around AI models and workflow tools.
• Reduced operational cost across the company's cloud platforms by 50%, while increasing our utiliziation of high-powered GPU's for AI inference and training.
• Streamlined CI/CD operations, improving lead times and cycle times from hours to minutes.
• Established site reliability practices across the organizations, defining servie level indicators and objectives, working to ensure we met our 99.99% uptime responsibilities for our customers.
• Enhanced collaboration between departments by initiating regular cross-functional meetings to discuss ongoing projects and share expertise.
• Built strong relationships with stakeholders through open communication channels, maintaining trust during challenging situations.
• Streamlined engineering processes by implementing agile methodologies, resulting in reduced project timelines.
• Led cross-functional teams to enhance product quality and achieve customer satisfaction.

Runa offers a complete cloud-based HR software solution designed and built for small to medium-sized companies in Latin America. Runa builds products and services across the areas of payroll, HR and "fintech." Runa strives to be the #1 HR software for SMBS in Latin America.

As CTO and part of the executive leadership team at Runa, provided people and technical leadership guiding business outcomes through product and technical innovation. This included building and embracing macro-level strategic decisions along with micro-level implementation details. Additionally, served as the company's chief architect leading efforts and decisions into progressive technical cloud-based solutions, programming paradigms, design principles, and architectures. Fostering a culture and environment of high collaboration and alignment and building high-performing autonomous teams.

Major Accomplishments

• Trained up and instilled Agile through product development organization, delivering value every sprint to our customers.
• Established career paths for all roles within tech, along with clear promotion paths, salary bands, performance scales.
• Built a worldwide distributed technical organization of 60+ professionals spread over 18 countries around the world.
• Architected and prepared multi-year technical roadmap shifting current platform away from monolithic back-end designs and single-page-app front-end paradigms to a distributed micro-services architecture and micro-front-end approach for back-ends and front-ends respectively.
• Recruited, hired, and retained top technical talent from around the globe made up of seasoned engineering managers and technical leaders.
• Spearheaded and drove the vision for an API-first approach to product development as Runa entered into the fintech space, creating various SDKs for a variety of platforms and programming languages.
• Established baseline application security and GDPR standards across product development to ensure compliance with data privacy standards for Runa's customers.

Riot Games aspires to be the most player-focused game company in the world. Riot's flagship game, League of Legends, is enjoyed by more than 100 million players each month. Riot is a company of gamers for gamers. Having an organization with people who are vested and caring of the products they create is a critical ingredient in working towards achieving its mission of being the most player-focused company in the world.

Focused on leading platform and game integration teams in building out Riot's next-gen services, applications and SDKs powering the future of Riot's games. Led partnerships with various game teams at Riot, working on solution integrations, feature development and development practices.

Shipped and deployed new game client technology to tens of millions of players around the globe.

Products Shipped and Contributions:

• Riot's Patching System 2.0
• Riot's Mobile SDK for iOS and Android
• Riot's PC SDK for Windows
• Riot Client and Riot's Game Launcher for League and future games
• Legends of Runeterra - Feature and SDK integration
• Team Fight Tactics - Mobile - Feature and SDK integration
• League of Legends - League Client, Social Features
• League of Legends: Wild Rift - Co-development Model

Major Accomplishments:

• Sourced, recruited and built up a strong initiative of engineering leaders and engineers, delivery leaders and technical product managers
• Established and drove alignment on discipline-wide performance management frameworks and tools for engineers and engineering managers
• Established best practices and working agreements across highly distributed teams working on game and platform projects
• Spear-headed "mobile competence" at Riot in 2018 as Riot's foray into mobile game development. Hired and trained Unity 3D engineers, working with a focus group to establish company-wide mobile development standards
• Partnered with League of Legends: Wild Rift in defining and driving the console strategy for the game
• Worked direclty with Nintendo and the Nintendo SDK in identifying technical gaps and integration gaps in bringing the game to the the respective platform

Consultant on special projects working on mobile gaming platform architectures and PC and mobile VR game development in the Unity 3D game engine.

MobilityWare is a mobile game studio producing some of the most popular iOS and Android games on the market today. Having over 250 million downloads and serving over 40 million unique monthly users, MobilityWare continually strives to innovate and create exciting and fun experiences for its players.

Led and worked with an incredibly talented and energetic group of technical and creative folks in producing top-charting, popular mobile games for iOS, Android and wearable platforms and devices.

As the VP of Engineering, the role consisted of serving as the chief architect and technical visionary for the studio. One of the role's primary objectives was to drive innovation and technical creativity through effective software engineering practices. The role oversaw many functional disciplines including software architecture/design/development, game testing, software quality assurance, vendor management, customer service, dev ops and data.

