World-Class Software Engineering on Demand
As Chief Executive Officer for Janea Systems, Mike is responsible for overseeing the day-to-day administrative and operational functions of the business. He brings more than 20 years of experience to Janea Systems. His experience and leadership have been focused on developing and delivering consulting services and software solutions, building high-performing teams, and driving efficiency in large scale global operations.
Prior to joining Janea Systems, Mike was the Vice President of Business Operations for the Technology Services division of Altisource, a leading provider of services and technology to the mortgage and real estate industries. There he was responsible for a wide variety of functions for the technology organization including financial management, process improvement, commercials management, performance management, Business Intelligence, strategic initiatives, and leading a professional services team providing custom development and business consulting services. Before that, Mike ran the professional services organization at Oco, a developer and provider of cloud-based business intelligence (BI), analytics, and data integration solutions, which was eventually acquired by Deloitte. Earlier in his career, Mike worked at a number of consulting firms, including Deloitte Consulting, delivering technology consulting services across a variety of domains and industries.
Mike holds a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Originally from Connecticut, Mike now lives outside Boston in Natick with his wife and 3 young children.
Alexis founded Janea Systems out of his passion for software engineering and solving complex technical challenges. His calling for math, science and programming was apparent from a very early age. At age 9 he started learning how to code on a Commodore 64 and within months he was already programming games in assembly language. Before graduating from high school he was proficient in C and was dabbling in graphics driver development for the IBM PC. After graduating cum laude at the university of Rome, where he also won several high-profile programming competitions, he moved to the USA after being headhunted by Microsoft, where he was part of the team that created the first version of the .NET Runtime. During his time at Microsoft he was awarded numerous patents and various publications including: “Efficient filtering in pub/sub systems”. After participating in the first 2 major releases of .NET, he left Microsoft to co-found Wishpot – a startup aimed at creating universal wishlists, later acquired by Light in the Box – where he was CTO.
Microsoft then sought his services as a consultant to help solve some of their deepest technical challenges, working on .NET, Windows, Exchange, experimental projects for the office of the CTO, and leading several high-impact open source projects for MS Open Tech. This included the Node.js on Windows initiative where he became a member of the Node.js Foundation’s technical governing body, the Technical Steering Committee. He also led the Redis on Windows project and oversaw the creation of Memurai, from the go to market strategy, and deep involvement in delivering the code for the product’s core features and improvements.
Coupled with a passion and experience in software engineering, knowing very well that the world is being eaten by software and yet a seemingly endless shortage of engineering talent, motivated him to find innovative ways to connect the best talent to the most challenging demands of the industry worldwide. Eventually leading him to recruit more like-minded people and build a team of engineering excellence at Janea Systems, where he now serves as Chairman of the Board.
In his free time, he enjoys playing beach volleyball, playing music, and travelling.
Prior to joining the Janea Systems team, Toby held positions with Aditi Consulting as VP of Engineering Consulting Services, Akvelon Inc. as Director of Growth & Strategic Accounts, Head of Consulting & Business Development for ProZone Sports (UK) in the sports analytics & emerging tech space, as well as lecturing & coaching in the United Kingdom & U.S.
Most recently, Toby was a key member in securing sustained growth in both revenue and client acquisition. Developed & built engineering & project-based consulting success, serving clients such as Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, Seattle Seahawks,Reddit, Doordash, F5 Networks, Qualtrics, Maana and more.Toby also held consultancy roles with FIFA, UEFA, the Welsh National Team, Chelsea, Arsenal, Ajax and Juventus.
Before relocating to the U.S, Toby lectured and taught at both the University of Worcester and Worcester Sixth Form College in the UK. He focused his time on delivering the Sports & Exercise Science, Sports Performance analysis curriculum and running the Worcester 6th Form Football Academy.
Toby has a MSc. in Education & a BSc. (Hons) in Sports & Exercise Science, as well as holding several national coaching qualifications including the UEFA ‘B’ football License.
Elias Najjar is a Lead Software Engineer at Janea Systems, where he oversees the development and maintenance of QCash Financial’s loan decision engine platform. He is a solution-driven engineer with over 11 years of experience building robust, user-focused software.
Elias is well-versed in all phases of the software development lifecycle and has substantial expertise in translating business requirements into technical solutions.
Before joining Janea, Elias was a project manager at PlanB Solutions, where he hired and led a remote team of 8 developers. Throughout his career, he has completed several notable projects, including an Eikon App Studio Application for Thomson Reuters and the PBS Galaxy ERP system, which consisted of several modules such as CRM, lead management, and accounting.
Elias graduated with an M.S. in Electrical & Computer Engineering from the American University of Beirut in Lebanon.
Sergio is the Head of Engineering Delivery at Janea, where he oversees a team of 40 engineers. With 25 years of experience in IT, Sergio has worked on several groundbreaking projects including; the development of a collaborative online editing platform, a 3D incident command training simulator, and a wide area measurement system for a national transmission system operator.
Prior to Janea, he worked in various roles such as consultant, project manager, product manager, IT manager, and CTO in a number of different industries.
