I'm Charles Dai
Development / DevOps Manager
- Location Vancouver, BC, Canada
- Phone +1 604-417-9889
- E-Mail [email protected]
Hi! I am Charles Dai.
I am a well-rounded and experienced Development and DevOps Manager with 20+ years of experience in the software development and IT industry.
I have strong engineering skills in virtualization and cloud technologies, software as a service (SaaS), and continuous integration/delivery/improvement, balanced with managerial skills including leadership, effective team building and motivation, organizational structuring and efficient process establishment.
My background includes extensive hands-on experience in the entire software development life cycle (SDLC) from design and implementation to testing and deployment, as well as project and team management. I thrive and enjoy agile and fast-paced environments with competing priorities.
Technical Skills
Management Skills
Work Experience
Sr Development Manager
Incognito Software Systems
■ Manage 3 teams (2 product teams with dev and QA and a 3rd cross portfolio Teams with UX/UI, Process, Documentation, and Build in a total of 20+ staffs and 3 managers
■ Provide technical, architectural and process guidance to the dev teams
■ Manage 1 scrum team and being the scrum master
■ Manage varies new features and projects
Software Development Manager
Rise People
■ Manage Dev, DevOps and QA Teams, and take ownership of Rise software products
■ Maintain Continues Delivery pipeline leveraging products like Jenkins, AWS ECS, Dockers, and Terraform, and day to day DevOps tasks
■ Manage varies new features and projects
■ Provide technical and architectural guidance to the dev team
System Development Engineer II
Amazon AWS
■ (formerly known as TSO Logic)
■ Implemented and maintained Continuous Delivery in an Agile .Net C# environment. ■ Leveraged tools such as JIRA, Bamboo, Confluence, Ansible, and Terraform. ■ Maintained Office IT and a virtualized test environment consisting of VMware and Xenservers on prem., and Azure and AWS on the cloud. ■ Supported dev. team and customer deployment and initiated various dev/ops process improvements
Development Director
Electronics Arts Canada
■ Managed cross-functional teams of software engineers, QA tester, and overseas contract engineers working on EA’s Origin online client platform software. ■ Analyzed telemetry data from beta build and proactively about 50% of potential bugs before release. ■ Resolved problems with software bugs caused by cloud-based user data race condition issues.
VP of Technology
Lasso Data System Inc
■ Managed all technology-related matters, including Development, QA and Network Services teams. ■ Oversaw day-to-day operations of Lasso SaaS website. ■ Improved product release schedules from 6 down to 1 month by converting to Agile SCRUM development. ■ Initiated virtualization of servers to reduce cost by about $2000 per month in rack space from 3 to 1 rack.
Senior Director, Software Development
Global Market Insite Inc.
■ Managed software development group (50+ staff) consisting of 2 overseas teams (25+ staff) and local team (25+ staff) of LAMP based developers, sys. architect and database architect. ■ Grew the Vancouver development team from 3 to 25+ staff in 3 years. ■ Converted Waterfall process to Agile SCRUM development process in 6 months, and emphasized on TDD (test Driven Development), Selenium and embedded QA in the development teams. ■ Piloted and implemented various process improvement projects such as JIRA tracking system, Confluence, Fisheye and Crucible development documentation system, and turnkey deployment system to aid development effort. ■ Solved daily performance issues due to large data and 1 million+ subscribers base, and/or network issues, with IT and development staff. ■ Implemented monitoring and alert system to provide 99.99% up- time. ■ Analysed user data in database for possible fraud and fraud prevention.
Product Sustaining Engineer
Kabira Technologies Inc
■ Performed coding, debugging, building, and testing on the Kabira Infrastructure switch product, mainly focusing on the protocol adapters (eg: HTTP and SMPP)
Manager, Product and System Integration
Motorola
■ Managed and built new Product & System Integration Team (exceeding company’s “On-time with Quality” philosophy). ■ Delivered software releases 15% earlier with 10% less problem reports by automating close to 70% of integration test cases. ■ Acted as features owner for various Motorola’s GPRS Infrastructure features. ■ Responsible for project planning, scheduling, and coordinating. ■ Sponsored ClearCase/Quest project and participated in SEI L5 and TL9000 audit. ■ Took over the management of the Build & Release, Test Bed, and Feature Test Teams, before the site closure.
Team Lead, Unix Services
ISM-BC (Jointly owned by Telus and IBM)
■ Managed staff, provided technical guidance to Sun/DEC teams and hands-on administration/support for Telus clients (largest data center in Western Canada). ■ Implemented the largest multi-million dollars Enterprise Systems. ■ Deployed and managed Sun Ultra Enterprise 10000 with 3.5TB of EMC storage, L10000 tape library, AMDOCS billing software and fail over provisioning across multiple countries.
Computer Sys. Specialist
BC Hydro
■ Managed various corporate client systems and technical lead for various computer system pilot projects, including BC Hydro’s first web server.
Senior System Analyst/ Project Manager
Vancouver Int’l Airport Authority
■ Managed various airport systems (Flight Info Display, Security and Baggage). ■ Supervised airport operation enhancements (Terminal Mgmt System and Noise Monitoring System). ■ Responsible for day-to-day operation and project management activities.
Software Designer/System Administrator
Glenayre Electronics Inc.
■ Designed and implemented software features for the GL3000 paging terminal. ■ Managed a heterogeneous LAN of 150+ PCs and Sun UNIX workstations.
Education
Electrical Engineering (3rd year level)
University of British Columbia
B.Sc. Computer Science (Graduated)
University of British Columbia
My Recommendations
-
Charles is an unassuming gem -- someone with an almost perfect combination of organizational skills, common sense, and positive energy. Always fun to be around, he nevertheless always seems to smoothly and quietly overcome whatever obstacles in the way to achieving a goal. While at GMI he successfully steered a team of developers towards a more disciplined, productive agile methodology in a very difficult corporate environment and delivered numerous milestones on time.
John Jensen Director, Corporate Strategy, Mozilla -
Charles sets up strong relationships with the developers he's managing and can see issues / constraints from their prospective as he's lived in their shoes before. Developers have told me they thoroughly enjoy working for him.
Sean Marthinsen Client manager, Annex Consulting Group -
Charles’ understanding, ability to read and assess essential needs of an organization and the technical knowledge necessary in the industry is substantial. He was a pleasure to work with, professional, motivated and a quick study. I would not hesitate to work with him again.
Ladislav Tagliafero Senior Manager, Dev. and Operation, Fujitsu -
Charles was instrumental in assisting my efforts for an Agile transition at GMI. With Charles as my guide, I was able to work with a talented team while deftly maneuvering around obstacles inherent to the environment - definitely stacking the odds in my favor. Charles is a natural manager and is able to drive for excellence while also respecting an organizations' capacity for change. I would recommend him as an asset for any organization with a need for technical leadership.
Jordan Lee Eng Manager, Amazon Sustainability Technology
My Interests
Because I like to try things at least once, I have many interests and hobbies…
- Snowboarding
- Skating
- Rollerblading / Rollerhockey
- Swimming
- Scuba Diving
- Flying
- Watch Movies
- Bicycling
- Fishing
- Canoeing
- Hiking