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Open to Director-level leadership roles

Farzad Hakimzadeh

Rise and Lead

Director, Client Services & Delivery — AI, Cloud & Data Platforms

Twenty years at the intersection of business, technology and leadership — building and scaling global teams and running complex delivery and transformation programs at Meta, Google and Cisco. I take ambiguous, high-stakes mandates and turn them into operating models, engineering organizations and measurable P&L outcomes.

farzadhak@yahoo.com LinkedIn AI workshop series
Focus Client Services & Delivery Leadership AI / Agentic Platform Programs Cloud & Data Modernization Global Engineering Organizations
20+
Years in Silicon Valley hi-tech
$45B
Annual bookings on the commerce platform he overhauled
$260M
Annual savings delivered, plus a 3% sales increase
$3B
Channel revenue migrated to a next-gen B2B platform (two Distis on EDI)
80K+
Engineering hours saved annually across 50+ data orgs
$19M
Idle cloud spend eliminated in the first month — a 7% reduction
01 — Capabilities

Four disciplines, each backed by shipped outcomes.

Not a list of keywords. Every capability below is anchored to a program I owned, the organization I ran it with, and the number it moved.

AI & Agentic Systems

0-to-1 build · evaluation · autonomous operations

Agentic AI SystemsLLMOps AI Evaluation FrameworksSelf-healing WorkflowsAI Productivity Tooling MLOps AutomationGenerative AI Use-case Design AI-first Operating ModelsAI Enablement & Teaching ↗
  • Transformed legacy, human-centric support workflows into an autonomous, AI-first operation, deploying an agentic system for multi-step triage, investigation and escalation that grew service margin.Meta
  • Pioneered a production-grade (0-to-1) AI evaluation system to continuously measure, test and self-heal the LLM agentic skills used across the infrastructure support ecosystem — now also a benchmarking tool for LLM coding quality.Meta
  • Built ML pipelines and MLOps lifecycle orchestration on AWS SageMaker — ML graph, explainable AI, fraud detection, privacy protection — including feature engineering and training-data labeling with client data scientists.EPAM
  • Stood up a Generative AI competency center: drafted use cases and ROI metrics across product engineering and customer support, using unsupervised labeling models (zero-, one- and few-shot learning).Minerals

Cloud, Data & Infra Platform Engineering

migration · reliability · FinOps · observability

Cloud-native OrchestrationDevSecOps Integration FinOps & Cost OptimizationScalable Distributed Data Architecture Data GovernanceReal-time Streaming Modern Data WarehousingSRE & Observability Infrastructure as Code
  • Architected an SRE-grade observability platform (0-to-1) for real-time infrastructure telemetry, safeguarding the web-crawling data feeds fueling Meta's cross-platform AI search stack.Meta
  • Directed a wholesale exit from two on-prem datacenters (~3,000 VMs/servers) to GCP across 200+ core applications and databases — landing zone, virtualization, networking, security and cutover — lifting deployment velocity 28%.Priceline
  • Led a 300 TB enterprise data warehouse migration to AWS Redshift using AWS Glue — 400+ stored procedures, tables and views converted, with Sort/Dist key tuning for query concurrency.Jobvite
  • Delivered FinOps engagements eliminating $19M in cloud spend in the first month (7%) and a further 6% GCP reduction, plus chargeback, budget-alerting and committed-use-discount tooling.PANW · Dexcom

