Nayla Nassif
For additional information, please contact me at: nayla_nassif@alumni.uci.edu
___________________________________SUMMARY___________________________________
Seeking a broad engineering leadership role in a highly technical and dynamic environment, which
utilizes my passion to:
 resolve complex problems across organizational boundaries,
 build high performing teams,
 deliver customer needs in timely quality products, and
 make business trade-offs that positively impact the business.
____________________________EMPLOYMENT HISTORY____________________________
NetApp, Sunnyvale, CA
Performance Engineering Manager
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Influence the definition and impact the viability of NetApp’s new data storage products from
inception through product delivery. Own and deliver the performance of these products through
modeling and simulation, performance estimation, prototype characterization, architectural tradeoffs and optimization, and design (hardware, software, file system) improvements.
Support Product Management launch campaigns and product positioning. Deliver commitments
on time with focus on performance impact that is most needed by customers and the business.
Manage a team of highly experienced Ph.D. performance engineers, set goals, and prioritize
project involvement. Grow the team while focusing on high employee engagement.
Foster innovation; team members repeatedly received patents and company-wide innovation
awards. Drive process improvements and cross-organization collaborations.
Manage the team’s Engineering Lab with multi-million dollar annual capital budget.
Intuit, San Diego, CA
Systems Performance Architect / Team Lead
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20042007
Developed business and technical solutions to meet performance and fault tolerance requirements
of TurboTax Online system (a multi-million concurrent user web application). Led crossfunctional teams to implement the solutions. My efforts saved more than $1,000,000 over the last
two years in unnecessary production scaling and earned me several recognition awards.
Accurately characterized and modeled future workloads, set capacity requirements, and sized
production hardware accordingly. This ensured a predictable and uninterrupted experience for
millions of customers during seasonal peak loads.
Partnered across Business Units to identify business critical processes, implement high
availability, and provide real-time monitoring status to executive leaders. This mitigated the risk
of failures and minimized their impact on customers.
University of California, Irvine
Visiting Researcher, Lecturer
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2008present
20022004
Researched the identification and mitigation of risk factors in collaborative distributed system
design at JPL, with emphasis on requirement elicitation and negotiation.
Taught upper division Information and Computer Science classes.
Resume of Nayla Nassif
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Stamps.com, Santa Monica, CA
Senior Systems Engineer
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Specified requirements for performance analysis of Stamps’ application and production servers.
Led cross-functional team to conduct simulations. This uncovered system bottlenecks, identified
hardware and software remedies, and in one instance, saved $100,000 in unnecessary upgrades.
Modeled customer growth and characterized workloads. This ensured proper build out and
prevented service outages during annual peak loads.
HyPerformix Inc., previously SES, Austin, TX
Systems Performance Consultant
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19971998
Explored architectural trade-offs in early design feasibility analysis of real-time embedded
communication products. Modeled and simulated system performance using BONeS to expose
design bottlenecks and improve rapid-prototyping of on-chip systems.
IBM, Server Division, Austin, TX
Advisory Scientist
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19992000
Modeled the high-volume call center of a major insurance company (client of HyPerformix) to
evaluate system performance headroom and prevent customer call delays.
Rockwell Semiconductor Systems, Newport Beach, CA
Senior Systems Engineer
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20002001
19961997
Initiated and specified requirements for cross-organizational performance verification
methodology. This set the framework for uncovering architectural and performance bugs early in
the design stages.
Applied the methodology to all seven of IBM’s high-end Symmetric Multi-Processor (SMP)
server projects. This uncovered discrepancies against mathematical models used to approve the
projects. Published methodology and results at IBM-wide innovation conference.
__________________________EDUCATION & PUBLICATIONS_________________________
Ph.D. Computer Engineering, March 1996, University of California, Irvine.
Designed distributed algorithms for fault-tolerant network communication and image analysis.
M.S. Electrical Engineering, University of California, Irvine.
B.E. Electrical Engineering, with Distinction, American University of Beirut.
Publication list available upon request or from http://www.eng.uci.edu/~nayla/pub.html
_____________________HONORS & PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES_____________________
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Finance Chair for IEEE’s High Performance Computer Architecture Conference, 2003.
Member of the Engineering Dean Search Committee.
UC Irvine representative to UC President, Regents, and statewide Student Association.
Vice President of UCI’s Associated Graduate Students.
Dean’s honors list, Regents’, alumni, departmental, and private fellowships.
Resume of Nayla Nassif
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