Game Engineering and Technology Oversight
14 SKUs for Solitaire Card Games
1 Blackjack SKU
1 Casino SKU
1 Slots SKU
1 Bingo SKU
3 Match-3 Puzzle SKUs
6 Casual Game SKUs
Ad Mediation SKU
Ad Server SKU
4 Back-end Systems (Support Games)

Major Accomplishments:

• Directly contributed to greater than 50% YOY revenue growth through innovation and operational efficiencies
• Sourced, recruited and hired industry top talent across various functions within the organization
• Built and led teams that produce games that are played by more than 10MM unique users every day
• Designed and led initiatives to support our players through continuous integration and deployment methodologies
• Established and operationalized new and effective means to produce and ship products, maximizing productivity while reducing errors
• Established new organizations for the studio in the disciplines of project management, software quality assurance, dev ops and automation
• Improved game engineering productivity and quality through improved process and more effective tooling
• Spearhead the studio's transition to the Unity3D game engine from native platforms and programming languages for iOS and Android operating systems
• Established guidelines and standards with regards technical due diligence pertaining to M&A activities
• Established SLAs for the studio with regards to all back-end services and designed teams, processes and established tooling to meet service levels

This role served on the executive team for the company and participated in strategic and fiscal budgetary planning.

Paros Productions specializes in web and mobile software applications pertaining to various industries including automotive, mortgage lending, human capital management and interactive entertainment.

Serving as the company's main technical leader, responsible for envisioning, designing and developing the company's web and mobile applications. In addition, provide onsite technical and management consulting for various organizations within the Southern California area.

Major Accomplishments:

• Served as interim CTO roles for various organizations within Orange County helping level-up recruiting, enterprise architecture and project planning
• Served as an onsite consultant for organizations that had gaps within their leadership team and focused on driving business through technology automation, product development
• Proposed and presented to executives various cloud-based solutions to drive ROI and reduce costs spent in managing collocated and on premise data centers
• Spearhead continuous integration and build automation at various client locations to streamline and expedite product delivery to end users

TK Carsites is a nation-wide marketing and technology company specializing in providing software and online solutions for automotive dealers with regards to new and used vehicle sales and vehicle service, parts and accessories.

As the company's CTO, was responsible for ensuring the company's technical vision and implementation aligned with the business's short-term and long-term objectives. In addition, served as the company's head of operations ensuring the day-to-day operations in customer setup, customer service and technical support.

Major Accomplishments (Technology):

• Moved from a 100% offshore staffing model with regards to software design, development and IT services to a hybrid model (70% onsite, 30% offshore), ultimately saving the company 45% in cost savings and improving the quality of the company's software services
• Architected and redesigned the company's flagship product to run on modern technology platforms, ultimately reducing the cost to maintain the software, improving the business' value proposition and indirectly contributing to an average of 15%-20% increase in sales year over year
• Established sound IT practices and standards improving system performance and system up-time. Performance improvements improved greatly going from 4 seconds web page response times to ¼ second response times per page). Database transactions and reporting improved similarly. System uptime was improved, reported and guaranteed at 99.9% for all customers

Serving as the company's head of operations, the business was able to realize several improvements in productivity and cost reduction.

Major Accomplishments (Operations):

• Improved onboarding processes. The time to implement a customer's solution improved by nearly 50% shortening the time from 90 days to 50 days on average
• Customer satisfaction improved (perception improved through regularly conducted surveys) through implementing better controls through phone, email and web
• Lead a SalesForce.com implementation for the enterprise focused on sales, marketing, customer service and technical support departments and processes. This improved inner company communication and allowed each department to service the customer/client better
• Lead a VOIP and in-bound call center initiative to streamline the company's sales, customer service and technical support departments
• Spearhead several process automation projects to reduce implementation costs. Reduced customer implementation costs by over 60% through software automation, process improvement and improving system performance of internal tools and systems

This position allowed me to participate strategically at the executive level while remaining hands-on with architecture, design and development of the company's processes, tools and customer-facing systems and services.

ACS is a world-wide Business Process Outsourcing and IT Outsourcing company. ACS was awarded and established themselves as the primary vendor in managing the County of Orange's technical services. This included IT infrastructure, software development, project management and staff augmentation / management.

As the General Manager of Application Services, my responsibilities included overseeing all software projects being conducted for the various departments within the county. These responsibilities included recruiting, training and managing over 20 technical and business teams across the various county's offices. Disciplines recruited and hired for include: project management, IT operations, systems security, quality assurance, software architecture and design, software engineering, web development and business analysis.

P&L responsibilities and reported directly to ACS executives for this engagement. Responsibilities included ensuring teams were trained and followed efficient SDLC / ALM processes such as Agile, Scrum and MSF for Agile Development. Managed and executed to an aggressive budget while providing exceptional levels of service and improving the overall perception of the team's deliverables.

The department was responsible for overseeing and executing the following:

• Led ~40 departmental software initiatives within various organizations within the county
• Led a team of 200+ managers, engineers, project managers, business analysts, QA engineers, and administrators
• Maintenance and support on ~120 production systems servicing various departments within the county
• Designing and developing the county's main public website portal (http:///www.ocgov.com) on a commercial CMS

LendingTree is a nation-wide mortgage lender and lead generator for the retail and secondary mortgage businesses.

