Waterloo Engineering students and alumni are invited to participate in an exclusive virtual Office Hour with Waterloo Engineering alumni Shervin Shaffie (BASc 2000), Principal Technical Specialist at Microsoft, and Mohammed Samji (BASc 2000), Vice President, User Experience Platform Engineering at Oracle who will discuss “You’ve Got the Job - Now What? Tips to Fast Track Your Career!”.
During this Office Hour, Shervin Shaffie and Mohammed Samji will share with you the lessons they learned over the years, from their co-op terms at the University of Waterloo to the various roles they held at Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle and eLoyalty. On his YouTube channel, Shervin has shared videos that discuss in more detail what he does, and how you too can join companies like Microsoft or Cisco in similar roles. But what happens once you land the job and start full-time work? How can you continue to grow and succeed as the years go by? Shervin and Mohammed are hoping the lessons they learned over the last 20 years will help you fast track your career.
Please RSVP to receive the MS Teams link to join and bring your questions for an engaging conversation!
Join the Waterloo Engineering Hub (powered by Ten Thousand Coffees) to gain access to this Office Hour. If you are already a member of the Waterloo Engineering Hub, please sign in to RSVP.
Shervin Shaffie
BASc 2000, Electrical Engineering
Principal Technical Specialist
Microsoft
Biography
Shervin Shaffie is a principal technical specialist at Microsoft, focused on MS Teams. He primarily works with his Enterprise and Commercial customers in Southern California and helps them build next generation Collaboration solutions. These solutions include Teams chat, collaboration, meetings, calling, room systems, and extend to platforms outside Microsoft integrating into business workflows.
His journey into tech started with his Electrical Engineering degree from the University of Waterloo, which helped nurture his natural curiosity to truly understand how things work. The degree also taught him how to learn anything he put his mind to and then explain it to others, in simple terms. A skill he’s been using every day since the beginning of his career.
Shervin started his career at Deloitte, consulting on CRM applications and that led him to work for a contact center company named eLoyalty, initially integrating CRM apps to business workflows. Later at eLoyalty, he became a Cisco contact center deployment engineer, building the network, contact center scripts and IVR flows for companies such as Maersk Data, Wells Fargo, Agilent, and several others.
Then he switched from post-sales to a pre-sales role by joining Cisco as a systems engineer in the public sector/SLED team working with LA County, and LADWP to design Greenfield Cisco contact center solutions. Over the years at Cisco, he expanded his technical skills and started covering UC, Video, Webex, Messaging, Cloud Calling, basically everything under the Collaboration portfolio. He also moved from SLED to Commercial and then Enterprise, covering customers such as Amex, Qualcomm, Live Nation, Amgen, and many more.
As Shervin became more senior in the pre-sales engineering roles, he led tiger teams to help provide field feedback to the business units in order to optimize products based on customer needs. During key sales opportunities, he assumed a technical lead role, interfacing with Cisco professional services, Cisco business units, partner, and customer contacts to bring the full solution together and would then present to the customer C-suite for their consideration.
Connect with Shervin Shaffie on LinkedIn.
Mohammed Samji
BASc 2000, Electrical Engineering
Vice President, User Experience Platform Engineering
Oracle
Biography
Mohammed Samji brings 20 years of proven leadership building hardware and software experiences. From vision and strategy, to experience creation and product design, to execution leveraging global teams, always driving to deliver on time with the highest quality. Customer advocate and corporate coalition builder who can get critical tasks done within and outside the organization. Recognized for the ability to share vision and experience through storytelling that motivates teams. Instrumental to the global launch of new Microsoft products and services under the Xbox and Surface banners. Currently leads the development of Oracle’s next generation User Experience platform.
Connect with Mohammed Samji on LinkedIn.