Oshri Cohen

What I can bring to the table

Deep technical knowledge from SaaS development to enterprise class software in every facet of the development lifecycle. Bring to me an idea and I can run with it by creating a business plan, design every technical aspect including the database modeling, hire/train the right talent and run the development process according to modern best practices which would of course include CI/CD.

I can represent you and your business with clients, customers, investors and the general public through a decade of customer facing experience honed by a privately held custom software consultancy that I owned and operated.

I can project a deep sense of empathy with everyone that interacts with your business and product. Developers, the C-suite, clients and customers generally find themselves at ease with me because I can speak their language and understand their needs and desires.

Technology Mastery (20+ Years)

.Net (C#), T-SQL (SQL Server), MongoDB, ASP.net, nodeJS, IIS, Azure Cloud, RabbitMQ, Azure Service Bus, Messaging Architecture, Reactive Architecture, Real-time systems, Cloud to on-premise integration, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, API Framework development, ReactJS (5 years), Typescript, HTML5, Javascript, SSIS, SSAS, SSRS, JSON, XML, XSLT, ETL Processes, SOAP (Microsoft and IBM variants), memcache, redis, Jira, Agile and Kanban Development, JQuery, Ajax, Encryption (many variants), MASA Architecture, REST, SOA, Clouds and On-premise Event & Local Stores, CQRS, REST API, API Gateway, Microservice Application Framework, Container Frameworks (Docker, Kubernetes), Monitoring (e.g. APM). +More

Technology Exposure (5+ Years)

Python, Perl, R Scripting (Data Analysis), Tableau, Xamarin (IOS/Android), AWS, Google GCP, MySQL, VMWare, powershell, Linux (Ubuntu), Docker, Hortonworks Hadoop, Spark, Pig, Microsoft Sharepoint, Angular, Hadoop, Kafka, pig, spring, hive, google dataproc, Golang, Circle CI (general CI/CD)

Fractional CTO

Self Employed, Montreal + remote across Canada and USA

July 2020 - present

Business Non-technical for clients

• Advise on business strategy and how it could be impacted by a given technical strategy
• Budgeting and forecasting proposals for fundraising
• Company organizational structure as it will evolve over the next year
• Idea to release process to ensure the client is operating efficiently

HR

• Design hiring and recruiting plan
• Write job descriptions
• Run recruiting process including screening calls and technical interviews
• Some clients wanted mentorship for their existing staff, I would meet with them on a monthly basis and talk out issues they may have.
• Hire their full-time CTO when they need such an individual.

Technology and development

• Define technology stack
• Define coding standards and process
• Define how devops will be implemented for any given client
• Define architecture
• Define product-technical organization.
• Define hosting and cloud strategy for maximum scale

Vice-president software development

ISR Transit, Montreal

July 2019 - July 2020

Business Non-technical

• Created product management practice
• Refined ambitious roadmap into tangible and achievable phases
• Reorganized project management department to work more efficiently with the software development team.
• Define business analysis process for requirements gathering, validation and commitment to work

HR

• Define hiring metrics, write job descriptions and build the entire development team.
• Hire consultants and contractors to complement missing skillset
• Define hiring plan for the next year
• Coach and Mentor my team as well as other department team members
• Manage career path for all technology team members, meet quarterly to ensure they are getting what they need

Client Facing

• Technical liaison with government and private clients ($1.5B in size)
• Requirements gathering for the public transportation industry

Technology and development

• Design migration strategy from legacy software to new cloud architecture
• Design data models
• Design real time system architecture
• Run all development operations
• Manage software development process end-to-end
• Define technology stack
• Actively code with the team about 10% of the time.
• Design IOT development strategy and lead the end-to-end project.
• Manage SR&ED tax credits for my department
• Project planning
• Product planning with product manager and product strategy with CEO.

Deliverables

• Reorganized technical team into a bimodal (value creation and value maintenance) configuration
• Created a devops team and designed the process
• Reorganized development team away from handling customer support issues and into fixing/developing features.
• Created and designed product management practice with OKR style roadmap design at its core.
• Created patterns and practices of foundational technology so that developers focus on delivering value instead of wasting cycles on latest and greatest technology

Principal IT Strategy Consultant (Contract)

Talsom, Montreal

October 2018 - May 2019

Client Facing

• Owned client relationship for mandates 6-8 months
• Lead all client facing activities (Workshops, status meetings, deliverable review)
• Coached, Mentored, Consulted with Client C-Level leadership.
• Executed an Run-Grow-Transform (RGT) analysis, COBIT 5 assessment

Deliverables

• Designed 3-5 year IT strategy roadmaps for >$500M organizations
• Designed IT team to be able to meet organizational business strategy and objectives (Target Operating Model)
• Executed discovery, requirements refinement, RFP production, vendor demos for ERP software selections

IT Strategy Consultant (Contract)

Leger Marketing, Montreal

May 2018 - August 2018

Executive advisor

• Consulted with CEO, COO, CFO to determine 3-5 year objectives and align IT accordingly.
• Advised CTO as to budget requirement, team structure, product roadmap