As the Sr. Director of Application Development, built and lead a team of ~40 technical resources in 5 functional departments. Functional responsibilities included governance and ownership of the company's enterprise architecture, technical project management, software development, quality assurance and software configuration management organizations. In addition to the onshore / onsite staff, also managed 2 offshore teams of ~25 resources in Bangalore, India and Monterey, Mexico.

Acted as main spokesperson on behalf of software technology teams to the business. Liaised and reported to the chief and senior executives of the organization on a regular basis.

Helped introduce and enforce some industry best practices around the aforementioned areas of responsibilities. Established and governed 3 software life cycle patterns to be used on projects with varying complexities, risks, budgets and durations.

Acted as the company's main principal software architect on all sizable software initiatives. Responsibilities and accomplishments include establishing and evangelizing the company's core software frameworks, transitioning the technology to a complete service-oriented-based architecture, establishing and enforcing architectural, design and development guidelines for the software organization. Special attention was given towards software and hardware security, including creating a re-usable security and encryption framework for the software applications, establishing best practices for security development and assisting with quality assurance test scenarios to ensure the proper standards were met.

Additional responsibilities included defining and complying with Sarbanes-Oxley policies regarding software development. Conducted the necessary analysis and due-diligence (RFI, RFP, and RFQ) on acquired and integrated 3rd party products and technologies.

Executed and delivered nearly a dozen projects, of which the most notable and sizable were:

• Automation - Mortgage Eligibility, Pricing and Underwriting System
• Mortgage Point of Sale
• Call Center Predictive Dialing Platform
• PeopleSoft CRM Integration (BizTalk)
• Enterprise Mortgage Framework (SOA, re-usable components)

Co-founded and organized a software company specializing in online video game development. Assembled a technical team to see the company's vision through: Delivering a state-of-the-art, 3D online poker game for the casual and competitive video game player.

Served the company as the principal architect and developer on the project. Worked across a myriad of programming languages and technologies including:

• C/C++ for Windows (Client)
• C# for Windows (Server)
• WinSock (BSD Sockets)
• Client-server architecture
• Service-oriented architecture

Architected the gaming platform and game client:

• Hardware, infrastructure, scaled-out system
• Back-end server applications and services
• Client applications, communication, networking, security and data persistence frameworks
• Game client (Windows/DirectX)
• Hand-rolled, customized 3D game engine in DirectX
• Secure Networking Protocol over TCP and UDP
• System-agnostic messaging allowing for potentially any device or client to integrate and interoperate with the game servers
• Real-money payment processing with various payment processors

Successfully sold 4 and launched 3 white-label online poker engines:

• PJ Poker - 1st Party, USA
• Black Label Poker - USA
• Dracula Poker - Romania
• - UK

Built and managed a software development team of 25 engineers from scratch. In addition, managed a team of 6 offshore resources in New Delhi, India. Offshore resources assisted with all aspects of software development and were treated as part of the core team. Ultimately responsible for the company's entire line of xSP and B2B billing, provisioning and self-care products.

Established and maintained software engineering disciplines throughout R&D, QA and technical writing departments. Disciplines include: configuration management policies and procedures, policies regarding software development ranging from inception to final code completion. Enforced procedures between marketing and engineering through proper bug and requirements analysis tools.

Acted as the main technical liaison between the company and the company's investors and customers. Involved in the price and scope negotiations of small to large professional service contracts ranging from $10K to $2M in revenue.

Our latest project involved porting our existing messaging system and front-end into .NET using C# for the back-end component and ASP.NET for the front-end.

Day-to-day tasks included design reviews, technical mentoring and design & development. Responsible for setting the technical direction with regards to design and development practices.

HURLnET was a start-up during the late-90's, when the Internet was becoming more mainstream. HURLnET was focused on delivering usage-based billing solutions for ISPs.

As the Director of Application development, I was responsible for the company's entire software product suite of ISP billing, provisioning and self-care systems. Built and managed a development team of 12 software engineers. Managed the products through the software development life cycle and into production maintenance and support.

Started at the company as a senior software engineer. Personally, designed and developed the first version of the company's billing and provisioning products written entirely in Java. Maintained the business relationships with each customer to continually provide them with additional features and enhancements. The product suite was sold to over 300 Internet/Application Service Providers.

Managed a small team of 3 developers in offering custom software development solutions, professional services and technical consultancy. Targeted small to mid-size companies in the Orange and Riverside counties.

Software projects included:

• POS systems for convenient stores.  Inventory tracking systems
• Customized billing systems for various service providers
• Workstation and server installations and configurations
• Network configurations
• System administration and maintenance of small offices

Assisted in the development of a PC video game titled Decimation.

Of a team of 4 programmers, was mainly responsible for the development of the main game logic, AI and sound mixing.

Produced graphical and sound routines in C/C++ and ‘x86' assembly. Composed several musical scores for the game in the S3M format using several off-the-shelf tools.

The product was finally released to the general public as SHAREWARE in 1996.