Mike Agar

“If you can imagine it, I can build it.”

Projects / Work History

2022 - Current

J.D. Power - Technology Manager

AI Cloud: a Multi-tenant Data Warehouse and Low Code ETL Platform

The AI Cloud system powers much of the internal data processing within J.D. Power. It is a highly scalable platform running batch processing jobs using Kubernetes on GKE and Fargate. Included in this work is a user friendly (low-code) Web Application that helps data analysts configure and operate complex data pipelines (ETL/Data Warehouse).

My role on the team is to maintain the AI Cloud system while expanding its capabilities. I set the roadmap for the AI Cloud team and oversee all work done on the platform.

2020 - 2022

Signal Flare - CTO / Founder

Signal Flare: Let your analytics tell your story

It was a simple observation that lead me to build Signal Flare. Tracking the SEO actions taken through to their effects on our marketing dashboards was exceedingly difficult. A new campaign would be launched and a week or two later identifying the campaign on the charts in our analytics dashboard would be a real chore. It gets worse as you move from tool to tool: Google Analytics, ahrefs, Semrush, etc.

Signal Flare centralizes your annotations so that everywhere you go, your charts are augmented with your notes. Now it’s easy to see where a campaign starts or ends in all of dashboards.

2017 - 2020

LoanConnect - CTO

I joined LoanConnect in the very early days of the company. When I left we had reached the total addressable market in Canada for sub-prime borrowers. The key to our success was optimizing the borrower life-cycle events to match hyper-targeted marketing messages.

The technology evolved under my leadership in two important directions: the first was in synchronizing the marketing message and channels to the borrower. If they had abandoned their partially completed application a call centre rep would call them to help finish the form. If they had been rejected by a lender, an automated email with alternative loan offers was sent. And many more in-the-moment automations kept the borrower on track and on a path to success.

The second innovation was all around deep integration with our partners. We helped Lenders expose APIs and Callback interfaces so that a borrower would never have to enter their data twice. And once rejected the Lender via the callback would earn commissions on future events for that borrower as they re-entered the LoanConnect system as an affiliate tracked lead. The affiliate tracking and commission sharing ultimately resulted in near 100% visibility into all the active borrowers seeking sub-prime loans in Canada.

2014 - 2017

BluePoint Technology - CTO / Co-Founder

Kindera: The easy way to protect your kids online

This project was some of my best work. So many different technical challenges all overcome to produce the best Parental Control WiFi router that has ever been made. You can still buy one here: Kindera

2010 - 2014

BlackBerry - Senior Software Engineering Manager

I managed a large team in this company. Together we built an amazing BlackBerry TV product that didn’t ship. Our team was instead disbanded and dropped into the PlayBook and BB10 launch effort. A whole lot of very interesting work was done. And my name ended up on four patents.