Klaus Salchner Email & Phone Number

Toronto, Ontario, Ca

APOLLO is Canada’s leading online insurance provider. Our proprietary platform, the APOLLO Exchange, allows insurance agents and their customers to purchase their policy immediately, from anywhere, on any device, 24/7. Unlike traditional paper-based processes, APOLLO leverages extensive data and sophisticated algorithms to quote, collect payment, and issue policies for thousands of types of small business and individuals without human intervention. Through traditional agents and embedded finance partnerships APOLLO is redefining the distribution of insurance.

Santa Clara, California, Us

Lead the development of our consumer facing platform, which supports more than 95+ million consumers addressing one of their basic human needs, finding shelter. We are helping millions of consumers buying or selling homes, and we have become a trusted partner for them by simplifying the home buying and home selling journey. Contributed to double digit revenue growth, close to 50% growth in our audience, and an all-time high of our consumer satisfaction scores.Led the re-imagination of our consumer platform, by adopting latest mobile technologies like Flutter, a focus on data, data analytics and Machine Learning, and the migration of a monolithic front-end to a modern and flexible experience which enables teams to ship frequently, re-use and a magnitude of difference in developer experience and productivity. Drove the rollout of a real time consumer profile which can capture millions of data points and enable a whole new level of personalization and a much more contextual and relevant consumer experience. My teams deployed several Machine Learning models using the latest AWS ML platform, which recommend relevant homes to our consumers. Partnering with Product and Engineering leaders on all levels of the organization and help to bring cross functional teams together to solve critical consumer pain points. Mentored and grew many engineers and leaders on the way, always with a focus on how to make them successful, connect them to a consumer need and outcome (we use the OKR framework and connect teams to business and consumer OKRs), enable them to iterate, measure and understand what consumers are doing, and then get out of the way to let them do magic.

Santa Clara, California, Us

Realtor.com is a platform, which connects consumers with the right agent (realtor), the right listing (property), in the right neighborhood at the right time. I was responsible for the technology teams, which focused on the professionals (agents and brokers), based in Vancouver, West Virginia, Santa Clara, and Bangalore, India. Launched a new platform with extensive ongoing customer feedback and validation which replaced several legacy platforms and addressed key customer pain points and needs. We moved from a monolithic application to a modular and loosely coupled architecture using micro-services and serverless Lambda functions. My teams moved to true Continuous Delivery, shipping multiple times a week, and created a CI/CD platform for the whole technology organization, which now supports 600+ projects. Shifted to a Continuous Testing approach by investing in test automation and a scalable Test Data strategy, being adopted by the whole technology organization. My teams moved from being lagging followers to fast-paced leaders with strong engineering practices and a customer-focused mindset and "shipping being a continuous learning" mindset. Built up the "Engineering Center of Excellence" for the whole technology organization with the focus of creating an engineering community of sharing, continuous learning and improvement, and driving large scale productivity and engineering improvements. Adopted industry DevOps metrics to measure the improvements in deployment frequency from months to days, roll backs from days to hours, and from a lack of operational insights to extensive operational insights where teams know what is happening in their application. This initiative was a major CTO initiative for 2018/19 to modernize the technology group of 500+ technologists.

Vancouver, Bc, Ca

Led the engineering group in North America, which was responsible for the consumer side, supply chain side and 2D and 3D modeling side of BuildDirect's platform for the home-improvement industry. BuildDirect is a polyglot engineering organization which runs on both the Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure platform and leverages the .NET, Node JS, Python and PHP platforms. BuildDirect's platform is built using micro-services accessed via public Hypermedia API's, componentized UI using React, and event processing and a message bus architecture. It is built to scale, applies machine learning algorithms and collects and leverages data throughout its platform.Moved all teams to a Continuous Delivery model where teams deploy multiple times a week. Heavily invested in test automation, guided by the "test automation pyramid". Created a System QA function with the focus on quality tooling and practices. Created small engineering teams with end-to-end ownership, from inception, to deployment to operation. Established an engineering community which fostered a continuous learning and continuous improvement mindset.Led the development of a Search platform which leveraged real time Machine Learning to make search results for consumers more relevant, where each click improved the search results for the user. Drove the development of real time logistic platform which powered BuildDirect’s heavy weight freight delivery network, as all off-the-shelf solutions focused on small goods, which is quite different from heavy weight construction material. This logistics platform optimized the delivery of goods from manufacturers and suppliers, to central warehouses, to last mile warehouses and the last mile delivery which often required special equipment.

