OPTIMAL - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Load Test Engineer
- Load Test Engineer / Services
Job Titles:
- Senior Engineer
- Principal Performance Engineer
- Principal Performance Engineer / Location: Vancouver, Canada
Fiann brings more than 20 years of performance experience-and multiple software engineering patents-to his role at Optimal. He began his career in A/B testing and personalization tools. He always had a serious interest in front-end performance, driven by the need to make A/B testing content a seamless part of the user experience. Later Fiann developed the deployment process for the tool that later became Adobe Target and created a new, patented method for deploying the software for maximum performance.
Fiann is now a senior engineer at Optimal and a technical lead on projects that involve deep-dive analysis of front-end integrations and performance. He's responsible for keeping up to date with emerging best practices that will squeeze every last performance improvement from complex websites.
In an earlier role at Tealium, Fiann led technical support and professional services for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The global rollout of Tealium tag management for Vodafone across 21 countries was his first serious introduction to the different performance needs in poorly networked regions of the world. It was on that project that Fiann first met Optimal Founder and CEO [Rich Howard]({{< ref "team/rich-howard" >}}).
Something that you may not know about Fiann is that he spent a year volunteering in a rainforest research center in Borneo, helping scientists research ways to mitigate the damage caused by logging in primary rainforests. He even contributed to the background material used in David Attenborough's classic series, Life of Plants! He'd be the first to tell you that despite how it may look in documentary films, it's very loud, but it's also very hard to spot animal life in the jungle, so an incredible amount of work goes into finding the things they want to film.
Job Titles:
- Principal Performance Engineer
- Principal Performance Engineer / Location: Dallas, Texas
An IT specialist with more than 20 years' experience in enterprise software performance engineering, Joe is an expert in testing automation, capacity planning, data analysis, and business intelligence decision support. His project management skills are pretty slick too. He's done it all: retail, financial services, software development, consulting, and travel.
At Optimal, Joe puts his considerable skills to excellent use identifying performance bottlenecks and scalability issues for websites and backend enterprise applications. He also works with clients on IT testing governance and best practices to improve software quality and reduce costs.
Job Titles:
- Performance Analyst
- Performance Analyst / Location: Norfolk, Virginia
Performance Analyst John manages data and builds out reports for big-name clients. He's also a pro at automating reporting and other data tools.
Job Titles:
- Performance Analyst
- Performance Analyst / Location: Galveston Island, Texas
In her role as Performance Analyst at Optimal, Kristiana develops report automation techniques like OptiBot and databases that enable easy storage and access to important metrics. She's a master of multiple programming languages-including R and Python-and monitoring tools (Rigor , Blue Triangle , SpeedCurve ) and their API implementations. And as if that weren't enough, she also reports and consults on A/B testing results for The Estée Lauder Companies Inc. using Google Optimize and Google Analytics.
After a brief foray into Aerospace Engineering, Kristiana switched to Astronomy with a minor in Mathematics. While writing her undergraduate thesis, she fell in love with data analysis, studying the Perseid meteor shower using Snow Telemetry radio frequencies.
Upon graduating, Kristiana landed a job as a data analyst in the pharmaceutical industry. It was her first introduction to data science. She happily spent her days designing pricing algorithms that automatically put items on sale or adjusted according to market trends. She also used linear regression to predict the weights of future shipments with over 80% accuracy and developed a model to recommend products to customers using R and k-means clustering.
Astronomy is still close to Kristiana's heart, but the diversity of data science and its applications is where her passion lies.
Something you may not know about Kristiana is that she barrel-raced as a child-even riding a world champion horse in one competition. A woman of many talents, she also worked in a small mom-and-pop chocolate-making business during college.
Job Titles:
- Performance Engineer
- Performance Engineer / Services
Job Titles:
- Project Manager
- Project Manager / Location: Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Project Manager with our front-end performance team Leslie is the Swiss Army Knife of all things project-related. With her newly minted ScrumMaster skills, she fosters a supportive, productive environment for the team. Leslie believes the key to success is identifying and leveraging your weaknesses and strengths and improving your skillset daily. As Dory says in Finding Nemo, "Just keep swimming," but in this case, just keep learning.
Leslie began her IT journey more than 15 years ago at CompUSA, where she facilitated repairs and warranties. While there, she returned to school. When CompUSA closed-and after a brief foray into tech support for a bank-Leslie worked her way from support roles to project management at the University of Oklahoma. Her focus was bridging the communication gaps between IT and other departments, helping opposing teams find alignment and value in collaboration to achieve a shared vision. She later became a Security Analyst working in governance, risk, and compliance for the same institution.
Leslie‘s career path has been winding and full of surprises, but it's given her the chance to build serious networking and relationship skills, which she puts to excellent use every day.
Before becoming a mother, Leslie won two gold medals (one bronze) as part of a corporate rowing team and enjoyed running half marathons. She now spends her downtime chicken herding with the family (luckily for Leslie, they're peaceful little dinosaurs), although the outdoors still calls. It's where she's most at peace.
