Aidan Leonard

Jigstack is an ambitious project aiming to be the DAO of decentralized finance. Hired as the CTO, I managed and delivered all the products within the Jigstack ecosystem. This involved hiring teams from scratch and building a series of procedures to streamline the development process and deliver four high-quality blockchain projects within the space of less than one year.

The Lotto! app was the first-ever agile project for BCLC. It covered not only the development of the app itself but also the underlying mobile platform, which would become the foundation for all future BCLC apps.

This was a very complex project that took over three years to implement and involved three key vendors who had specific expertise in mobile development, lottery systems, and online gaming.

There was massive collaboration throughout the project with the three development partners to develop the BCLC mobile platform, which also integrated into backend systems, including Salesforce, Mashery, and the EDW.

In total, there were over 60 project team members with the development partners based in Vancouver, Kamloops, Toronto, and Europe (UK, Serbia).

BCLC hired me to set up and run the project using an agile methodology (scrum) to deliver both the mobile platform and, after several releases, the Lotto! app 2.0 (purchase a ticket).

The success of the release of the Lotto! app 1.0 (after six months) acted as a catalyst for an enterprise-wide agile transformation within BCLC, which is still ongoing today.

AFS was the payment provider for Google worldwide and while there I was an eCommerce project manager responsible for the implementation of a wide variety of payments projects for Google in several different countries.

The most exciting of these was the setup of the check processing entity for their AdWords customers in Argentina which needed to comply with the highly complex tax system that was in place at the time.

This required several trips to the Google headquarters in Mountain View and Argentina and working with a wide variety of resources at Google. It also required working with local banks in Buenos Aires to understand the local regulations and define the operational processes and procedures. The project also involved working with the AFS development team to ensure that the development, setup, and configuration of the back-end systems were in place to facilitate these check processing activities.

Overall this project was a success and along with my time at AFS gave me a massive insight into the working style at Google. As a result, it provided the foundation for my agile approach to work and helped develop a growth mindset that has served me well since.

The BC Securities Commission is a government agency that plays a leading role in regulating the highly complex securities industry in British Columbia and they hired me to implement their new public website.

This project involved the selection of a development vendor who specialized in the implementation of the Sitecore CMS platform within an Azure infrastructure. There was also the development of a number of backend APIs that connected to external data sources and the migration of a significant number of documents from Ektron CMS to Sitecore CMS.

The project deadlines were extremely aggressive (launch March 2020) and required significant coordination and collaboration with internal SMEs and vendors. With the complex nature of the industry, aggressive deadlines, and a wide diversity of project team members, this project was very challenging.

However, early alignment on expectations and dedication to a regular cadence of engagement with all parties helped to ensure that the project remained on track and we reached our final milestone in time for March 2020.

Unfortunately, COVID-19 forced the project launch to be put on hold for now. but it is expected to launch in the next couple of months.

Managed and delivered numerous successful data, AI, and ML projects on the Databricks platform for leading global brands, including Heineken, Diageo, WPP, and AstraZeneca. Spearheaded complex migrations from legacy systems like Synapse to Databricks, developing a deep understanding of the platform and its transformative potential in helping organizations harness vast data reservoirs for innovation and growth.