Delivery & Client Services Leadership

P&L ownership · org scaling · people development

Delivery OversightProfit-margin Ownership People ManagementTalent Development Stakeholder ManagementExecutive Storytelling MSA, SOW & SLA Metrics GovernancePre-sales, QBR & Deal Sizing Customer Success & CSATGlobal Delivery Models
  • Direct delivery and client partnerships for two strategic, fixed-budget managed services inside Meta’s Enterprise Infrastructure & Security organization — defining the operating models, standards and profit-margin renewal strategies.Meta
  • Scaled a global Tier-1 engineering support organization to 50+ engineers and 6 operations managers, integrating first-contact workflows vertically with Meta on-call teams to expand capabilities such as triage of AI-workload incidents.Meta
  • Ran Google gTech's application modernization PMO as a managed service across 40+ global engineers; 30+ applications modernized, +20% delivery velocity, with QBRs owned end to end.Google
  • Owned account delivery health, CSAT and every KPI in the MSA/SOW, plus discovery, solution design, deal sizing and margin optimization across a multi-client portfolio.EPAM
  • Hired, coached and performance-managed direct reports (managers, TPMs, team leads), owning their career paths, OKRs and semi-annual reviews.EPAM · Cisco

Revenue Operations & Enterprise Platforms

quote-to-cash · B2B commerce · 0-to-1 and 1-to-N

Quote-to-Cash (QTC)CPQ & CLM CRM / ERP AlignmentB2B Digital Commerce B2B EDI & Order Management0-to-1 Platform Engineering 1-to-N ScalingChannel Enablement New Product IntroductionEnterprise IAM
  • Co-led the overhaul of a $45B+ annual-bookings e-commerce operation — consolidating 21 legacy tools into one common architecture across 120 countries, with 950 training sessions driving adoption.Cisco
  • Designed a next-generation B2B solution and migrated $3B in channel revenue from top distributors (WWT, Ingram Micro), building new EDI and RosettaNet XML order-fulfillment flows.Cisco
  • Enabled new selling models — SaaS orderability, bundle offerings, guided selling, service attach, net price catalog, software e-delivery, many-to-one licensing — lifting auto-booking-no-touch and quote-to-order conversion.Cisco
  • Led development and first-customer ship of a premium analytics SaaS product in the WebEx BU, and incubated a CLM SaaS offering on ServiceNow CMDB from problem statement through MVP and roadmap.Cisco
02 — Signature Work

Programs where the mandate was ambiguous and the stakes were real.

Meta
Enterprise Infrastructure & Security
via Crystal Equation · Menlo Park
Jul 2024 – Present

Turning a human-centric support org into an AI-first operation

Owned two fixed-budget managed services inside Meta’s Enterprise Infrastructure & Security organization end to end — operating model, standards, and profit-margin renewal strategy. Executed Meta Director-level OKRs for data infrastructure reliability, then replaced manual triage with an agentic system for multi-step triage and escalation, backed by a 0-to-1 evaluation harness that continuously tests and self-heals the LLM skills in production.

Agentic AILLM evaluationSRE observabilityManaged services P&L
80K+
engineering hours saved annually across 50+ data orgs
60K+
user issues resolved annually
20%
reduction in support ticket volume
Cisco Systems
E-Commerce · Quote-to-Cash
Apr 2009 – Oct 2013

Overhauling a $45B commerce operation running in silos

Co-led the strategic digital transformation of Cisco's e-commerce workflow, process and policy across the quote-to-cash domain onto a single common enterprise architecture — the hard part being that Commerce, WW Sales, Channels, Finance, Marketing and Pricing all operated independently.

Consolidated 21 legacy tools into one platform serving 935+ partners, customers and distributors across 120 countries. The program ran 950 training sessions to drive global adoption and built the new B2B/B2C customer- and partner-facing commerce portal. As part of the PMO I removed adoption barriers for large enterprise laggards including AT&T, Verizon and BT.

Quote-to-CashCPQSalesforce CRMEDI / RosettaNetB2B portal
$45B+
annual bookings transacted
$260M
annual cost savings
+3%
annual revenue increase
21→1
legacy tools consolidated
Cisco Systems
WebEx Collaboration BU
Nov 2015 – May 2018

A big-data platform from zero — then a SaaS product on top of it

The business unit had no big-data capability at all. I built its first Hadoop ecosystem from nothing — ingestion, event streaming, storage, batch processing, job scheduling, query engine and governance — then turned it into a monetized SaaS product that lets global enterprise accounts track engagement and usage of WebEx across their global sites.

