Justin Challenger

Justin Challenger

Technical Entrepreneur & Enterprise Platform Leader

Burlington, Ontario · info@challengers.tech · justin.challengers.tech · LinkedIn · GitHub

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Summary

I build the internal platforms that large organizations run on. Over the past decade at IBM and Kyndryl, that's gone from a skills-assessment system used by 300,000 people to a Power Platform suite that 7,000 sellers rely on today. The thread through all of it is the same: take a slow, manual process and turn it into software people can actually trust. I started out writing game engines and rendering code — that's where I learned to think in systems, and it still shapes how I approach full-stack work, the Power Platform, the infrastructure I self-host, and AI automation.

Experience

Kyndryl — Markham, Ontario Sep 2021 – present
  • Associate Director (Oct 2024 – present) — I lead the engineering behind our Business Engineering Platform: six Power Platform solutions (190+ Dataverse tables, 110+ Power Automate flows, 40+ Power BI reports) that run on top of the enterprise CRM for 7,000 sellers. One rebuild took opportunity intake from about eight days down to under one before resources get assigned. I run two development teams — seven engineers — alongside a 50-plus contributor community, and together we've shipped more than a thousand user stories.
  • Lead Software Developer (Oct 2023 – Oct 2024) — took technical ownership of the Accounts & Signing Management Hub — now Velocity — and shipped its first real release, clearing the intake lag that had been holding up around 2,000 users in Canada. Mentored three developers from interns into juniors, each now on track to become a Technology Owner.
  • Product Owner (Sep 2021 – Oct 2023) — owned all 16 of the HR skills-and-learning tools that every Kyndryl employee touches. Sat down with process owners across Compliance, Learning, HR, and Security to work out what each team actually needed, then folded it into Workday Learning as the company stood up. I also owned the HR Performance products — YourCareer, BadgeMe, and eventually the Workday Career modules — plus a custom integration we built with an outside vendor that tracked the certifications employees and contractors earn worldwide, feeding their learning and development plans.
IBM — Lead Software Developer, Markham, Ontario Jul 2015 – Sep 2021
  • Built SMARTER, a skills-assessment platform (PHP/Angular) that grew to 300,000+ users and millions of records. At its peak, every IBM seller was assessed in it — by their manager or themselves — and those records fed into Your Learning, and later Workday.
  • Built ZACS (Zone for Accelerating Success), a bot and search tool that put the right documentation in front of sellers the moment they needed it.
  • Platform improvements I worked on helped recover more than $300,000 in 2018.
  • Moved background processing off Cloud Foundry onto Kubernetes in 2020, and built out the Docker dev environments and CI/CD pipelines the team relied on.
Challenger's Tech — Founder, Web Development & Consulting Aug 2012 – Jan 2016
  • Ran a web development and consulting business while I was still in university — my first real lesson in owning the whole thing: finding the clients, building what they asked for, and shipping it.
Self-Hosted Infrastructure & Automation Ongoing
  • Design and run my own private cloud at home — 50-plus services on a five-node Docker Swarm over Proxmox, with the networking, storage, and monitoring to match, plus a multi-agent LLM system I built called Hermes. See Projects.

Skills

Languages
PHP, JavaScript / Node.js, Python, Angular, C#, SQL, Bash
Power Platform
Power Apps (Canvas & model-driven), Power Automate, Power BI, Copilot Studio, Dataverse
Cloud & Infra
Docker, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, Proxmox, Linux, CI/CD, Git
Observability & Networking
Prometheus, Grafana, Uptime Kuma, Smokeping, Traefik, UniFi, DNS / TLS
AI & Automation
AI integration, workflow automation, multi-agent orchestration
Foundations
Rendering / graphics, applied math for interactive software, systems architecture

Certifications

Team Solution Design — Kyndryl (Credly) 2024
Enterprise Design Thinking Practitioner — IBM 2021
Watson Data Platform Foundations — IBM 2016

Education

Ontario Tech University — B.IT (Honours), Game Development & Entrepreneurship 2011 – 2015
  • Vice President, UOIT & DC Game Development Society.