Sergio graduated in Computer Science Engineering in Italy and currently lives in Spain. In his spare time, he enjoys playing the guitar, bass, and piano, baking pizza, and riding his motorbike.
Zak Greant serves as the Vice President of Strategy at Janea Systems and the General Manager for Memurai, the company’s product division. Their career has been dedicated to helping open source startups and non-profits flourish. Initially focused on software development, open source advocacy, and marketing, they eventually transitioned to strategy and leadership roles.
Over the past 30 years, Zak has contributed to software, projects, and licenses used by a majority of the world’s developers. They have worked with prominent organizations such as the PHP project, MySQL AB, the Mozilla Foundation, the Open Source Initiative, ActiveState, and the Free Software Foundation.
Participated in the design of a messaging protocol system for the .Net Platform & later SQL Server.
Supporting the C/C++Compiler for ARM team:
Janea Systems developed various features for Microsoft’s digital media products:
Developed the Lodging “Price and Availability Engine”, which servers over 300 million requests per day and is key to Expedia’ success.
Memurai – Our very own Redis-compatible cache and datastore for Windows. Memurai originated from our work leading the Redis on Windows project for MSOpenTech. memurai.com
Managing the Windows version of Node.js on behalf of Microsoft, from 2013 to present day. github. com/nodejs/node
Benedetto has a 20+ years of computer software engineering and programing experience ranging from being a Principal engineer in a Fortune 500 software centric companies to designing and building a custom supercomputer (in Italy with International Institute for Nuclear Physics, in Germany with DESY) to analyse and simulate quark interactions.
He has extensive experience with massive production distributed systems as well as tools development such as C++ compilers and tools. Benedetto has frequently designed and developed novel computer algorithms to solve computer vision, acoustic & subsea imaging, road traffic and performance related problems.
Currently Benedetto leads the Memurai division of Janea Systems trying to diversify the product offering, build deterministic marketing and sales machines, and grow a top notch engineering team. In his spare time, Benedetto has fun with FPGA designs, in memory engines (take a look at his MemFusion project), and functional programming.
Having competed in several programming contests & Olympiads, Filip started his engineering path in his early school years. He went through a variety of projects like Lego Mindstorm robot contests, ubiquitous computing rotten tomato social experiment, Web graph compression with fast access algorithms, and many more requiring interpersonal skills and intuition.
When it comes to specific projects, Filip created and maintained several core Web services mainly used by mobile apps like city guides or lotteries for a company in Spain, developed a complex backend for an online shop in Barcelona, and even helped to implement a staff management system at a bus factory Solaris in Poland. Later he joined Intel and worked on Windows kernel drivers for Intel’s audio proprietary HW solutions.
Filip not only loves to hear from clients, but also appreciates listening to some good music and even being part of it by singing in a choir “Music Everywhere”, performing on stage, playing violin, drums, or guitars.
Our team’s extensive experience being trusted by our clients to develop, manage, contribute and execute their mission critical OpenSource projects and technology initiatives (Node.js, Node.js Mobile, React Native, PowerToys, MSOpenTech, Redis port to Windows) spans several years and is a key contributor to supporting their successful products and services delivery. Benefits we have realized include;
Jaime is a senior software engineer with a diverse engineering background, having worked on management software, mobile, game and tools development covering many industry verticals with over 10+ years of experience.
Jaime has had a passion for programming since he self-taught how to program at the age of 11 and has since then refined this passion into algorithms, low-level and system code. He loves tackling difficult bugs where he has to go deep to solve them, treating them as elaborated and satisfying puzzles.
Jaime’s project work for Janea Systems covers many areas including porting Node.js to Android and iOS, porting react-native modules to Windows, porting the Azure Maps SDK to iOS and developing the first PowerToys versions, among other projects
In his free time, he enjoys reading about philosophy, politics and economics and playing board and video games.
João was part of a robotic soccer team implementing scientific progress and innovation in cognitive systems and Robotics applications at the Intelligent Robots and Systems Laboratory (IRS Group), while studying for his computer engineering degree. João joined Janea Systems in April 2015, working from Portugal.
He coordinated software development and was responsible for the ROS based middleware at RoCKIn. After graduating he worked on robotics research for several years as a software engineer.
After joining Janea Systems, he worked on maintaining the Windows version of Node.js, including the development and maintenance of the Windows CI system in close collaboration with the open source community. João also worked on several cloud agnostic projects, giving him deep experience and ability to work across the board, from embedded to massive web applications.
João likes learning better tools to make new things, solving problems that make a difference and making the quality of the final solution his first priority.
Dragos has several years of experience as a software engineer working mainly with C++ on complex projects ranging from navigation (in NDS format) to web services for data streaming, documenting the API with OpenAPI. He is also well versed in the Boost libraries and language standards.
He has extensive experience with Continuous Integration Systems such as Jenkins and Github Actions. When it comes to testing experience, he worked with GTest and Docker for the environment.
During high school, he attended the National Olympiad of Informatics, as well as building and working on many small games and other projects in C++, later building in his free time games using Unity 3D, using C# as a scripting language.
In his free time, he really enjoys playing basketball outside and meeting new people this way. Currently living in the Netherlands, he likes to go on bike rides.