Fiann O'Hagan
Principal Performance Engineer
Location:
Vancouver, Canada
About:
Fiann brings more than 20 years of performance experience—and multiple software engineering patents—to his role at Optimal. He began his career in A/B testing and personalization tools. He always had a serious interest in front-end performance, driven by the need to make A/B testing content a seamless part of the user experience. Later Fiann developed the deployment process for the tool that later became Adobe Target and created a new, patented method for deploying the software for maximum performance.
Fiann is now a senior engineer at Optimal and a technical lead on projects that involve deep-dive analysis of front-end integrations and performance. He’s responsible for keeping up to date with emerging best practices that will squeeze every last performance improvement from complex websites.
In an earlier role at Tealium, Fiann led technical support and professional services for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The global rollout of Tealium tag management for Vodafone across 21 countries was his first serious introduction to the different performance needs in poorly networked regions of the world. It was on that project that Fiann first met Optimal Founder and CEO [Rich Howard]({{< ref “team/rich-howard” >}}).
Something that you may not know about Fiann is that he spent a year volunteering in a rainforest research center in Borneo, helping scientists research ways to mitigate the damage caused by logging in primary rainforests. He even contributed to the background material used in David Attenborough’s classic series, Life of Plants! He’d be the first to tell you that despite how it may look in documentary films, it’s very loud, but it’s also very hard to spot animal life in the jungle, so an incredible amount of work goes into finding the things they want to film.
Favorite animal:
Gibbons. They deserve far greater popularity. Incredibly elegant as they swing through the trees, they sound more like birds than mammals when they sing
Bucket list destination:
25 years later, Fiann would love to return to Borneo with his kids to see how the rainforest has changed and try to spot some jungle wildlife
Education:
M.S., Artificial Intelligence, University of Sussex
B.S., Neuroscience, UCL, London