Fazal MAJID

Profile

I am a successful entrepreneur and hands-on CTO with a proven track record in the competitive and time-driven Internet and Mobile industry. I also have international experience in the Telecommunications and Networking fields. This background gives me a unique perspective across the entire application stack.

Skills

  • Founding and growing startups
  • Building and managing engineering and ops teams
  • Project management
  • Cost-effective scaling (Mobile, Web, Big Data and Cloud)
  • Performance optimization and application tuning
  • Database and Big Data design and management
  • Network architecture, Telecommunications OSS and BSS architecture
  • Expert in Python, C and Go on UNIX platforms
  • I was granted two patents

Experience

June 2017–Present
San Francisco, CA, USA
Our mission is to deliver the best marketing analytics platform to ensure that our customers can not only do their job—but excel at it. Singular tracks $10B in spend and has over 2,000 integration partners.

Singular Labs

CTO, Americas

Apsalar merged with Singular in June 2017, combining best-in-class marketing analytics and attribution.

I share responsibility for integrating the platforms, modernizing our stack, cross-training the teams, and led on scalability for user/device-level data.

I implemented GDPR and COPPA compliance, as well as data governance as contractually required by our partners.

I am now extending our platform to be globally distributed, self-healing with continuous delivery, while further optimizing cost efficiencies using a judicious mix of cloud and facilities-based infrastructure.

February 2010–June 2017
San Francisco, CA, USA
Apsalar offers the most advanced mobile analytics and marketing optimization platform. We provide insight and actionable tools to help mobile app developers maximize their revenue and ROI.

Apsalar Inc.

Founder and CTO

As CTO, I was responsible for the architecture, implementation and operations of the Apsalar platform, and built a top-notch engineering team to develop it.

I built market-leading mobile revenue analytics, mobile attribution, real-time bidding and audience creation & distribution platforms.

I scaled our architecture to traffic levels three orders of magnitude higher than Kefta for roughly similar CAPEX.

I built a data science team to create market segments to sell as a DSP. Ultimately we were not able to scale them due to poor RTB inventory quality at the time and focused on our attribution offering.

April 2007–February 2010
Foster City, CA, USA
Acxiom is the global leader in interactive marketing services, Acxiom helps clients connect with their customers through deep consumer insight that enables effective and profitable marketing initiatives and business decisions.

Acxiom Corp.

Senior Architect

I worked on the architecture for Acxiom's next-generation multi-channel marketing platform, integrating the Kefta technology with Acxiom's other online marketing channels. Some of the work covered scalable, yet ultra-low latency OLTP database technology for demanding online applications, where every millisecond counts.

February 2000–April 2007
San Francisco, CA, USA
Startup, funded by Softbank Venture Capital. Kefta provided SaaS behavioral targeting and email marketing solutions that helped increase our clients' online conversion rates and sales, often by 30%. We sold the company to Acxiom Corp. in April 2007.

Kefta Inc.

Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer

I started the company with two partners (both Harvard MBAs), as the founder with a technology background.

I recruited, managed and mentored the engineering team (14 engineers at peak)

I defined the technology vision and led its implementation, including much of the coding.

I was the technical face of the company on client pitches and public speaking engagements.

As a founder, I was ultimately responsible for getting things done. Just one example: after an unavoidable round of downsizing in 2003, I assumed the role of sole systems and database administrator until 2005.

I led the business’ reinvention several times to ensure its survival and renewal in the face of the dot-com nuclear winter of 2000-2004, one of the most challenging environments ever for technology startups.

I ran a tight ship and found ways to stretch our infrastructure dollars. One way to achieve that was insisting on performance optimization and efficiency, and mentoring engineers in my team to achieve this.

1999–2000
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Dutch commercial ISP, ran a national network with 26 POPs in the Netherlands, as well as an international backbone, with POPs in London, Brussels, Paris, Frankfurt, Washington and San Jose.

EuroNet Internet BV

Technical Director, Operations Manager, deputy to the CEO and interim CIO.

I performed technical due diligence for France Telecom's acquisition of the company in 1998, and stayed on to overhaul it. I limited post-acquisition turnover and recruited to stabilize the workforce, while shedding non-strategic activities such as custom web development.

I managed the core operations department with a 1999 budget of €5M in capital expenditures, €4.5M in operating expenses, and over 20 employees.

I upgraded the technical platforms (service, network and IS), reorganized operations and project management. I led the design of the long-term converged technical architecture for data services (IP and ATM) for all of France Telecom's Dutch affiliates . The first phase was an ambitious IP over SDH network of Cisco 12000 and 7500 routers, spanning over 29 POPs in the Netherlands, with an initial capacity of 155 Mbps and scalability to 40 Gbps.

