Company: TangoMe, Mountain View, CA
Company Description: Tango is a leading mobile messaging service with more than 300 million registered members around the world. Evolved from its beginnings in 2009 as a popular, free, cross platform video and voice calling app, Tango today combines communication, social networking, and content in a single platform.
Nomination Category: Product Management Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Product Management/Development Executive of the Year

Nomination Title: Guy Fighel, Director of Engineering, Platform Infrastructure

Tell the story about what this nominee has achieved since January 1 2014 (up to 650 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms.

Mr. Fighel, drove Engineering budget of +$5M to devise products generating over 10% in user growth, systems automation and stability, multi region scale and 99.95% uptime for this $1.5B fast-growing, global mobile and social media messaging service. Lead team of 15 to oversee technical production automation development, application monitoring, networking performance analytics. Expanded scope to include oversight of Operational Big Data capabilities, performance measurement & improvement plus Engineering product feature development. Built direct reports team to 15 from 3.

Product Strategy:

• Enabled firm’s “remarkable growth” by innovating TangoOut product that attracted 15K to 20K unique new users’ registration per month globally, 10% overall steady growth.

• U.S. user base multiplied at average rate of 5% per month since TangoOut launch (Dec 2014).

-Achieved over 25% month-to-month growth in countries such as Bangladesh, Kuwait, Egypt, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Saudi Arabia, dominating mobile social application market in 6 months.

• Enhanced Middle East active users by 20%, and grew by 100% total registrations in Jordan and United Arab Emirates when deployed Proxy services and initiated local networking small-PoPs in region.

• Built global footprint across 11 regions using same automation & monitoring tools with >5 Cloud providers.

• Increased visibility and market leadership positioning by publishing shared PR activities with several providers.

• Oversee technical aspects of TangoMe-Carriers strategy, including integrations and interconnectivity products with global carriers, messaging/SMS platform integrations and development. -Served as Tango’s telecommunication subject matter expert for all OTT integrations and projects).

Product Architecture/Development

• Led technical team of 10 in full Java software development process from conception to product launch for TangoOut. - Managed cost allocation using call corridors analysis.

• SMS Deliverability spiked to 99.7% overall in U.S. from 80% and to >86% from 60% globally when led re-architecture of SMS Messaging Systems.
- Service uptime increased to 99.99%.
- Cut overall costs by $200,000.
- Enabled automatic auto-scaling and increased system redundancy, by deployment via AWS.

• Overcame own Vonage patent to architect Tango No-Cost SMS Roaming.
- Crafted “no cost” messaging to & from any number through collaboration with global Mobile Operators.

DevOps Management:

• Led on-time and within budget $10M distributed automation of >40 Java applications supporting >1,200 servers in global Linux distributed Environment with multiple Puppet Masters servers and redundant DNS architecture.
- Re-architected production deployment, continuous delivery and automation procedures and systems.
- Ensured automated and controlled Push deployments by utilizing Python and Ansible Play Books.
- Set company’s overall real time monitoring and alerting strategy and executed multi-sprints plan.

• Established 1st Hadoop Cluster, using Presto Cluster for Real Time SQL queries, Apache Flume to stream information from >40 applications & >1,200 Linux servers globally & entire Android & iOS Mobile clients logs.
- Processed >100K events per second and provided real time data in 30 seconds increments.
- Designed, architected and directed teams for ElasticSearch multiple clusters running (with >40 nodes each) in AWS with VPC and Autoscaling groups.
- Provided end-to-end event correlations using Java application, as well as custom Alerter application to push real time alerts to Software Engineering and Site Reliability Engineers.
- Designed, architected and directed development of multiple event correlation system based on Python, Apache Lucene and pyClips engine to minimize false positive alerts in production systems.

• Enhanced overall Tango’s Mobile networking world wide performance (>80% stability improvement and >28% in performance improvement) by developing Linux TCP/UDP Kernel tuning and optimization approaches.
• Enabled overall infrastructure cost reduction by over $400,000 every year.
- Reduced deployment time to minutes from 1 week per services, with no down time.

• Transformed Tango to Cloud deployment. Re-focused teams to work on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud deployment automation, using baked AMI patterns, Cloud-Init, Autoscaling and AWS solutions.
- New services deploying into 5 regions from 1 main application and to be deployed into all 7 regions.
-Expanded connectivity to Tango’s physical co-location using 2 AWS Direct Connect links and VPN tunnels.
-Established networking redundancy and performance optimization by signing separate multi-home networking providers.

In bullet-list form, briefly summarize up to ten (10) accomplishments of the nominee since the beginning of 2014 (up to 150 words).

• Led technical teams in full Java software development process from conception to product launch for TangoOut.
• SMS Deliverability spiked to 99.7% overall in U.S. from 80% and to >86% from 60% globally when led re-architecture of SMS Messaging Systems. Service uptime increased to 99.99%. Cut overall costs by $200,000.

•Provided real time data in 30 second increments when streamed information from >40 applications & >1,200 Linux servers globally & entire Android & iOS Mobile clients logs, establishing 1st Hadoop Cluster able to process >100K events per second
-Led on-time and within budget $10M distributed automation.

• Enabled infrastructure cost reduction by >$400K/year by leading transformation to Cloud deployment.
- New services deploying into 5 regions from 1 main application and to be deployed into all 7 regions.
- Re-focused teams to work on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud deployment automation.

• Achieved >80% stability improvement and >28% performance improvement when enhanced worldwide Mobile networking