IT Strategy

• Identified business operational areas that could be improved with technology
• Designed the 3 year technology implementation and development roadmap
• Estimated effort, cost and opportunity cost of not evolving the technology.
• Defined Buy / Build / Buy and Integrate (Hybrid) technology acquisition guidelines
• Ran workshops with all major functional business units (Marketing, Sales, Operations, Administration, HR)
• Executed an Run-Grow-Transform (RGT) analysis, COBIT 5 assessment

Technical

• Defined parameters for proof of concept
• Implemented proof of concept with code level integration as a one man team.
• Defined work plan for development team

Director of software development, architecture and client implementation

Leger Marketing, Montreal

May 2016 - May 2018

Product Leadership

• Designed product strategy and roadmap for client facing custom BI web application development (This was later changed to off the shelf BI and integrated)
• Consulted with marketing and sales concerning the roadmap
• Acted as principal product manager

Department Leadership

• Designed and implemented deployment, development, QA and support processes in line with business requirements
• Designed a Bi-modal technology department that split the team into Service Creation, Service Delivery, and Service Innovation
• Promoted individuals that had management capacity to team leader and scrum master as the team grew
• Instilled methodologies such as Agile (Kanban) for maintenance and waterfall for new product development/client implementations.
• Defined formal career path review every 6 months to ensure the team was satisfied with the work assigned and still engaged.
• Maintained an open door policy.

Hiring Manager

• Defined the hiring strategy; in this case all developers had to be full-stack given the limited resources.
• Designed revolving door intern program with Concordia University and ETS.
• Hired development team from zero to 10
• Instilled a 70/30 junior to senior ratio

Principal Developer and Lead Architect

• Designed core architecture: data model, back-end and front-end architecture, mobile application architecture, cloud and on premise hosting from Azure cloud.
• Designed Core Messaging architecture for cloud-to-on-premise integration via RabbitMQ
• Installed proper architectural patterns using .Net for backend, Typescript/ReactJS for front-end
• Maintained extremely lean tech stack and only implementing technologies that have been around for at least 3 years and have a proper resource pool availability in the Montreal market.

Coach And Mentor

• Coached and mentored my team and when necessary educated them about core concepts they needed to know.
• Guided my team to become more autonomous and make their own decisions; within a year I was no longer involved in day to day activities and could focus on higher level activities such as strategy and product direction.

Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

Medfar Clinical Solutions, Montreal

Jan 2014 - May 2016

Department Leadership

• Defined team structure, job role requirements, employee skill set and profile requirements.
• Worked with the Quebec government to acquire Dossier Sante Quebec (DSQ) certification.
• Distilled legal requirements into technical requirements and split across agile sprint based processes.
• Defined data governance
• Defined disaster recovery strategy and ran regular soft and hard failure drills

Hiring Manager

• Wrote job descriptions, filtered through candidates and ran overall hiring process
• Created a technical evaluation test which scored candidates across back-end, front-end, architectural, data layer, analytics knowledge
• Ran formal review process every 6 months that also covered employee ambitions
• Placed administrative processes to ensure that private patient data was never viewed by anyone. In any event it was encrypted.

Client Facing

• Communicated with key clients (Hospitals and major clinics) to ensure implementation success

Principal Developer and Lead Architect

• Designed and executed strategy to migrate from monolithic Silverlight code base to an HTML ReactJS/Typescript microservice based system
• Designed API microservice architecture
• Modeled the data layer in SQL server
• Designed caching strategy while remaining compliant with government regulations
• Designed and architected an event-based RabbitMQ backed microservice architecture for communicating with client PCs to support physical USB key authentication requirements by the Quebec government “DSQ Key”.

Principal Architect

Agility Metrics, Montreal

Jan 2011 - Jan 2014

Principal Architect

• Designed and developed Analytics system used to deliver insights
• Designed and developed SQL Database layer
• Designed and developed API system for real time insights
• Designed and developed front-end, back-end architecture

Chief Technology Officer and Founder

NuvoIT, Montreal

Jan 2007 - Jan 2011

Founder work

• Designed, Developed and Marketed innovative recipe management system (Like Wordpress) CMS
• Designed, Developed, Consulted and Sold Microsoft Dynamics CRM+Sharepoint Based Solutions
• Designed, Developed, Consulted and Sold custom software solutions based on the Microsoft Ecosystem
• Handled quarter million dollar accounts.

Education

McGill University, Montreal

• Degree in Business Administration, 2006

Self-taught

• Software development innovations, 2001 - Present. I never stop learning by keeping my knowledge up to date on the latest trends and how they can be applied.
• Game Theory. Currently studying the application of game theory in the technical space.

Volunteering

FounderFuel Mentor, Montreal

• Mentor for early stage startups, 2017 - 2019

Various startup executive boards, Montreal

• Expert technologist to assist early stage startups up to the point that they hire a CTO. 2017 - present

Montreal CTO meetup, Montreal

• Co-organizer, 2015 - present

Kids coding teacher, Montreal

• I teach kids how to code at my local library, Sept 2019 - present