Welcome back to our Meet the Team series where we give you a peek behind the curtain and introduce you to some of the people behind the Spiff brand. Whether you’re interested in working with us or you’re simply browsing our website, our people are our most important asset and it’s impossible to know Spiff without knowing our team.
Without further ado, let’s meet the team!
Marcello Albuquerque, Software Engineer
Marcello was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He lived most of his life in Rio but lived in Panama for two years. He has since immigrated to Canada and has been in Calgary for a little over two years. He likes video games, anime, manga, prog metal, prog rock, cars, coding, and barbecues. He lives with his wife, two cats, and a small dog.
What excites you most about your role at Spiff?
Mohammed Alghaffari, Solutions Architect
Mohammed was born in Iraq and moved to the United States in 2013. He attended the University of Maryland – College Park for his Bachelor of Science in Information Systems and Finance. He identifies himself as an efficiency enthusiast, whether it comes to his personal or professional life. He’s very passionate about strategic technologies, especially within emerging innovations, and he’s a geek for entrepreneurship. His hobbies include reading philosophy books, trading stocks, and entraining ideas of why things are the way they are.
What excites you most about your role at Spiff?
Dave Kozisek, Senior Enterprise Product Manager
Born in California, Dave grew up in Boise, Idaho before moving to Seattle, Washington for undergraduate studies at the University of Washington in politics and economics. Returning to his roots, he moved back to California to earn his MBA at Pepperdine University. Dave started his career in sales and marketing prior to falling in love with the balanced left/right brain usage of product management.
He loves solving complex problems with simple, elegant solutions. Dave built his first computer at age ten with his dad, and has since been passionate about technology. His passions include cooking, gaming, reading, investing, being a cat dad, and traveling with his wife, Stacy. So far he has been to five continents with Africa and Antarctica remaining on his bucket list.
What excites you most about your role at Spiff?
Raphael Bres, Chief Product Officer
Raphael brings over 25 years of experience in Enterprise Financial Applications & SaaS working with leading software companies such as PeopleSoft/Oracle, Microsoft, Workday, FinancialForce and more recently as the Chief Product Officer at Tradeshift.
Raphael started his career at Deloitte Financial Audit and Deloitte ERP Consulting. Raphael holds a Master of Sciences in Economics and a Master of Sciences in Information Systems from the University of Paris-Dauphine. Raphael was born and raised in France and has lived in the San Francisco Bay area for the last 15 years. In his spare time, Raphael enjoys traveling with his wife, music, food, wine, chess, and helping others.
What excites you most about your role at Spiff?
Nicole Schuerman, Lead Creative Designer
Nicole lives in Connecticut and graduated from Salve Regina University in 2012 with a Bachelor’s degree in Studio Art with concentrations in Graphic Design and Photography. She has ten years of professional design experience and a passion for creating thoughtful, effective solutions for brands. When she’s not designing things, she’s spending time with her son Max, taking photographs, and binging true crime.
What excites you most about your role at Spiff?
Bobby Bartlett, Technical Support Engineer
Bobby grew up near London and spent nearly 10 years working in Banking and Financial Markets, before heading abroad and spending the next 10 years in New Zealand. Living there allowed Bobby to do the things he loves including skiing, hiking, football, biking, and exploring the great outdoors. Having recently returned to the UK with his wife and daughter, he can be found spending his weekends exploring London’s markets, parks, and attractions. No matter where Bobby goes or what he is doing, Bobby is normally listening to music and likes to go to gigs and festivals as much as possible.
What excites you most about your role at Spiff?
Erli Ametaj, Technical Support Engineer
Erli was born in Albania and moved to the United States when he was four years old with his family. They moved to the city of Boston and he grew up in the surrounding area. Erli has lived in and around Boston ever since. He’s a big fan of the Boston sports teams with the Patriots being his favorite.
When Erli was younger he was always put in charge of the technology in his house, which involved mostly troubleshooting computers for his parents. As such, he had an affinity for technical troubleshooting. Erli also spent a while in the restaurant industry working as a bartender/server, which helped him expand his interpersonal skills. These two developments eventually merged into his current role as a Technical Support Engineer.
