Careers

Adventurous, Stylish, Inclusive

I study 25 hours per week.

When I was 16 years old, I had to make my ‘final’ career choice, and I decided to take Computer Science at the Kyiv Polytechnical University. After 6.5 years of fun and a lot of coding, I decided to pursue a completely unfamiliar field – Finance. I started working at an Investment company and quickly realized that making decisions about how to invest other peoples’ money is not as hard as I initially imagined. I got bored once I mastered my skills there and decided to switch to a more technical field. And as I wanted to try something new, I chose testing as opposed to coding to see what I could learn. That’s how my IT career started. By the end of my second year as a Sr QA, I received an offer to relocate to Switzerland to work at Swisscom, and after two amazing years, I decided to settle there. However, yet another offer quickly materialized, this one proposing that I lead a green-field project in Toronto, and my Canadian adventure started. A couple of hard years later, with a lack of sleep, almost no weekends and personal time but a vast quantity of new, unexpected skills from BA, PM, DevOps, and Sales roles, I was about to take a break when my employer at that time offered me a new project in Calgary. After six years on multiple projects and 9 years in Telecommunication industry, once again I decided to try something new and radically different, this time in oil and gas at Aucerna.

I am managing a diverse group of QA analysts located across the Globe who are responsible for ensuring the quality of the entire Aucerna product stack.

I am proud of being one of the Employer Ambassadors at Aucerna to promote a unique blend of innovation, social responsibility, and team spirit.

Having extensive experience of working in 6 countries for a variety of organizations, the most defining characteristic of Aucerna in my mind is the quality, capability, and expertise of the management team.

Street-smart, Funny, Down to earth

I once read on the Internet about some crazy thing called polyphasic sleeping where you nap for 15 minutes every four hours, continuously. So I went for several months only sleeping 2 hours a day. Imagine having another 6 hours or so of free time every day where everyone else was sleeping so it was all yours! I had so much free time and did a lot of photography and woodworking in those days. I don't remember much of it though. I think it affected my memory.

My career. Hmmmm. Well... I'm a simple guy. I grew up on the streets of North West Calgary, raised by a pack of wolves that took me in as one of their own. I had to fight for every scrap of food I had. I clawed my way up and out and... Nah. Seriously though, I've always loved computers and had been coding since I was a wee lad. After I finished high-school, I took Electrical Engineering at the University of Calgary (because it was computery and didn't require me to take the "Effective Writing" course...). After my second year, my Dad introduced me to Boyd Russel (then president of Energy Navigator) and, according to Boyd, said something like "I've got this son that needs to be shaped up, can you put him to work?" I worked there as a summer student, which then morphed into a full year off working on Prod Nav (a product that never made it out of the gate, but golly was it purple - long story there). After that blissful year of coding an overwhelmingly purple production tracking application, I went back to school and finished my degree. After graduating, I joined up with Energy Navigator full time and I've been here ever since. Other than that, my career includes flipping burgers at A&W, a summer of researching the Y2K readiness of various office appliances (seriously, I had to sign-off on the microwave being Y2K compliant), and teaching web-server development at SAIT (back when CGI scripts were common and PHP was the plucky upstart).

I get to straddle several great teams! I'm part of the Product Management and Aucerna Execute Team, where I get to work with some exceptionally talented and smart people ? . With my Product Management team, we're hard at work aligning and integrating our products and designing and building our NextGen product offering. With the Executies (can I call us that?!) we're building, testing, implementing, and supporting the best Capital Management and Operational Planning tool! I don't actually do much of the building these days, but I do get to spend a lot of time working with clients to understand their pain points and then bring those to the development team to turn into solutions.

Obviously Aucerna Execute. I've become quite attached to that product! Also the team we've put together (I'll use "we" liberally here... I didn't do that). I love that we work hard and build amazing solutions. I also love that we get along so well and have so much fun doing it. Some highlights for me are Bad Movie Wednesdays, Hackathons, Old Fashioned Fridays, Covid Happy Hours, Raftmmuting, Mountain Biking, building an arcade cabinet, etc. When I describe to others the things we do, I'll invariably get comments like "I wish my company did stuff like that" and "you guys sound like you have so much fun".

I've been here (my "here" started with Energy Navigator) for a really long time (flirting with 20 years), so I think that's somewhat rare (although not unique... we have quite a few long-time employees!). For me, it's been amazing to see the company evolve from a small-company-we'll-do-anything-to-make-this-work mentality ("it compiles! ship it!") to a big-small-company with a lot more rigour and forethought around our process and releases (but still with hints of craziness from time to time). It's been a fun journey.

I am REALLY looking forward to this whole pandemic thing being over and getting to hang out normally with everyone again! While I do appreciate my 15-seconds commute and the fact that I can attend meetings wearing a bathrobe and bunny slippers, I do miss laughing and catching up with everyone in person. Also whiteboards... I miss whiteboards so much!

Creative , Resourceful, Sensitive

As a teenager I dreamt about becoming a professional golfer. I used to spend multiple afternoons after school and my weekends on the golf course. Unfortunately, the time came to prioritize between either golf or university with only one sensible alternative: the latter. My golf level simply wasn’t up there. I still enjoy playing golf although much less than before… in terms of quality and quantity.

As a teenager graduating high school I wished to pursue a career in engineering but that was all the detail I knew at the moment. I didn’t know what type of engineering or industry I would like to work on. I started my college journey in the industrial engineer curriculum and as part of it I took several programming courses. I quickly found myself spending a lot of time in the technology courses or applying the business concepts I lean (in industrial engineering) to the tech industry. Long story short, I ended up with a dual mayor in Industrial Engineering and Systems Engineering (similar to computer science). As I graduated, I founded a company specializing in tailored software development. This was a great experience form me as it introduced me to world of consulting, workflows, project management, change management, B2B sales process, etc. I joined Aucerna (formerly 3esi) as part of the Latin America team. when region was still at an early stage. This allowed me to wear many hats from sales to consulting including roles in project management and support. Eventually, I consolidated myself in the Solutions Consultant role for a couple of years. During this time I worked on consulting and implementations projects in Asset Development, Portfolio, Business Planning and Strategy with some of the most important companies in the region. As the Latin America office grew, I had the opportunity to become a Solution Architect and have been a part of the team since 2017.

I’m part of the Solution Architect team where we specialize in understanding the needs of our clients and designing solutions utilizing Aucerna’s technology. We’re a client facing team that works with customers and our sales executives throughout the sales cycle. This includes delivering demonstrations, proofs of concept or other types of projects. In more mature implementations, I also look after the workflows and industry best practices to ensure the success of our clients.

I am proud of being part of an emerging region of the company. As one of the first employees of the Latin America region I’ve seen it grow from just a few clients to being recognized through the industry with successful implementations in multiple countries.

As we have grown over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to work with teams and companies form all regions of the world. Most of my expertise has been working with oil and gas companies in Latin America from Mexico to Argentina but with Aucerna’s global presence and small company feel I’ve had the opportunity to work in multiple projects such as consulting in Russia, demonstrations in Malaysia and pilots in North America. This level of global experience is unique to Aucerna.