Job Titles:
- CEO
- Founder
- Member of the Leadership Team
- Founder & CEO / Location: Split Between Atlanta, Georgia and San Francisco, California
Having moved from London to San Francisco, Rich founded Optimal in 2015 after a more than 20 year career in web development. In that time, he developed a particular interest in performance and user experience, working with brands like Sephora, Vodafone, and Williams-Sonoma.
Rich now shapes Optimal's company vision and culture, bolstered by the recruitment of highly collaborative performance pros from around the world. Besides designing our service offering and mentoring Optimal's whip-smart team of performance experts, Rich provides thought leadership to a diverse client base to help them supercharge their businesses.
A passion for performance runs deep with Rich. He started out in a usability team building UI prototypes, then spent more than 10 years as a web developer and architect working in full-stack web development, infrastructure, and content delivery networks. Most recently, he was Senior Architect in Vodafone's Global Channels Optimization team, responsible for web performance and experience for 625 million customers worldwide.
Rich has traveled to over 30 countries. He's lived in the UK, US, and Thailand-where he became a lifelong student of the Thai language. This international influence further shows up in his advocacy of Kaizen, a Japanese business philosophy that maintains there's always room for continuous, incremental improvement across all functions.
Watch Rich in action at conferences like Akamai Edge World and MeasureCamp , where he speaks in-depth about the latest performance topics.
Education:
B.S. (Hons) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, University of Sussex
Job Titles:
- Member of the Leadership Team
- Director, Load Test Engineering
- Director, Load Test Engineering / Location: Boulder, Colorado
With over 20 years of technology leadership under his belt, Richard oversees strategy, design, and infrastructure delivery for our e-commerce and enterprise applications. He partners with IT and business leaders to define a technical roadmap that will maximize business objectives. Richard builds and leads high-performing teams specializing in Performance Testing with an additional focus on DevOps, On-Prem, Cloud, Edge Delivery, and project & program management.
Avid outdoor enthusiast Richard spends his downtime biking, hiking, snowshoeing, and skiing the American West. He briefly had an office at the base terminal of a ski lift and skied for 125 days that season. Richard is also a former certified Executive Chef and still experiments in the kitchen to the delight of his wife and neighbors. You might want to wrangle yourself an invite.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Leadership Team
- Director, PMO & Customer Success
- Director, PMO & Customer Success / Location: Houston, Texas
Sarah bridges the gap between clients and our leadership, engineering, and analyst teams. It's her job to ensure that expectations are met on time and flag up potential workstream issues.
Sarah graduated from Texas A&M with a degree in Industrial Distribution-chosen for its high job success rate and the ratio of guys (a lot) to girls (a few)-and an unexpected talent for machining and welding. Her consulting career began in supply chain and distribution management with PriceWaterhouseCoopers, which was later acquired by IBM (post-Accenture/Enron scandal). In between jumping on a plane every Monday and landing back home on Fridays, Sarah implemented warehouse management systems for multiple companies. It seemed glamorous from the outside, but most of the projects were in small, off-the-grid towns where you typically find distribution centers.
After almost five years of living the consultant lifestyle, Sarah settled into a role at Stage Stores (a retail company, now bankrupt) in Houston, Texas. During her 16 years there, she worked with the IT team serving as an analyst/project manager, bridging the gap between stakeholders and members of the technical team. Her passion for detail-seriously, Sarah has a list for everything and still keeps a to-do list on her paper (gasp!) planner-and timeliness have led her to her current role at Optimal.
When not running her four kids to social commitments, Sarah reads and hangs out with family and friends. She's up with the lark for her run and bookends her day with fresh, hot coffee in the morning and a cold glass of white wine in the evening.
If pressed-even lightly-Sarah will tell anyone the recipe for the best Ranch Water cocktail. Would you like it? Oh, go on then: 1:1 ratio of Topo Chico (non-flavored. And yes, it has to be Topo Chico) and Casamigos Blanco tequila (yes, it has to be Casamigos. No, it's not because of George Clooney) and the juice of one lime.
Job Titles:
- Programme Manager
- Programme Manager / Services
Job Titles:
- Member of the Leadership Team
- HR Operations Manager
- HR Operations Manager / Location: Seattle, Washington
Native Southern Californian Tanya has done it all when it comes to HR management and consulting, working with organizations large and small. After co-owning an event planning business she was accepted for an internship in the Global HR Operations unit at the Walt Disney Company in Orlando, Florida (upping sticks from her then-home in Washington).
Through the 2020 shut-downs, she watched the role of HR grow, change and adapt to the evolving employer/employee landscape and is excited to transfer her skills to the tech world and help Optimal continue its growth.
Something you may not know about Tanya is that she's lived in five states and has driven across the U.S. four times. An Army veteran, she turned 21 on the day she graduated from basic training. Shortly after, she was stationed in Oahu, Hawaii at Tripler Army Medical Center (‘the big pink hospital on the hill'), where she worked as a surgical technician.
Tanya plans to retire in Europe someday and loves to research her ancestry. She also paints and writes in her ‘spare' time.