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Justin Spears

Leader, Strategist & Digital Transformation Catalyst

About Me

I grew up in the rural rolling hills of Western Pennsylvania the product of two hard working parents who were the first in their respective families to get a college education (both as working adults). From the age of 15 I had a variety of part-time and full-time jobs doing everything from starting my own technical consulting firm to washing dishes at a country club to eventually managing a restaurant. When I went off to college at the University of Pittsburgh I entered a mind-expanding world of possibility where with enough effort, time and energy all things were believed to be possible. At the time my focus was on the molecular sciences, but I always had a nagging splinter in the back of my mind that I should be focusing on technology as a primary trajectory. After college, while working as a Research Data Scientist in the medical imaging field I began to see the value of applying the scientific method to areas of practical technological development. It was this job and this perspective that still drives my passion for technological advancement today.

Services

Digital transformation consultant
Hybrid Cloud Architect
Engineering Strategist

Experience

* Deliver key business performance improvements of Time to Market, Predictability, Quality, Transparency in product development operations to the core $5bn-dollar product portfolio.

* Evangelize the necessity of digital transformation and adoption of emerging and newer technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, IoT, Hybrid Cloud, Software Defined and Container Orchestration

* Sets product vision and priorities, partnering closely with engineering, operations and other cross-functional teams to define and deliver enterprise class product capabilities

* Establish Go-to-market strategy working with Sales, Marketing, Pricing and work with senior business leaders and establish technical and business strategies

* Maintaining a solid understanding of the Hybrid Cloud, IoT, AI/Ml/DL, Data Protection, Security methodologies and container orchestration (Kubernetes, etc) to ensure that the right products or services are available at the right time.

* Developing a comprehensive multi-year & generational business and product plan for the product family, focusing on expanding market segments and addressing new market needs

* Deliver key business performance improvements of Time to Market, Predictability, Quality, Transparency in product development operations to the core multi-billion-dollar product portfolio.

* Evangelize the necessity of digital transformation and adoption of a Hybrid Cloud model.

* Worked collaboratively across organizations to define and deliver a comprehensive and cohesive set of software, reference architectures and tools that support the digital transformations for our customers.

* Negotiating customer requests (internal and external), industry and marketplace changes and company strategic initiatives to manage product development capacity or services expansion to meet customers' needs and the company's strategic vision.

* Maintaining a solid understanding of the Hybrid Cloud, IoT and AI marketplace to ensure that the right products or services are available at the right time.

* Providing tactical support to other internal initiatives such as sales training, collateral development, and product performance while facilitating a drive for the overall vision.

* Ran a multi-layered engineering organization dedicated to designing and building software products in IoT, Big Data, AI, hybrid clouds and their relation to digital transformation in the marketplace.

* Developed and implemented a CI/CD pipeline that increase productivity and overall software quality by focusing on automation and early error detection. Reduced time to market by 25% and decreased error rates by more than 40%.

* In depth experience in Agile; including roles of Product Owner, Scrum master and experience with user stories, burn-down rates, backlog creation and the various ceremonies.

* Focus on ensuring solutions and products meeting expectations and include full cybersecurity, data protection and business continuity support for the customer environment.

* Operated as architect and technical leader, overseeing 150 engineers across multiple geographies. Responsible for overall architecture, allocation of work and delivering results on-time.

* Conceptualize, design, configure, install, test, verify and automate dynamic solutions that comprised NetApp core products with external technologies such as cloud, virtualization, applications, etc.

* Perform gap analysis between customer environments, setups and workloads and integrate the findings into our internal automation and quality assurance infrastructure.

* Use hands on expertise in Automated Software Testing, assessment and allocation of automation candidates, development of automated regression, integration and unit coverage scripted procedures targeting cloud distributed applications

* Perform performance testing on enterprise level products and draft software test plan for each software release, ensuring product stability.

* Function as the test and design engineer for ongoing operations in the Cloud with major vendors such as AWS.

* Solving deeply complicated technical problems related (or interrelated) to the storage backend which included the design and setup of complex system configurations both virtually and physically

*Support enterprise data storage systems offering NFS, CIFS and SAN via FCP/iSCSI protocols on multitenant UNIX/Linux/Windows platforms

* Solving deeply complicated technical problems related (or interrelated) to the storage backend which included the design and setup of complex system configurations both virtually and physically

* Perform gap analysis between customer environments, setups and workloads and integrate the findings into our internal automation and quality assurance infrastructure

* Function as the test and design engineer for ongoing operations in the Cloud with major vendors such as AWS.

*Support enterprise data storage systems offering NFS, CIFS and SAN via FCP/iSCSI protocols on multi-tenant UNIX/Linux/Windows platforms

* Led the development and implementation of new product designs, manufacturing processes and automation projects to the manufacturing floor to continuously reduce costs and improve product quality.

* Contribute to robust, scalable, and high-quality test automation solutions for production workloads

* Built and maintained tools, solutions and microservices associated with deployment and our operations platform, ensuring that all meet our customer service standards and reduce errors.

* Scale systems sustainably through mechanisms like automation and evolve systems by pushing for changes that improve reliability and velocity; includes automation for other various operational needs

* Translate image analysis tools and methods from prototype to deployment, including integration into established software platforms and dissemination to colleagues and clients successfully

* Build predictive models and machine-learning algorithms

* Provide guidance to data collection teams on data collection and test protocols including design of experiments, sample size, and statistical distributions.

* Processing, cleansing, and verifying the integrity of data used for analysis

* Perform ad-hoc analysis using a variety of tools including Matlab, Perl, SPSS, SPM and may other tools

* Program, interface and redesign spectrophotometric imaging system for ex-vivo patient use

Publications/Media

Principles of Proper Bug Reporting

This white paper provides a detailed synopsis of what makes a good bug report. This includes examples of how to write them and suggestions on proper formatting and details.

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Digital Transformation in 90 seconds

Everyone talks about the idea of Digital Transformation but nobody really understands what that means. This 90 second video provides that answer.

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Coming soon

More publications, video's and media coming soon

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Recommendations

Justin is one of those rare engineers that can quickly grasp difficult technical concepts and apply them to problems to reach quick resolution. He consistently demonstrates strong communication skills and shows an aptitude for communicating complex technical concepts in a way that is easy to understand. Justin is always willing to help a colleague in need and is a willing leader and mentor to others.

James Sigmond

Justin was an excellent mentor, helping me develop in order to take over his role as the Data Protection specialty lead. His in depth knowledge of our data protection products and performance troubleshooting was invaluable. He was also a great resource for learning more about the processes and tools available to help get problems solved if he didn't have the answer already.

Michael Baker

Contact Me

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Phone

919-476-5055

Web

Mail: quantumspores@yahoo.com
Web: http://www.justinspears.com