Omer Ayfer

Summary

I am a technologist, IT leader, lecturer and a cook. As of late 2017, I hold a number of fractional CIO positions and also stay fresh by contributing in a number of advisory roles helping startups find the right technology direction for their teams. I make time to deliver talks on topics such as blockchain and cryptography to a wide variety of audiences, with regular appearances as a guest lecturer in Executive Education programs at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.

Relevant Professional History

Ayfer Network, LLC Oakland, CA (2017 - present)

Principal

• My own consulting business providing fractional CIO/CTO services to a number of startups, mostly -but not exclusively- in the biotechnology space.
• Areas of focus include cloud and high-performance computing, cybersecurity, recruiting and vendor management.
• Clients include: Illumina Ventures, Encoded Therapeutics, Lyell Immunopharma, Convergent Genomics and Serimmune.

Merritt College Oakland, CA (2017 - present)

Adjunct Professor

• Teaching courses in the premier cybersecurity program at the community college level, including preparing curriculum, course materials and assessment tools, covering topics including cryptography, network security and architecture.

Consortium of Information Systems Executives Silicon Valley, CA (2016 - present)

Administrative Chair of the CDP

• As a committed member of the CIO Development Program (CDP), I have taken on additional responsibilities to help with the success of the group's regular meetings and administrative health.

Previous IT Director/Head of IT roles

• Veracyte, Inc. South San Francisco, CA (2015 - 2017)
• Sequenta, Inc. South San Francisco, CA (2013 - 2015)
• Mendel Biotechnology, Inc. Hayward, CA (2002 - 2013)

Skills

My most valuable technical skill is the ability to translate real-world needs into effective technology solutions.

My most valuable soft skill is communication, including distilling technical content for non-technical audiences.

I enjoy an even split between time spent on managerial and engineering tasks, and mostly held roles that required hands-on expertise in:

• IaaS (especially Amazon Web Services)
• network engineering (especially security)
• Linux best practices

I have strong technological preferences but also believe any major style (e.g. vmware or openstack, AWS or GCP) can work well when correctly implemented and managed.

Examples of taste: I prefer vi over emacs, Ansible over Chef and have recently come to terms with Python being better than Perl. I use Mac OSX on my laptop and Fedora on my workstation, with access to a Windows virtual desktop. I am a big fan of free and open source software.

Education

Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering
Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN

Leadership Development Program
Center for Creative Leadership, San Diego, CA

Miscellaneous

Since 2015 I have been giving guest lectures on topics including blockchain, information security and career development at UC Berkeley, Purdue University and Merritt College.

In May 2010, I served as a Grand Awards Judge (Computer Science) at Intel ISEF in San Jose, CA.

While I was unemployed as an entry-level job seeker just after the dot-com crash, I co-authored a book:
"Kim Korkar Linux'tan?" (Who's afraid of Linux?), 2003, an introductory book about Linux in Turkish