Neal is a Greater Toronto Area-based engineering leader with 15+ years in IT spanning data integration, enterprise systems, and modern web delivery. He leads the DevOps team at Oxford Properties Group, part of the OMERS family of companies, managing a team of developers and owning the reliability, CI/CD, and delivery of Oxford's digital products, from the public corporate website to enterprise data pipelines.
He translates complex business requirements into right-sized architectural decisions, from cloud migration strategies and data platform design to full-stack application architecture, while collaborating across engineering, business analysis, and senior leadership.
Trajectory
Team Lead, DevOps · Oxford Properties Group
Dec 2022 — Present
Led end-to-end delivery of the Oxford corporate website reskin, a full platform modernisation built on Next.js, Agility CMS, Elasticsearch, Netlify, and a custom leasing API, Oxford's first fully in-house web delivery. Launched April 2026 via a zero-downtime branch cutover, with senior OMERS executives in attendance.
Built an internal Website Observability platform (Next.js on Netlify) unifying monitoring of Oxford's web estate, including property pages, Netlify sites, Agility CMS, GitHub repos, SEO/OG tags, and GTM trackers, via the leasing, GitHub, GTM, and Netlify APIs, replacing manual checks across disconnected tools.
Architected and developed data pipelines for the Retail Marketing Team capturing user traffic and signups on Oxford's corporate website, integrating with Simon Data (a new customer data platform) for analytics and email marketing, using Boomi for pipelines and AWS S3 for storage.
Cut corporate website property search latency from 6 seconds to under 1 second, an 85%+ reduction, using Oxford's Lease-With-Us API and Elasticsearch for caching.
Developed Building Admin, a PowerApps application replacing a legacy Remedy platform app, resulting in over $200,000/year in licence cost savings, and a PMO Demand Intake app triaging IT requests from multiple business units with Power BI insights on volume, ownership, and effort.
Implemented CI/CD for PowerApps Canvas Apps and Azure Data Factory pipelines using Azure DevOps build and release pipelines, and own sprint planning and release management for the team.
Education
York University — Certificate, Full Stack Developer (2019)
Toronto Metropolitan University — Bachelor of Commerce, Information Technology Management (2008)
Toronto Metropolitan University — Certificate, Information Systems Management (2006)
Honors & Awards
Director's Award in Telecommunications
Certifications
Microsoft Power Platform Fundamentals
Microsoft Azure Fundamentals
Boomi Professional Developer
Boomi Associate Developer
Boomi Associate Administrator
VTS Administrator Certification, Professional Developer
Specialization
What does Neal specialize in?
Full Stack Engineer & CMS
Building modern, component-driven web applications with Next.js, React, and Tailwind CSS. Experienced with headless CMS integration (Agility CMS, Sanity) for content delivery, and end-to-end testing with Playwright.
Managing deployment pipelines on Netlify and Azure DevOps, with hands-on experience in CI/CD strategy, branch management, and secrets hygiene. Homelab enthusiast running a 3-node Proxmox cluster with Ceph storage, a QNAP NAS, and a self-hosted Docker services stack.
NetlifyAzure DevOpsDockerAzure Container InstancesAzure Data Factory
Manage and develop a team of 3 developers plus contract staff, including hiring (built a scorecard and structured interview process for a senior front-end search across 5 candidates), performance reviews, and individualized upskilling plans.
Drove frontend modernisation: TypeScript migration, a Storybook component library, Lighthouse performance auditing, and AEO/JSON-LD structured data for search and AI discoverability.
Managed and maintained public-facing websites using Agility CMS Site Generator, triggering build and deploy to Netlify CDN.
Extended the corporate site platform with the Agility CMS SDK for content preview and editor mouse tracking, and a show-modules overlay for live page composition visibility.
Created a repeatable WordPress-to-static site conversion process, migrating WordPress sites to static HTML hosted on Oxford's preferred Netlify infrastructure, standardising the platform footprint and eliminating CMS dependencies.
Presented technical strategies and architecture decisions to business stakeholders and senior leadership, translating complex technical concepts into actionable recommendations.
Mentor and develop the team's developers in front-end architecture, testing practices, and career growth, and take part in the Oxford Properties mentorship program.
Integration Developer · Oxford Properties Group
Feb 2021 — Dec 2022
Designed and developed a new ingestion and validation process for financial and non-financial data for third-party property managers, standardising data collection and removing manual intervention to satisfy audit requirements.
Re-architected all VTS integrations following deprecation of the VTS XML API, migrating to their next-gen JSON APIs, switching from SSIS to Azure Data Factory, and redesigning database structures for new data points.
Worked with Suite Spot to update their API to allow Oxford to send additional data fields for residential move-in and move-out jobs, improving unit turnover visibility and operational cost tracking.
Led Azure Cloud Migration analysis for on-premises VTS integrations: produced current-state landscape, evaluated cloud-native options, and authored future-state architecture recommendations for executive review.
Designed and architected the end-to-end T&I data flow pipeline, from source file ingestion through multi-stage validation, establishing the staging schema, error classification framework, and multi-environment promotion standards for consistent, auditable data delivery.
Evaluated and selected integration technologies (SSIS, Azure Data Factory, Azure Logic Apps, Boomi) for specific pipeline patterns, documenting architectural rationale and standards for team adoption.
Coordinated production deployments with the SRE team through ServiceNow change management, and maintained documentation for every new or updated process.
Key contributor in migrating legacy .NET web applications from SQL Server 2008/2012 to SQL Server 2019.
Responsible for testing all on-premises external web applications for Windows Server in-place upgrades from 2012 to 2019 due to end-of-life support.