The visualization layer came through Qlik as a third-party vendor: I ran the integration of their software directly into Cisco's own offering, which was as much a commercial and support problem as a technical one.

Led 40+ engineers across four scrum teams, brokering between product managers, solution architects and data scientists, and delivered first customer ship to enterprise customers and reseller partners including AT&T, IBM, Bank of America and WWT.

HadoopKafkaNiFiFlumeHBaseApache SparkHiveSplunkOozieCloudera NavigatorQlikSDK
0 → 1
big-data platform built from nothing
40+
engineers across 4 scrum teams
FCS
first customer ship of a monetized analytics product
Priceline
via EPAM Systems
Oct 2018 – Mar 2023

Two datacenters to multi-region GCP, without stalling the developers

Directed a datacenter-exit migration of ~3,000 VMs and servers onto GCP, standing up hybrid and cloud-native stacks for 200+ core applications and databases across Corp IT, CloudDev, NetOps, Pipeline, Windows/Linux Compute, QA and Enterprise Architecture.

Databases were re-homed by workload type — OLTP to Cloud Spanner, OLAP to BigQuery, finance to Bigtable, documents to Firestore. Automated pipelines and IaC meant developer throughput went up during the migration rather than down.

GCE / GKEArgoJFrogTerraformAnsibleHelmHarnessIstioPrismaVaultNew RelicPagerDuty
~3,000
VMs / servers migrated out of 2 datacenters
200+
core applications and databases
+28%
developer deployment velocity
Google gTech
via EPAM Systems
Oct 2018 – Mar 2023

Scaling an application modernization PMO into a managed service

Built out Google gTech's application modernization PMO as a managed service, directing a global delivery team of 40+ engineers refactoring legacy applications across gUP and gPTO (in the ecosystem of Search, Maps and YouTube) — microservices architecture, business logic, code upgrade and containerization.

Reduced production downtime by integrating Cloud Build DORA automation with error budgets, halting unstable releases automatically. Owned monthly business reviews and QBRs with the client, and managed staffing, rotation, talent sourcing and solution architecture alongside the delivery margin.

MicroservicesCloud BuildDORA metricsSonarQubeDockerApigeeAngularJava
30+
enterprise applications modernized
+20%
delivery velocity
Palo Alto Networks
via EPAM Systems
Oct 2018 – Mar 2023

Making cloud spend visible enough to actually cut

White-labeling Sedai Inc., jointly deployed a bespoke AWS cost-alerting and chargeback system integrating AWS Cost and Usage Report with the client's corporate ERP systems, so cloud cost could be compared per product line and attributed back to the teams incurring it.

The tooling surfaced committed-use-discount expirations, reservation capacity and serverless-versus-traditional-compute projections (Fargate/Lambda vs EC2/EKS) — moving procurement decisions upstream to design time.

AWS CURCost ExplorerTrusted AdvisorERP integrationFinOps
$19M
cloud spend eliminated in the first month
7%
cut in the monthly AWS bill
Jobvite
via EPAM Systems
Oct 2018 – Mar 2023

A 300 TB OLAP warehouse move to Redshift without breaking the dashboards

Led the migration of a 300 TB enterprise OLAP data warehouse to AWS Redshift using AWS Glue, converting 400+ stored procedures, tables and views onto the new platform.

The team tuned Sort and Dist keys to cut data scanned per query — so Tableau dashboard performance and query concurrency came out of the cutover materially faster rather than degraded, which is the usual outcome of a move this size.

AWS RedshiftAWS GlueSort / Dist key tuningTableauETL conversion
300 TB
data warehouse migrated to Redshift
400+
stored procedures, tables and views converted
03 — People & Organizational Leadership

Teams I built, and the people I grew inside them.

The part of a director role that never shows up in a metric. Here it is anyway — with the organizations attached.