Erli also enjoys building computers, watching football, playing fantasy football, video games, and trying new restaurants.
What excites you most about your role at Spiff?
Benjamin Naugle, Software Engineer
Ben was raised in the Washington D.C. suburbs of Maryland. He attended community college in Montgomery County and graduated with an Associates degree in generally studying sometimes. With that degree and the help of friends, Ben was able to land a job in NYC at very large corporate law firms as a legal assistant.
Ben’s main motivation to move to NYC was to live with his older brother and the job itself facilitated the move. After three extremely formative years in the city he found his true calling. Snowboarding. In 2011 Ben visited Utah on a ski trip and decided to move there on the second day. In 2012 Ben began the quest for a bachelor’s degree and completed it in May of 2016. In his time professionally Ben has learned quite a bit about the software development life cycle, deployment and maintenance of software, and a lot of specific java syntax and patterns.
What excites you most about your role at Spiff?
Jeff Romano, Enterprise Account Executive
Jeff grew up and lived in the Boston area until about four years ago when he moved to Denver. Jeff has traveled the world over to over 40 countries mostly from the freedom that professional poker brought him. Today Jeff enjoys cooking, growing plants, hot yoga, golfing (Jeff would like to note he’s bad), and skiing. When he’s not working he’s usually exploring a mountain or going to a concert.
What excites you most about your role at Spiff?
Cory Randolph, Sr. Machine Learning Engineer
Cory is a Machine Learning engineer who geeks out about finding ways to extract knowledge from data and make it useful to others. Cory has a mixed background in project management, reliability engineering, business intelligence, and team leadership, all of which provides him with a unique perspective when looking at new challenges.
Cory was born and raised in California and now lives in San Jose with his family (Wife Leray and two kids Elias and Liana). Cory says his son is a mini-me who likes to think and build things whereas he’s not sure where his daughter came from, “She is basically feral and gets away with too much because she is cute,” he jokes.
What excites you most about your role at Spiff?
Simon Ward, Solutions Engineer
Simon is originally from New Zealand and has been living in and around London, UK for the last 20 years. In his career he has moved from Customer Service, to Account Management, now for the last five years in more technical roles. The common theme is that Simon loves to turn customers not just into advocates, but fanatics, through his passion for solving problems and delivering value. Outside of work, Simon has a wife, two kids, and an English Springer Spaniel. Simon loves to travel, explore new places, and try new foods and music.
What excites you most about your role at Spiff?
Royce Joe, Software Engineer
Royce was born in Texas and grew up in South Korea. He studied Computer Science and moved to California in 2009. Royce settled down in Irvine, California and started as a .NET C# developer but quickly got into the frontend technologies. With his previous experience in jQuery and Angular, Royce is now happily coding in React and Typescript daily. When he’s not working, Royce likes snowboarding and riding bikes. On weekends, he can usually be found shopping or out to eat with his wife.
What excites you most about your role at Spiff?
Travis Hoki, Software Engineer
Travis enjoys Web Development and has been working in the field since 2011. Travis graduated from UVU with a Bachelors in Digital Media with a focus in Internet Technology. Travis married his high school sweetheart and is the dad of two crazy boys, and a doggo. Outside of his work at Spiff, Travis is an indie children’s book illustrator/publisher and avid plank pusher.
What excites you most about your role at Spiff?
Wrapping Up
As always, we hope you’ve enjoyed getting to know the people behind Spiff a bit more. If you’re interested in working together, check out our careers page to browse our open roles. We’re always hiring! Or, if you’re not done meeting the team, check out the previous installments in this series here:
About Spiff
Spiff is a new class of software that creates trust across the organization by delivering real-time automation of commission calculations and motivates teams to drive top-line growth. With a combination of an intuitive UI, real-time visibility, and seamless integrations into current systems, Spiff is the first choice among high-growth businesses. Spiff’s sales commission software enables finance and sales operations teams to self-manage complex incentive compensation plans and provides transparency for sales teams.
