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Payam Moghaddam

About

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Payam Moghaddam

Fractional CTO & Technology Advisor
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Specializations

  1. Structuring product delivery with an emphasis on Kanban, automated reporting, and a culture that emphasizes autonomy and excellence. I structure and support teams to establish end-to-end ownership with minimal project management oversight.
  2. Building cloud-native applications on AWS by designing end-to-end solutions (from infrastructure to UI) that meet high security and compliance needs (e.g. SOC2, FedRAMP), and have rich observability (i.e. traces, metrics, logs), while being deeply embedded in AWS (e.g. Serverless) to avoid needing large operational teams for infrastructure management.
  3. Mass enablement and education of teams by creating curated training content for an organization to bridge the gap that mass-produced training curricula does not meet. I support training content with lectures, assignments, and workshops as well.

Notable Accomplishments

People Leadership

  • (2021) Acquired for 1 billion USD for the platform built under my leadership and technical guidance for seven years as the Vice President of R&D at time of acquisition.
  • (2024) Restructured a young start-up to increase productivity via introduction of Kanban, elimination of status meetings, and significant downsizing and restructuring of the engineering team. I dramatically increased the productivity and engagement of the product development team while reducing costs.
  • (2022-2023) Guided ~300 engineers across multiple regions to build in a consistent manner on one platform via regular teaching sessions, touch points, and hands-on demonstrations on how to build in a Serverless manner on AWS with a high degree of security and compliance.
  • (2019-2020) Structured and led a global engineering organization of 16 teams (~130 engineers) to build a platform using micro-service architecture, with each team contributing to distinct platform components, with automatic release notes and detailed JIRA reporting for each team.
  • (2019) Integrated an acquiree's engineering team with only 3% attrition while significantly boosting eNPS scores for teams and re-skilling teams for AWS and Serverless development.

Technical Leadership

  • (2024) Advised CTOs and CEOs on their productivity gaps and opportunities via hands-on prototypes, product workshops, and establishing the foundation of their AWS infrastructure to meet future growth needs (e.g. scaling compute and securing access), compliance requirements (e.g. SOC2) and data residency requirements (e.g. Canadian region addition).
  • (2022-2023) Architected a multi-account AWS architecture using AWS Control Tower such that every team and every service has their own set of AWS accounts. This architecture enabled teams to manage their own accounts, while improving security by limiting the blast radius of each team and service.
  • (2018-2022) Built a SaaS platform that deployed to 9 different AWS regions, including GovCloud in an entirely automated fashion while maintaining SOC2, FedRAMP Moderate, and DoD CC SRG IL5 compliance.
  • (2019) Transitioned to a Serverless TypeScript-first technology stack from a container-based Ruby skill set (Vancouver team) and VM-based classic C# skill set (Bangalore team). To accelerate the learning process, more than a dozen internal training modules, with assignments, were made and presented by myself.
  • (2017-2022) Built a Serverless Data Lake for the company that ingested various metrics (using AWS Glue and AWS Lambda) and provided a SQL interface (using AWS Athena), as well as a BI interface (using AWS Quicksight), with near-zero operational overhead in maintenance.

Professional Interests

Software development is my craft. Despite operating in senior management roles, I've remained highly technical and close to the code. My interests are thus an intersection of management and technology, in particular:

  • Automation - almost every problem that has become "my problem" has been automated rather than solved via addition of people.
  • Simplicity - figuring out how to build simple solutions to solve real problems is what drives me.
  • Excellence - culture will always win out over processes; thus a culture focused on excellence is one I seek for myself and I support others to build.
  • Impact - curiosity and a desire to have a meaningful impact on people, employees, and communities are key for me.

If my interests align with yours and you have an opportunity you could use my assistance with, feel free to reach out!