50+
engineers in the global Tier-1 support organization built at Meta
6
operations managers reporting into that organization
40+
engineers in the Google gTech delivery practice
4
TPMs directly supervised and developed at Cisco

Building the organization

  • Scaled a global Tier-1 engineering support organization to 50+ engineers and 6 operations managers, integrated vertically with Meta on-call teams.
  • Built global, agile, multi-discipline co-delivery teams blending my own, client and vendor resources — recruiting, staffing and rotating against demand.
  • Led 40+ engineers across four scrum teams plus third-party consultants on a single product program.
  • Set the operating model and standards two managed services run on — not just the headcount plan.

Developing the people

  • Hired and people-managed a pool of managers, TPMs and team leads — owning their career paths, OKRs and semi-annual performance reviews.
  • Supervised six engineering managers and four TPMs directly, accountable for their success, productivity, coaching and career growth.
  • Ran talent sourcing, onboarding and rotation; oversaw workload and productivity across the practice.
  • Presented monthly business reviews and QBRs to client leadership — the executive-storytelling half of the job.
Verified LinkedIn recommendations — publicly visible on linkedin.com/in/farzadhakimzadeh
“

Farzad was my Service Delivery Manager at Crystal Equation on assignment at Meta for two years with about 40 reports rolling up to him. He made decisions and pushed drastic changes that helped save our service and adapt to the change in workflows that AI rollouts brought on.

Where other similarly positioned teams were stagnating or getting trimmed with re-orgs, Farzad kept our team near the cutting edge and our growth high.

Would highly recommend for steering long term decisions.

Dylan Boyce
Engineering Manager · Direct report · Meta
LinkedIn · verified
“

He encouraged the team to stay open to new ways of working, remain agile, and take ownership of our impact… Farzad consistently supported new ideas and gave the team the autonomy to contribute to projects that improved our workflows and operations.

One of Farzad's strengths as a leader was his ability to balance strategic direction with team empowerment while encouraging innovation.

I highly recommend Farzad to any organization looking for a forward-thinking, adaptive leader.

Deepa Venu
Support Engineering Manager · Direct report · Meta
LinkedIn · verified
“

One of his earliest observations was that AI would fundamentally transform software engineering in a very short timeframe — a prediction that has proven remarkably accurate… He championed AI Native initiatives, gave me the support and direction to build out my team, and empowered us to develop AI agents for our oncall support.

What sets Farzad apart is his combination of technical awareness and people leadership. He has the vision to guide a service through one of the most disruptive periods in our industry and steer it toward greater impact.

I'd recommend him without hesitation to anyone looking for a leader who combines strategic vision, technical fluency, and genuine investment in his team's growth.

Conrad Bormann
Support Engineering Manager · Direct report · Meta
LinkedIn · verified
04 — AI Practice & Thought Leadership

I don't just deploy AI. I teach the people who have to live with it.

Self-directed research · Delivered at Meta

The AI Workshop Series

A personal, research-based self-study on artificial intelligence, built from public sources and delivered to my engineering team at Meta as four one-hour workshops with live Q&A between June and August 2025.

The goal was to give a working engineering org real literacy rather than headlines: where AI actually came from, how the field progressed to where it is, what it means for the work in front of them today, and what is plausibly next. The feedback that mattered most was that it changed how the team thought about the systems they were being asked to build.

4 × 1-hour sessions Live Q&A Jun – Aug 2025 Public-source research
What the series covered
01Origins. Where AI came from — the ideas, the people and the false starts behind today's systems.
02Progress. How the field advanced over time, and which breakthroughs genuinely changed the trajectory.
03Implications. What it means right now for engineering work, operations and the people doing them.
04What's next. Where this is plausibly heading, and how to think about it without hype or dread.

Built entirely from publicly available research and data. Shared here with link access.

05 — Technical Depth

Technology I've delivered on, not technology I've read about.

Two decades of hands-on program ownership leaves a specific footprint. This is the stack underneath the programs above.

