sohaib.athar@gmail.com
+92 345 944 3378
Islamabad, Pakistan

Summary

  • A seasoned software professional with over 22 years of proven track record in technology development and leadership for startups, unicorns and multinational businesses
  • Expert at building and leading globally distributed, high-performing engineering teams
  • Adept at initiating and leading software research and development initiatives for large-scale, mission-critical software systems
  • Experienced in shaping, driving and implementing technical vision, strategy and tactics, and optimizing engineering practices to achieve it
  • Extensive hands-on exposure to a plethora of languages, technologies and software development methodologies
  • Remote work veteran with over fifteen years of remote team management experience
  • Creative problem solver with strong analytical, communication, technical and management skills
  • Comfortable with wearing multiple hats
  • Inventor and co-author of numerous technology patents
  • Open to a challenging and remote-friendly technical leadership consulting engagements

Professional Experience

Founder – Confidential

2021 – ContinuedAnywhere

Stay tuned for details.

Vice President of Engineering – Afiniti

2016 – 2021Islamabad / Washington D.C. / Remote

Afiniti is the world’s leading applied artificial intelligence and advanced analytics provider with a $2.6 billion valuation and a team of 2500+ operating throughout the world. Afiniti has measurably driven billions of dollars in incremental value to its clients, including 70% of the major global telcos.

  • Led departments, teams and guilds; managed managers, and individual contributors; assisted teams to successfully develop, deliver and support numerous products
  • Defined, directed and owned team-building and enablement, hiring, onboarding, training, assignment, mentoring, assessment and career growth
  • Built and led three high-performing cross-functional departments from the ground up, each with ~20 geographically distributed members
    • Led the Oversight guild – managed architects and engineering managers in the design, deployment and support of robust and scalable multi-tenant, real-time monitoring systems deployed on private clouds across the world at leading telcos, for 24/7 operations monitoring
    • Headed the Insights department – coached teams in developing data analysis, data science and data engineering, log monitoring, 2D/AR/VR data and time-series visualization software to extract actionable insights and BI from real-time data
    • Headed the Automation and Chatbots team – directed the technical vision for  process automation, bot creation and deployment systems for upcoming Afiniti products
  • Led cross-departmental teams to bootstrap MVPs for the next-gen disruptive Afiniti contact center products in partnership with Avaya
  • Led multiple teams in reengineering the core Afiniti products from a monolithic to an SOA and microservices architecture
  • Collaborated with HR to enhance the Afiniti hiring processes by using open-source software tools
  • Set appraisal rubrics, conducted performance review and managed the career trajectory for engineering teams
  • Improved and streamlined engineering standards, best practices and Agile methodology
  • Enabled engineering teams to establish a self-managed learning and growth-focused culture
  • Facilitated cross-departmental collaboration between engineering, product and client teams
  • Provided technology vision for numerous software products and oversaw their development lifecycle from conception and beyond
  • Initiated multiple software R&D initiatives, resulting in technological paradigm shifts across Afiniti

External Business Partner – Roche

2011 – 2013Basel / Remote

Roche is the world’s largest biotech company with $50 billion+ in annual revenue, and is a global pioneer in pharmaceuticals and diagnostics focused on advancing science to improve people’s lives.

  • Conducted R&D for mission-critical projects with a global user-base, involving Big Data in large-scale graph and columnar databases, as part of a globally distributed engineering team
  • Developed data engineering solutions in Java, C#, Oracle, SQL Server and early incarnations of SAP HANA
  • Collaborated with the Oracle SAP HANA product development team to identify bugs and issues in HANA and recommended fixes

Founder – Coffity

2009 – PresentAbbottabad

Coffity is a successful cafe that has grown into a local culinary landmark since its inception.

  • Started the cafe after noticing the vacant niche during a sabbatical
  • Defined and optimized SOPs, automated operations and reporting through software, enabling the business to run on auto-pilot by a staff of twenty

Consultant – Blue Brain Project

2007 – 2008 EPFL, Laussane / Remote

The Blue Brain Project is a Swiss brain research initiative in collaboration with IBM, that aims to create a digital reconstruction of the mammalian brain and use supercomputers for biologically-detailed digital reconstructions and simulations to identify the fundamental principles of brain structure and function.

  • Developed a custom cross-platform 3D graphics software system to semi-automatically model neurons in 3D from 2D hi-resolution microscopic imagery stacks, as part of the primary workflow for the research project
  • Led the product development in C++, WxWidgets, Qt, OpenGL and OpenSceneGraph for Windows and Linux, and also contributed to the opensource project OpenSceneGraph

Vice President of Technology R&D – OrthoClear

2005 – 2007 San Francisco / Lahore

OrthoClear was a SF based biotech startup that grew in two years to a multinational and multi-million dollar business with over 1000 employees, before acquisition by Invisalign.