Richmond, British Columbia, Ca

Provided day-to-day and strategic advice to the executive, product and engineering team on people, product, technology, and product delivery. Shared best practices for Engineering, Operations and Product.

Vancouver, British Columbia, Ca

Provided day-to-day and strategic advice to the executive, product and engineering team on people, product, technology, and product delivery. Shared best practices for Engineering, Operations and Product.

Newcastle Upon Tyne, Gb

Responsible for the engineering group responsible for Sage's flagship Sage 300 ERP product powering the business of thousands of international SMB businesses. Transitioned to smaller engineering teams, which own the delivery end-to-end practicing Continuous Delivery. Established practice groups to foster a continuous learning and continuous improvement mindset in the engineering team. Re-envisioned QA by forming a System QA function which owned the QA tooling and practices as well the platform and regression testing suite. All other QA and quality aspects were owned by the engineering teams.The Sage 300 ERP platform was moved from a separate cloud and on-premise codebase to a single code base which was continuously deployed and tested both in the cloud and on-premise. Ramped the focus on test automation to cut regression cycles by weeks, with the goal to get it down to hours. Transitioned all development from an offshore outsourcing partner to the in-house engineering team.

Vancouver, Bc, Ca

Was responsible for all aspects of the Product Development of Elastic Path's core commerce platform, patent-pending Hypermedia (REST Level 3) commerce API, as well as integrations into CMS platforms like Adobe Experience Manager. Hired key roles and experienced technologists into the team. Set out a vision for frequently shipping software to our partners and customers via monthly Tech Previews and four GA releases a year. Solidified a DevOps practice which heavily leveraged cloud services like Amazon. Moved Elastic Path's Documentation to a structured, reusable content format using DITA XML and a modern Development Centre with open-sourced reference applications and a partner accessible cloud instance of Elastic Path's commerce platform and API's.

Seattle, Washington, Us

Led a product development team which struggled to innovate on a 15-year-old SaaS and Enterprise platform. Aggressively hired senior engineering talent, restructured the organization, and brought an “Agile” coach on board with the goal to release one significant innovative feature each quarter using an iterative delivery approach. Elevated the need for a strong user experience by building out a senior UX Design function, creating a dedicated front-end development team with experienced UI Developers and contracting Habanero, a well-respected UX Design company which has delivered award winning projects. Released a preview of the new device reporting platform and interface within 90 days, a key feature of the current platform and the number one source of customer dissatisfaction. Transitioned a decade of reporting data for millions of user devices from the Microsoft platform to Mongo DB to eliminate licensing costs of up to a million dollar and enabled a global distributed data store. Moved to a loosely coupled middle tier and UI tier via a robust REST API and introducing a “Data as a Service” concept to allow the data store to operate, scale and innovate independently. This was a period of rapid innovation at Absolute.Placed an Offshoring Manager with our outsourcing partner in Vietnam to manage the upgrade to senior talent, restructuring to more efficient teams, agile training and upgrading the engineering practices. This resulted in the offshoring partner to work more efficiently and independently and deliver higher quality software releases. Initiated the buildup of our own offshoring center in Vietnam with senior talent.

Dublin, California, Us

Responsible for all operational aspects of the Software Delivery including the overall Software Development Lifecycle, Agile and engineering practices, coordination and collaboration across groups and geographies, operational systems, coordination across 3rd party vendors for the product delivery, establishing and tracking quality, field readiness and engineering practices and overseeing the localization of all products.

Dublin, California, Us

Responsible for the R&D organization in North America and manage a R&D budget of several millions. Rebuilt the R&D organization for innovation by bringing in a Chief Architect from Google and several Senior Principal Engineers who have experience in Semantic Web, Enterprise Security, REST and Web Services API and Machine Learning. Brought Saba’s first iPhone application to market, and built Saba’s Social Networking product for the Enterprise with aggressive revenue plans in the first year. Spearheading the development of Saba’s next generation platform and collaboration suite. Led a goal setting and alignment initiative across all product operations using the Balanced Score Card framework.