AI & Machine Learning

Agentic systems, evaluation, and the MLOps lifecycle around them

Agentic AI systemsLLM agentic skillsAI evaluation harness Self-healing workflowsGenerative AI use-case designAWS SageMaker MLOps orchestrationExplainable AIFraud detection Feature engineeringZero/one/few-shot labelingML graph

Cloud & Infrastructure

GCP and AWS at datacenter-exit scale, with the automation to match

GCEGKECloud SpannerBigQueryBigtable FirestoreCloud BuildEC2EKSFargate LambdaKubernetesDockerArgoTerraformAnsible ChefHelmJenkinsHarnessJFrog HashiCorp VaultIstioPrismaQualys

Data & Analytics

Streaming, warehousing, governance and the BI layer on top

HadoopHDFSHBaseApache SparkKafka NiFiFlumeHiveYARNOozie SnowflakeTeradataRedshiftAWS GlueEMR AthenaMacieStarburstTableauQlikPower BI SplunkCloudera Navigator

Enterprise Platforms & Reliability

The systems the business actually runs on, and keeping them up

Salesforce Sales CloudServiceNow CMDBMuleSoft Anypoint ApigeeOracle PIM / MDMOracle FinanceCPQB2B EDI / RosettaNet XML Enterprise IAM (AAA)SRE practicesDORA metrics Error budgetsNew RelicZabbixPagerDuty SonarQubeAgile / SAFe
06 — Career

Twenty years, three eras: enterprise platforms, cloud modernization, AI operations.

JUL 2024 — PRESENT
Director — Client Services / Services Delivery
Crystal Equation · on assignment @ Meta — Menlo Park, CA
  • Direct delivery and client partnerships for two strategic, fixed-budget managed services within Meta’s Enterprise Infrastructure & Security organization — defining operating models, standards and profit-margin renewal strategies.
  • Scaled a global Tier-1 engineering support organization to 50+ engineers and 6 operations managers, integrating workflows vertically with Meta on-call teams.
  • Executed Meta Director-level OKRs for data infrastructure reliability; delivered quarterly data-driven support patterns that eliminated systemic bottlenecks in authentication, memory, CPU/disk and network partitions.
  • Deployed an agentic triage-and-escalation system and a 0-to-1 AI evaluation harness; architected an SRE-grade observability platform for real-time infrastructure telemetry.
  • Designed and delivered a four-part AI workshop series for the engineering organization (Jun–Aug 2025).
AUG 2023 — APR 2024
Technical Delivery / Engagement Manager
Consulting · on assignment @ Dexcom — Remote
  • Delivered a GCP FinOps engagement — 6% savings immediately upon removal of idle resources, plus a further 10% on custom logging solution.
  • Drove Cloud Financial Management improvements including FinOps strategy, tagging, tooling, visibility and standardization.
OCT 2018 — MAR 2023
Director — Client Services / Services Delivery
EPAM · on assignment @ Google, Priceline, Palo Alto Networks, Jobvite
  • Managed delivery workstreams, resources and profit margins while owning discovery, solution design, deal sizing, execution and customer success across a multi-client portfolio.
  • Owned account delivery health, CSAT and all SLAs in the MSA/SOW; partnered with Client Partners on P&L and margin; drove every engagement type from staff augmentation to managed services.
  • Scaled Google gTech's application modernization PMO — 40+ engineers, 30+ applications, +20% delivery velocity.
  • Directed Priceline's exit from two datacenters (~3,000 VMs) to GCP; +28% developer deployment velocity.
  • Eliminated $19M of AWS spend in the first month at Palo Alto Networks; led Jobvite's 300 TB data warehouse migration to AWS Redshift.
  • Also delivered CRM implementation (Broadridge), marketing analytics (VMware) and enterprise integration platform selection and build for a FinTech client.
OCT 2006 — JUL 2018
Manager, Technical Program Management
Cisco · twelve years across Commerce, IT, Services and WebEx Collaboration — San Jose, CA
  • Designed a next-gen B2B solution and migrated $3B of revenue from top channel distributors (WWT, Ingram Micro), including new EDI and RosettaNet XML order-management flows.
  • Managed a team of four technical program managers, accountable for their success, productivity and career growth.
Commerce & IT — Digital transformation · 2007–2013
IT Release Manager then Program Manager for e-commerce quote-to-cash: 2-tier revenue recognition, Oracle PIM master-data quality, then the $45B+ commerce overhaul delivering $260M annual savings and a 3% sales increase.
Services — SaaS & enterprise IAM · 2013–2015
Led the Entitlement API platform for role-based access control and a two-year intelligent IAM roadmap (authentication, authorization, audit); incubated a CLM SaaS offering on ServiceNow CMDB from problem definition through MVP, roadmap and journey maps.
Intercloud — Alliance business development · 2015
Coordinated a five-track strategic sales PMO forming carrier alliance partnerships (Telstra, América Móvil) to jointly deliver IaaS/PaaS/SaaS offerings and manage end-customer rollout.
WebEx Collaboration BU — Product engineering · 2015–2018
Four first-customer-ship programs: the Spark messaging app's IRC feature set, the BU's first Hadoop big-data platform and monetized analytics SaaS product (40+ engineers, 4 scrum teams), partner self-service portals, and a web CMS re-platform to AWS connected to Salesforce Cloud.
1996 — 2006
Earlier career — Europe & MBA
Telecommunications and consulting · KPN, Lucent, Atos — Netherlands
  • Six years in the telecommunications industry and business consulting before relocating to North America for a full-time MBA (2004–2006).
  • Lead or co-author of 6 peer-reviewed IEEE journal papers on optical lasers; co-founded and chaired ISAN, an international scientific student association.
07 — Client Portfolio

