Ali Zaidi Email & Phone Number

Memphis, Tn, Us

Memphis, Tn, Us

Spade Animation is a next-generation animation studio leveraging real-time and machine-learning workflows to produce compelling characters, immersive worlds, and high-quality visuals at a competitive cost. Our U.S. and India team boasts decades of experience in top-tier Animation and Visual Effects while strategically collaborating with Epic Games to bring your vision to life.

As a startup, our biggest challenge was recruiting the right talent. I recruited the infrastructure, SRE and desktop support teams that consistently performed above expectations. Besides my immediate teams, I also recruited our CTO, software engineers and render wranglers to Spire.I architected the “Studio on the Edge” platform and infrastructure for realtime (Unreal) workflows across three geographically distributed studios and a sprinkling of remote artists. In this endeavor, I built the infrastructure from ground-up for two studio locations in the US overseeing the design and implementation of- Networking (WAN, Internet, Wifi, Wavelength).- IAM and security (EDR, ZeroTrust, SASE, firewalls, Active Directory, Anti Virus, SSO, SCIM).- Render farm autoscaling, physical workstation deployment, MDM, VDI.- Audio Video for conference and screening rooms.- SMB and NFS storage, global file system namespace, caching, backups and DR.- SaaS based productivity, HR and collaboration.- Multi-site/multi-master database replication, Perforce scaling- CI/CD (for Kubernetes, Windows, Linux, libraries and tools)- Observability, logging and monitoringWas deeply attached to the pipeline development efforts as we fleshed out the balance between realtime and traditional CG workflows. During our search for the CTO, my responsibilities included fleshing out the pipeline roadmap to match the production schedule, budgeting for personnel, vetting pipeline vendors, recruiting the talent and driving the outcomes necessary to deliver on time. Planned and executed the commissioning of the Burbank and San Mateo studios from physical security, contractors, landlord, power and cooling to all aspects of the technology infrastructure.

Glendale, Ca, Us

I built the teams, crafted the technology platform and directed the business in honing the strategy for a globally distributed movie production pipeline. I partnered with R&D teams to evolve our development practices to an agile one that embraced microservices and secure TPN compliant patterns. The systems covered - Microservices written in Java, Python, Golang, Ruby and Javascript - UI/UX in React and Vue.- Cassandra, Couchbase, Elastic Search, Postgres, Mongo, Greenplum, Redis.- JWT, OAuth, OpenID and SAML based authN and authZ- Open Telemetry, Jaeger, Prometheus and Datadog logging, metrics and tracing.- Nginx routing, caching and load balancing.- Kafka and RabbitMQ data streaming, event processing and pub/sub - Looker, Tableau and ELK for AnalyticsFollowing is a list of notable accomplishments in these practices.Cloud EngineeringEnvisioned and produced DreamWorks Cloud control plane, an orchestration framework for infrastructure automation, governance and chargebacks on-prem and in the cloud. Platform/Site Reliability EngineeringDeveloped the API and UI that leverages Service Discovery, APM and synthetic transaction data to define and measure business SLOs. The system helps reduce the communication gaps between disparate teams, democratizes the performance metrics and reduces operational burden.Development of CI/CD platform supporting multiple cloud based Kubernetes flavors (including AKS, EKS and GKE). The platform provided DORA metrics, SecOps tooling and multiple deployment models (blue/green, canary). Data EngineeringEvangelized and charted the path for the Studio to get away from proprietary database systems and towards open source distributed databases, resulting in approximately $3 million annual savings.Sponsored the development of ForestFlow, a scalable policy-based cloud-native machine learning model server for easily deploying and managing ML models. ForestFlow has since become a Linux Foundation AI incubation project.

Glendale, Ca, Us

My responsibilities were split b/w managing the Data Services team and providing vision and architectural blueprints for Platform services.In this role i grew the Data Services practice from one team supporting eight Oracle instances to three teams supporting- Relational Databases Over 180 Oracle, Vertica, SQL Server, Postgres and Mysql instances- NoSQL/DevOps Over 130 Cassandra, Elastic Search, InfluxDB and Mongodb Instances and growing- Big Data and Analytics Hadoop, Kafka, Spark, Ignite and various other technologies encompassed by the Big Data label. A decent amount of my time was spent researching/formulating strategies and tactics towards a larger Data Services Vision.Following are some of the themes that were implemented and continue to be enhanced by our vision.- Database As a Service (DBaaS) We successfully delivered a DBaaS platform that allowed quick provisioning and lifcycle management of various NoSQL, Relational and Big Data services. We continue to enhance our DBaaS platform to support more technologies and more sophisticated scheduling logic.- Cloud Native Apps We recognized the paradigm shift happening in the industry early on and helped evangelize the adoption of container packaged, micro serviced and dynamically scheduled mantra throughout the Platform services organization.- Operational Analytics Not only did we instrument and monitor our platform and services, we successfully drove the adoption of analytics platform that detects anomalies and impending dooms. - Big Data made Easy Making Big Data technologies easily usable for the developers/end users. This included ingesting, processing, correlating and most importantly, visualizing large data sets.- Data Driven Business Decisions Providing the Data, Science, Analytics and Visualizations to help the business make decisions.

Charlotte, Nc, Us

Charlotte, Nc, Us

Architecture and certification of highly available database platform for the next generation loan origination system. The system was architected to have five nines of availability using Oracle 10g as the database platform. High availability was achieved utilizing Oracle Real Application Clusters technology running on AIX using HACMP cluster manager and EMC Symmetrix (DMX 3000) as the storage platform. Disaster recovery capability was achieved using Oracle Data Guard. The system was thoroughly tested for high availability, disaster recovery, scalability to seven nodes and database restores.Oracle grid control was setup to manage and monitor the database platform. The system was integrated with Netcool enterprise management platform.

Bangalore, Karnataka, In

Ms - Partial, Computer Science

Be, Electrical Engg

Hsc, Pre-Engineering