  • Wore multiple hats as a founding member of OrthoClear
  • Authored technology patents; conducted R&D; selected and created software and hardware technology; defined workflows for 3D data digitization, data acquisition and CNC machining software that formed the backbone of the business
  • Trained and led large 3D software development and software user teams of ~50 members
  • Represented OrthoClear in international technology and orthodontics conferences

Senior Partner – Algotrek Technology Consulting

2002 – 2009Lahore

Algotrek is a software consulting and solutions provider, operating in the US and European software markets, in the 3D, web and mobile development domains. It was established as an off-shoot of the Align Technology Pakistan operations, to continue work with them after their operations moved from Pakistan to Costa Rica.

  • Established the software consulting business as a partner
  • Continued consulting for Align Technology 3D graphics based software products
  • Designed and developed desktop, ecommerce, web and 3D graphics applications, databases for complex systems, optimized legacy software and conceived and implemented business automation solutions for Invisalign as well as other clients

Software Engineer – Align Technology

2000 – 2002 San Jose / Lahore

Align Technology is the inventor of Invisalign clear aligners used in orthodontics, traded on NASDAQ with a $2 billion+ valuation and 15,000+ employees.

  • Collaborated on the development of the custom 3D graphics software, reporting and automation systems critical to Invisalign operations, primarily in Visual C++, Java, ASP and OpenGL
  • Re-engineered a critical low-latency SQL Server and ASP based automation system to support hundreds of concurrent clients
  • Optimized and automated manual processes, resulting in significant cost reduction per client
  • Exploited the chance to experiment with haptic devices, 3D printers and biometric technology, cutting-edge at the time
  • Developed reporting, file synchronization and pdf generation software using Visual C++ and Java

Web Analyst – Nextbridge

1999 – 2000Lahore

Nextbridge is one of the top-ranked software businesses in Pakistan.

  • Liaised between aspirant eCommerce businesses and web development teams to gather requirements, recommend features and synchronize designers and developers to successfully engineer and deliver multiple eCommerce websites, during the dot-com boom

Independent Consultant

1999 – PresentLocation Independent

Consulting intermittently since the late 90s to escape the comfort zone and to stay current in emerging technology, helping small and large clients to solve their management and technical problems.

  • A few noteworthy clients:
    • Frontiers Media – 2007 – Managed the Frontiers development team to redesign and port their front-end publication software from Java to PHP, for a faster and scalable system with a shorter development cycle. Frontiers is an award-winning online peer-reviewed open-access scientific journal.
    • Mindbridge – 2005 – Developed a web-based online real-time tutoring system for Mindbridge,  one of the largest BPOs in Asia.
    • Symbionica – 2004 – Implemented a secure online software sale system for FaceSay, a patented system that trains autistic children on emotion recognition
    • Systems Ltd. – 2001 – Provided complete website development solutions for Systems, as well as an interactive system for realtime image manipulation in Javascript. Systems is the oldest and one of the largest software firms in Pakistan

Skills & Technologies

  • Intimately or briefly familiar with many languages, frameworks and technologies, including Apache Spark, ASP.NET, C#, C++, Cassandra, COBOL, D3, Digital Ocean, Docker, Drools, Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, Fortran, Google Cloud Platform, Go, GraphQL, Greenplum, Hololens, Java, Javascript, Kafka, Kubernetes, MLS, MongoDB, MySQL, Neo4J, Node.js, OpenGL, ORMs, Perl, PHP, Postgres, Private Cloud, Python, Qt, R, Rasa, React.js, Redis, SQL Server, Tk, TypeScript, Unity, Visual Basic, Visual C++, VTK and Vue.js
  • A preference for Linux as the OS of choice

Education

Master’s in Science – Computer Science

University of the Punjab – 2001

Master’s in Business Administration – Marketing

Preston University – 1998

Post Graduate Diploma – Computer Science

University of the Punjab – 1999

Bachelor’s in Science – Mathematics and Physics

Forman Christian College – 1996

GRE General

2260/2400 – 2002

Patents, Conferences, Workshops etc.

  • Presented a panel on citizen journalism at the Poynter Institute, St. Petersburg, FL in 2012
  • Delivered a talk on the role of social media in citizen journalism at the Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, FL in 2012
  • Presented a session on journalism and social media at the University of Texas, Austin, TX in 2012
  • Led a panel at SXSW Interactive titled “Tweeting Osama’s Death: From Citizen to Journalist” at South by Southwest, Austin, TX in 2012
  • Co-authored Visualizing and Manipulating Digital Models for Dental Treatment (U.S. Patent 20100009308 A1) and more than ten other patents that were transferred to the employer’s portfolio in 2006
  • Created and presented an innovative virtual reality orthodontics treatment system with 6 DOF motion control and stereo vision, dubbed Orthotouch, at the American Association of Orthodontics 106th Annual Session, Las Vegas, NV in 2006
  • Attended a 6 months long course on Orthodontics concepts and methodologies at Align Technology in 2000
  • Participated in a 6 months long rigorous course on computational geometry, advanced 3D graphics theory and implementation at Align Technology in 2000