“I have been very happy with the process and very pleased with the result. Calibre One had the right recommendation at the end, and helped us throughout the hiring process all the way until we got our A+ VP Engineering.”
Narges Bani Asadi
Founder & CEO, Bina
Backed By:
The Need: VP of Software Engineering
The Bina BoxBina was in need of an executive to support and build upon the product line. The Bina Box is a self‐contained data analysis appliance which is highly optimized to process next generation sequencing datasets and links to Bina Cloud. It performs the entire secondary analysis pipeline and constructs an accurate genome from raw sequence data. The key responsibilities for the VP of Software Engineering were to commercialize the genome sequencing product and build the support system for launch which included expanding a team of 10 to 20 software engineers within twelve months.
Desired Executive
The ideal candidate had experience in both consumer and enterprise with a combined background in software and hardware. A background in genomics was ideal, however, given that the industry is still new we expected to also pinpoint candidates outside of genomics that would be interested in Bina’s big data platform.
Required qualifications:
• Background in complex backend multi-distributed systems and database technology
• Experience building software that was tied to a hardware component
• Exposure to big data or business intelligence software was critical
Placed Candidate
The search for candidates included a mapping of both the consumer and enterprise markets with a complex drill-down into backend multi-distributed systems and database technology. We were searching for an executive who could bridge the gap between software and hardware having both startup and corporate experience. We found our target candidate, Sharon Barr, who had over eight years of experience as a VP of Engineering.
Unique Attributes:
• More than 18 years of experience developing infrastructure software
• He led the server development team at AppStream, a provider of on-demand software distribution and virtualization
• While Director of Engineering at Yahoo, he was responsible for the development of Yahoo’s Real Time Targeting platform, which processes billions of events daily
Search Hurdles
The biggest challenge was ideally finding candidates with knowledge of genomic sequencing and the big data behind it. We also anticipated the test in finding someone who wasn’t yet in the industry and moving them into this relatively new disruptive sector of big data genomics.