Programming Analyst · York Region District School Board
Nov 2020 — Feb 2021
Assisted in developing and implementing ILARRS, a new attendance and replacement application for language teachers.
Integrated a new Supervisor form in ILARRS holding supervisor emergency contact details, enabling notifications when a language teacher reports an absence two hours or less before their scheduled class time.
Worked with the Data Quality Management team updating and enhancing SQL Server stored procedures for scheduled monthly data audits.
Programmer Developer L3 (Contract) · Ontario Ministry of the Solicitor General
Sep 2020 — Nov 2020
Supported and maintained eRoster, a shift scheduling application used across 25 correctional institutions with over 4,000 users.
Added new business rule logic across multiple reports for Daily Roster, Overtime, and Other Duty charges.
Developed additional web portal features for better user redirection, added user prompts for selection confirmation and error messages on business rule violations, and added a site map for AODA compliance.
Lead Integration Developer (Contract) · Oxford Properties Group
Mar 2020 — Aug 2020
Led the VTS platform implementation, designing and developing an automated data cleansing process for JDE data extracts that loads sanitised data into VTS on a nightly basis.
Developed a Budget integration ingesting Azure DataMart views and performing an ETL process that populates CSV templates uploaded to SmartFile for consumption by VTS.
Built an SSIS reconciliation package comparing data Oxford sent to VTS against what was entered via VTS reports, generating a comparison log that saved many hours of manual work.
Updated a complex integration between Oxford's corporate website and its Space Inventory application, replacing it with VTS Portfolio data and mapping legacy indicators to allow data to flow through.
Developed PowerApps applications for mapping third-party buildings in VTS with Oxford JDE properties, and for running the Budget integration on an ad-hoc basis for business users.
Data Developer (Contract) · Toys"R"Us Canada
Nov 2019 — Feb 2020
Created multiple SSIS ETL packages ingesting data from sFTP servers, MySQL, and SQL Server databases for Business Intelligence purposes.
Developed back-end solutions using views, stored procedures, C#, and VB scripts to extract, transform, cleanse, and load data.
Used Azure Data Factory to create data pipelines, setting up linked services and integration runtimes for both on-premises and cloud environments.
Data Developer & DevOps · Walmart Labs
May 2019 — Oct 2019
Used OneOps to manage building and deploying QA and production environments hosting the Metadata Management web application for the Canadian Data Lake.
Developed a disaster recovery process for the Metadata Management web application.
Developed Bash scripts to apply patches and perform backups of the application and its PostgreSQL backend across multiple environments.
Supported and maintained scheduled Alteryx ETL workflows generating daily logistics report cards in Tableau.
Optimised the e-commerce catalog DW loader supporting daily Sales reports, switching from fast append to reload to reduce row count.
Master Data Analyst · Walmart Labs
Nov 2018 — Apr 2019
Developed Python scripts using Selenium to automate the item delisting process, saving significant hours of labour cost, and ran the process on an ongoing basis to keep old items cleansed from the system.
Developed SQL queries across Oracle, DB2, Teradata, and SQL Server to support delisting and data quality work.
Created and maintained Excel and Outlook VBA scripts to semi-automate vendor communication regarding data quality and synchronisation via the GDSN network.
Initiated a monthly vendor fines process, resulting in $400,000 in fines for the first wave.
Held rotational Scrum Master duties for the Data Ops team, running Stand Up, Backlog Grooming, Sprint Retrospective, and Sprint Planning.
Data Specialist · Rethink Solutions Inc.
Jul 2017 — Oct 2018
Led data-related tasks with a focus on new client implementations and internal and external support, including migrating current and historical data for top-ranking Fortune 500 companies.
Mapped unstructured client data to existing database structures, processing gigabytes of data from multiple sources with over 100,000 records and 100+ fields each.
Extracted, transformed, and loaded data end to end, including cleansing, error correction, deduplication, and outlier handling.
Developed SQL procedures, functions, and queries for reuse across migration projects, and generated ad hoc reports to support internal and external decision-making.
Tested and validated imported data against source systems on local web server and database resources.
Developer & Data Analyst · Plexxis Software
Oct 2016 — Jul 2017
Wrote PL/SQL queries, views, and procedures to automate data sanity checks and migrate large data sets into the Oracle database.
Created custom data file exports for third-party software integration as required by clients.
Mapped and connected multiple high-volume, disparate data sources across mixed environments and platforms into common data structures.
Maintained and developed new features in Oracle Forms for the ERP front end, and provided technical support to the application development team.
Systems Analyst · Teknion
Sep 2011 — Oct 2016
Maintained the manufacturing system's item master, bills of materials, and routings, ensuring complete and accurate data to meet customer demand on time.
Audited and root-caused bill of materials inquiries, resolving production floor issues with Engineering and Manufacturing Systems, and supported Lean Office process improvement projects.
Created bills of materials and routings from detailed drawings to support custom product design, including entering component parts and attaching routings.
Processed engineering change orders in TFS, updating part numbers, bills of materials, routings, and related Engineering Data Management records.
Built custom reports in Enterprise Cyberquery (eCQ) for various departments, and developed IT specifications, test cases, and training documentation for new system processes.
Oracle Configurator Developer · Teknion
Sep 2009 — Aug 2011
Python
Selenium
Bash
Enterprise Integration & Data Insights
Designing and maintaining financial data pipelines using SSIS and Boomi, integrating platforms such as Yardi, JD Edwards, and internal legacy systems. Proficient in SQL, PL/SQL, shell scripting, and Power Platform tooling including Power Apps and Power BI.
