Best Companies AZ

Join us on June 20, 2018 as Senior Engineers from GoDaddy, Charles Schwab, and more share with the greater AZ Tech community “open source” style.

Learn about technical projects and/or challenges each has recently tackled at their respective companies, how they have solved these problems at scale, lessons learned, and more!

Stick around and we’ll turn the mic over to the audience to ask questions and then wrap things up with Happy Hour!

Rob Ferguson is a Scrum Master/Technology Project Manager in the BPM Technology organization where he leads efforts to implement technology solutions for business partners in Operations, Client Strategic Solution, Advisor Solutions, Advisor Services, and Bank Organizations.

Rob has been with Schwab for over 2 years, and has over 18 years of experience implementing technology solutions in the Financial Services Industry. Rob began his career as a Technology Consultant with Accenture and has successfully driven the strategy and execution of enterprise technology solutions, system architecture, technology roadmaps, and the full SDLC at numerous companies including Wells Fargo, American Express, JP Morgan Chase, and GoDaddy.

He has a BS degree in Computer Informations Systems, Masters in Accounting and Information Systems and an MBA, all from Arizona State University.

In his free time, Rob enjoys the outdoors, working out, and cheering on his favorite Philadelphia sports teams. Rob also likes to teach Java and C++ and has taught at Paradise Valley Community College for 4+ years.

Brent McCarthy is a Cloud Solution Specialist at Microsoft Corporation where he assists State and Local Government customers in transforming their information technology solutions into the Cloud. He works closely with representatives of States, Counties, and Cities in the South West at all levels within government to help them leverage new Cloud technologies to better serve citizens.

Brent has been with Microsoft for 18 years, with a singular focus on government solutions. He has held a multitude of positions in his career at Microsoft from Consultant in Microsoft Consulting Services, Services Delivery Management, Technical Strategist, to Cloud Solutions Specialist. Prior to working with Microsoft, Brent served as a Sergeant in the US Army for 7 years. During his time in the US Army, Brent worked on designing and deploying information technology solutions to better serve and protect troops in combat.

He has an incredible passion for technology and how technology can be used to not only solve complex problems and drive efficiency, but how it can be used to make the lives of everyone better.

Vivek Dwivedi has 20+ years of experience in leading and enabling technology solutions for large enterprises through engineering, domain, process expertise. He has built and led globally distributed diverse teams to deliver large scale technology programs involving systems, infrastructure and process transformation.

His expertise is in leveraging technology creatively to solve business problems. Backed up a strong grounding in finance, IT strategy & roadmap, architecture, design and service delivery.

Vivek strives to apply his experience and skills in compelling and challenging ways by being part of a vibrant team which is truly focused on amplifying human potential using technology.

Education: MBA from NYU-Stern School of Business, New York and Bachelor’s Degree in Material Science & Engineering from Indian Institute Technology, Varanasi.

Maria Montoya is the Senior Career Services Manager of Galvanize Phoenix. She partners with tech companies to understand and fulfill their technical hiring needs, providing insight on hiring process design, talent branding and candidate experience. She also coaches Web Developers and Data Scientists to manage their careers, particularly after retooling/retraining.

Prior to working at Galvanize, Maria led Talent Attraction and Acquisition at Ipro Tech, having previously worked as a Technical Recruiter at Infusionsoft. In these roles, she worked to build strong talent brands, refine hiring processes for these companies, train technical hiring managers, and drive high volume technical recruitment. Passionate about purpose, she loves to apply design thinking and UX/CX practices to hiring and job seeking.

Pradhan Pattanayak is a Technology Executive at GoDaddy where he currently leads engineering for Hosting Products. He is passionate about building winning teams and products. Pradhan has domain expertise in Ads, Text Search and Distributed Systems.  

Prior to Godaddy, he was the CTO of an AdTech Start up called AdForge. As Senior Director of Engineering he led Yahoo’s core Video and Display Ads platform development worldwide. He also successfully architected many infrastructure products applied to Text Search, Indexing and Storage at IBM Research and Software Group. He holds an MBA from Santa Clara University and a Master of Technology degree from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.