Ten clients across seven unique industries.

01
Technology, Internet & Social Media
Meta·Google
AI-first infrastructure support operations and SRE observability; gTech application modernization PMO and Assistant OEM integration
02
Cybersecurity & Networking Infrastructure
Cisco·Palo Alto Networks
Quote-to-cash transformation, B2B commerce, big data and SaaS product engineering; cloud economics, chargeback and FinOps tooling
03
Healthcare Technology & Medical Devices
Dexcom·LindaCare
GCP cost optimization and cloud financial management; board advisory on US cloud expansion strategy
04
Enterprise HR Tech & Recruiting Software
Jobvite
300 TB enterprise OLAP data warehouse migration to AWS Redshift
05
Enterprise Software, Cloud & Virtualization
VMware
Marketing spend analytics; Starburst distributed SQL and Power BI dashboarding
06
Fintech & Financial Services Technology
Broadridge
Salesforce Sales Cloud modernization and a three-way org merge into one target org
07
Online Travel & E-Commerce
Priceline
Datacenter exit and multi-region GCP migration; InfraOps automation
10 clients across 7 unique industries Hyperscalers · networking & security · MedTech · HR tech · enterprise software · fintech · online travel
08 — Credentials & Beyond

Engineering depth, business training, and work outside the job description.

Education

MBA
Corporate Strategy & Finance
University of Toronto — Rotman School of Management · 2006
MSEE
Masters and Bachelors — Electrical Engineering
Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands · 1999

Certifications

PMP — Project Management Institute (License #277935) AWS Cloud Practitioner Scrum Master SAFe Agilist Scrum Product Owner Six Sigma Green Belt Cyber Security Ninja Green Belt — Cisco

Leadership, Advisory & Research

AI
AI Workshop Series — Meta ↗
Four one-hour workshops with live Q&A, researched and delivered to the engineering org (Jun–Aug 2025)
ADV
Board Advisor — LindaCare Inc.
MedTech startup; guided US cloud expansion strategy (2022–2023)
CHR
Co-Founder & Chair — ISAN
International scientific student association (1996–2001)
IEEE
6 peer-reviewed publications
Lead or co-author, IEEE scientific journals — optical lasers

Let's talk about the hard mandate.

Currently exploring Director-level leadership roles where delivery rigor, AI-first operating models and global team building all must work at once.

farzadhak@yahoo.com Connect on LinkedIn