June 1996–1999
Paris, France
The division of France Telecom that operated Wanadoo (now rebranded as Orange), the premier Internet Service Provider in France and second-largest in Europe.

France Telecom Interactive (FTI)

Deputy to the Vice-President of Engineering. Acting as Chief Technology Officer for the division.

I designed Wanadoo's technical architecture to scale to 1 million subscribers and beyond by 1999, ran the RFPs and oversaw their implementation. This included the network architecture, the web portal and email services platform, the Business Support System (provisioning, billing and CRM) and the OSS. The first phase was completed in August 1997, the second in February 1999, when it served over 560.000 dialup, cable and ADSL subscribers. FT was still using the same basic architecture for over 5 million subscribers across all retail Internet services, as recently as 2007.

I set up much-needed QA and project management groups, to improve reliability, quality of service and reduce time to market for introducing new features.

September 1994–June 1996
Caen, France
A joint France Telecom and French Post Office R&D lab, covering Internet, messaging, groupware, smart card, RFID and payment technologies.

Service d'Études Communes des Postes et Télécommunications (SEPT)

Project Manager I led Project Mercure to produce a prototype ISP platform for FT with electronic commerce capabilities, as a successor to the legacy French Minitel system. The project was successfully completed, on time and within budget, in collaboration with Netscape Communications, with a total budget of €500K and a staff of 15 engineers. The payment feature was patented and later commercialized in Wanadoo. It was generating well over €2M in yearly revenues by 2002.

Education

1992–1994
Paris, France

Télécom Paris (French National Higher Institute for Telecommunications)

MS in Telecommunications Engineering

Telecom ParisTech is one of France’s leading graduate engineering schools and is considered the school in the field of IT.

1992, 1993
New Haven, CT, USA

Yale University Mathematics Department

Research Assistant

I investigated noise reduction using wavelet packet analysis, leading to an international publication and a scientific software package. My research was awarded first prize for Mathematics in 1992 by the École Polytechnique.

1989–1992
Palaiseau, France

École Polytechnique

MS in Mathematics and Computer Science

The top French engineering institute or “Grande École”. It has trained France’s scientific and industrial elite and the upper echelons of its civil and military services since its inception, and it continues to do so today. Of the fifty most important corporations in France, nearly half are headed by a polytechnicien.

Skills detail

Patents granted

Videotex emulator in Java (French patent 96 04263 / FR 2 747 258 - A1).

Web-oriented Pay-per-view system (International patent WO 99/03243).

Technology stacks

Highly proficient

  • Python, writing Python C extension modules
  • C, Go
  • HTML5, CSS, HTTP, JavaScript, AJAX, Comet, CGI, FastCGI, PHP, DOM, XML, JSON, RSS/Atom, Postscript
  • PostgreSQL, PL/pgsql, PL/proxy and writing C extensions for PostgreSQL, SQLite
  • nginx extension module programming
  • Solaris, Linux, Docker, OS X, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Juniper JunOS and Cisco IOS administration
  • UNIX systems and network programming
  • PostgreSQL DBA at scale
  • Git

Somewhat rusty

  • C++, R, Java, Scala, Ragel
  • Apache Spark
  • iOS (Objective-C) and Android mobile app development
  • Writing Wordpress extensions and themes
  • Oracle SQL, PL/SQL, Pro*C, OCI and JDBC, MySQL
  • Apache, NSAPI and AOLserver extension programming
  • Tcl/Tk, Tcl C extensions and embedding
  • Oracle, Sybase and SQL Server DBA
  • CORBA, AMQP, XML-RPC
  • X11/Athena and Motif
  • Microsoft Project, including VBA extensions
  • RCS, CVS, Subversion, Mercurial
  • Memcached, Postfix, Dovecot, Cyrus, BIND, DJBDNS, Unbound, SAMBA admin
  • SNMP, NetFlow, MRTG, Cacti
  • VMware, Xen, Solaris 10 Zones, Parallels and VirtualBox
  • Amazon EC2 and AWS
  • Windows programming (Win32/C++)

Languages

Native French, English and Urdu speaker.

Intermediate German. Basic Dutch and Japanese.

International exposure

  • 2000–Present: San Francisco, California, USA
  • 1999–2000: Amsterdam, Netherlands
  • 1992, 93: New Haven, Connecticut, USA
  • 1982–85: Tokyo, Japan
  • 1981: London, England
  • 1978–80: Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
  • 1970–78, 80–81, 85–2000: Paris, France