Labeeb Ismail Email & Phone Number

Managing the Global devices software team for Comcast and Sky. This team consists of around 2000 engineers spread across several countries and continents. Responsible for 100M+ devices spread across 80+ device models. Developed key technologies that helped automate testing, deployment and monitoring of over 7000 software releases a year. Built several tools for managing these devices and triaging field issues arising from these devices. Organized the team into crews and squad to implemented processes to foster leadership at squad level. Targeted and achieved around 10% improvement in average annual productivity throughout this period through tools, automation, training and process improvements.As the primary technical leader for RDK - the operating system for managed devices - helped lead the effort to get RDK deployed by around 40 global Operators and fostered a community of over 10,000 developers spread across 500 companies.As an early adopter of Generative AI in Comcast, the RDK team successfully built around 20 POCs for using generative AI in various tools and processes. Successfully deployed around half of them in internal tools.As a technical member of Comcast CoE for Generative AI, helped in setting the policies for AI adoption in Comcast. RDK team led Comcast is Generative AI adoption for the product development lifecycle improvements.Led several high priority projects like the deployment of XumoTV, Sky Glass, XB6-8.

Managing software development, test and deployment for Comcast customer premise devices including video clients, set-top boxes, video gateways, WiFi gateways, cable modems, extenders and IoT devices. Manages a large team of employees and contractors distributed in several continents and provides directions to several vendor/partner teams.As a founding member of the Comcast X1 team, responsible for defining and building X1 device software. Defined, developed and deployed RDK on 20M devices spanning 20 device models and 15 silicons within the last 4 years. Published RDK to the open source community, and is now licensed by over 250 companies. RDK is deployed by 4 other operators in US, Canada and Europe and is in trials with several other operators.Switched software development/deployment model for Comcast devices to DevOps methodology. Accelerated device software deployment cycle from 2 year update cycles to 2-3 week cycles. Now all 20M Comcast RDK devices get a new software update roughly every 2-3 weeks. This required rebuilding everything - starting with software architecture which scales well across the 20+ device models; changing roles, responsibilities and attitude of developers, testers and deployment engineers; creating tools, dashboard and metrics for daily health tracking; and instituting a release management team to coordinate dev, test, release and deployment processes. Most of these scaling from the initial 1M to 20M was done without adding significant operating cost.Started this role with a 5 person team to prototype the initial client device and grew the team to around 400 employees and contractors over 6 years, while expanding responsibilities take on development and testing for all X1 devices, Data/wireless devices, legacy video devices, IoT controllers and IoT devices.

As a founding member of the Comcast X1 team built the initial prototype of X1 working with Sree Kotay, who later became the CTO of Comcast. Created the proof of concept for X1 device within 4 months by assembling several open source and proprietary modules from several sources. After the project was approved, signed up to deliver first customer shipment in 12 month. At that time, the previous Comcast record for deploying a new device with a new silicon provider and with a new software stack was 3 years. Hired the team of employees and contractors, setup the process and tools for executing this project and achieved first customer shipment in 15 months.

Overseeing development of client platform technologies and evolution of application environment. In this role lead the development of several technologies which later became the basis for X1 and RDK. Created a app framework based on using Adobe Flash as a plugin to OCAP Java middleware. Lead the efforts to create the first open source reference implementation for OCAP. Represented Comcast in several Industry standards groups. Lead technical evaluation of several strategic investments and technology partnerships.

Oversee development of various technologies related to TVWorks client software components. Work with the industry to promote standardization of various software interfaces.

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Created and managed the DVR and OCAP teams

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Built industry's first viable Multi-room DVR solution and first remote GUI solution for multi-room DVRsDeployed MbTV PVR technology on Scientific Atlanta's DVR set-top boxes - Cable Industry's first DVR enable set-top box.

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Worked with other founders in raising $15M in funding. Created the technology behind MbTV personalization and DVR software. Over the course of 3 years created a team of 50 highly productive engineers with deep expertise in this area. Developed algorithms and software modules for the personalization engine and the DVR engine. Built an AI engine to learn about user's TV watching preference by monitoring their TV viewing and recording patterns. Created unsupervised learning algorithms to detect groups of various interest clusters within the home and used those groups to fine tune recommendations. Used these interest groups to create better personalized targeted advertisements.

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Created the interactive TV Consulting group within Metabyte. Grew the group from 0 to 25 engineers over the course of 3 years while maintaining a positive P&L account.Managed over 20 projects including porting OpenTV to 8 STBs, Americast-Starsight-Divicom EPG integration, porting Liberate Navigator, building early CableModem software, implementing reference a EPG, etc.Software development tasks include developing SCO Unix network drivers, OS 2 drivers, DVB-SI stack, OS abstraction layer, Microware OS-9 modules and a proprietary (non-DOCSIS) Cable-modem stack

Santa Clara, California, Us

Developed NetWare SNMP agents and drivers for Intel server boards for instrumenting server parameters

Developed and debugged NetWare device drivers for several SCSI disk adaptersDeveloped Unix (SVR 4) device drivers for Ethernet network interface cards

Chennai, Tamil Nadu, In

Developed the following software components:Implemented Reed-Solomon Error correction module for Tape drives;NetWare, Unix and DOS Devices drivers for tape drives.Added file-validation functions for the TVS archive management software in DOS assembly code (approximately 20,000 lines of assembly code)Wrote a NetWare integration module to integrate TVS tape drives with another company's Archive Management software.