Dublin, California, Us

Charged by the CEO and SVP of Product Operations to take over the OnDemand Operations as it struggled to meet uptime SLA’s and meet customer demands. Rebuilt the OnDemand organization, started the migration of all customers to a new data center, reduced the cost structure via data center consolidation, replaced failing systems and applied latest technology like VMware. Spent several months in Pune, India to rebuild the India operations from the ground up, established an operational model to perform the majority of the day to day work in India and improved the quality of the output. Restored uptime SLA’s, customer confidence and reduced the time to bring up new OnDemand systems from several weeks to two days. Increased the margin points of the OnDemand business by close to eight percent in one year.

Dublin, California, Us

Ran the Program Management Office and was responsible for all product releases worldwide. Rolled out an “OnDemand first” SDLC which allowed Saba to build enterprise class software but deliver it to OnDemand customers first. Spent several months in our Lexington, MA office and helped stabilize the R&D organization in this office after low morale and delivery problems. Improved the communication between this office and the headquarter, improved the quality of the deliveries and managed the budget to renovate the office.

Dublin, California, Us

Built out a Program Management Office responsible for the end-to-end management of all product releases. Led an initiative to overhaul the development process and a culture change to improve quality and on-time delivery of releases. Introduced key performance indicators like bug density, code coverage and bug arrival rate. Has been recognized by the CEO and COO for process and product quality improvements while delivering releases on-time. Led an initiative to improve cross-organization coordination and hand-offs. Led the R&D groups for five of the seven product lines across North America and India – the Performance Suite, the Talent Suite, the Learning Suite, the Analytics Suite and the Content Services Suite.

Architecture and application design and management consulting services specializing in .NET enterprise applications. As a Senior Enterprise Architect with solid experience in enterprise software development, Klaus spends considerable time on performance, scalability, availability, maintainability, globalization/localization and security. The projects he has been involved in are used by more than a million users in 50 countries on three continents.

Us

Led a geographically distributed team of more than forty engineers located in our west coast (Vancouver) and east coast (Baltimore) development center. Improved the stability, scalability, performance, security and architecture of the product by magnitudes. Was the lead architect and technology evangelist for several years. Was featured in several Microsoft case studies and were early adopters of Microsoft Windows 2000 and MS SQL 2000 (named during a Bill Gates key note). Managed the selection of HCL Technologies as the outsourcing partner and was in charge of training and nurturing the relationship. HCL delivered several projects successfully within the first six months which resulted in noticeable cost benefits. Rewarded for playing a key role in winning the largest commercial win in the history of the company and was the go-to technologist expert during its implementation. Participated in numerous large scale enterprise implementations at Boeing, State Farm, Lockheed Martin, AT&T, US Postal Service, US Navy, General Dynamics, Price Waterhouse Coopers, Siemens, HP, Australian Defense Organization and many more. Built and managed a large scale OnDemand system with 99.99 percent availability which was also powered the msn.com education section.

Richmond, British Columbia, Ca

Evaluated several platforms and selected the Microsoft platform to deliver the company’s first e-commerce initiative using Windows, MS SQL, IIS/ASP and Site Server. Created a prototype of the application using Visual Studio and ASP within four weeks. Provided ongoing support to the development team as it built the e-commerce application.

Initiated the company’s web development and hosting initiative built on top of the Microsoft platform using Windows, MS SQL, IIS/ASP and Visual Studio. Mentored and trained the development team. Taught courses in Windows, MS Office and IIS/ASP to IT staff of mid-sized enterprise companies. Led the effort to become a certified Microsoft training center.

Architected and built the first web based nation-wide “Austrian Real Estate Service” on the Microsoft platform using Windows, MS SQL, IIS/ASP and Visual Studio. Designed and developed the first nationwide “Austrian Real Estate Exchange” using a client server architecture which allowed all realtors to exchange real estate information. Written in Borland Pascal using the Btrieve database engine and implemented its own Macro language so customers could script custom logic. Assisted in the migration from an IBM mainframe system to the newly created Real Estate Exchange. Provided Sales, Customer Support, Training and IT support.

Telecommunications And Electronics Degree, Telecommunications And Electronics

Executive Training In Communications And Employee Motivation

Professional Language Studies