Jennifer Lombardo

Jennifer Lombardo

Jennifer is a true executive generalist with the ability to manage and create the necessary process and procedures needed to drive efficiencies for a successful business. Holding human resources and operational positions, Jennifer has thrived in both start-up cultures and large corporate environments.

In 1994, Jennifer began her human resources career which spans the production entertainment, VFX Production, animation production, AI production, video game development, manufacturing, digital marketing, content creation, social media and broadcast industries. Jennifer has worked with companies such as Warner Bros, Sony Pictures Entertainment (including Sony Pictures Animation, Sony Picture Digital and Sony Strategic Alliances divisions), Cinesite VFX and Animation Studio, Ignition Entertainment Gaming Studio, The Vitec Group (including Bexel Broadcast Rentals, Tomcat and Brilliant Truss Manufacturing), Tai Lopez entrepreneur education influencer Brand.

Jennifer has handled everything from negotiating terms on real estate agreements, creating custom operational policies, facing and winning unlawful-termination complaints, managing union contracts, scaling teams by increasing staff 150% to conducting management coaching. Additionally, Jennifer has experience in managing international workforces and is an expert in global compliance programs having worked in a variety of foreign countries including Canada, UK, Mexico, Italy, Slovakia, and Norway.

Other areas of Jennifer’s expertise include establishing processing payroll, conflict resolution, employee motivation, organizational development, core value assessments, employee relations, employee investigations, and recruitment.

A California native, Jennifer enjoys playing golf, participating in charity events, and spending time with her husband and dog in their backyard. She graduated from the CSUN HR Program, is a member of SHRM, and is a Certified Myers-Briggs trainer.

Ali Zaidi

Ali Zaidi

Ali has focused his career on the intersection of technology and computer graphics. He has a track record of identifying and adopting technologies, practices and frameworks to catalyze the engineering competencies of a growing animation studio. Prior to joining Spire, Ali was at DreamWorks for 12 years and led the establishment and growth of the multidisciplinary Platform Services department.

At DreamWorks, Ali pioneered the architecture and deployment of the studio’s first-ever cloud-native pipeline. This pipeline has now been adopted for all DreamWorks features in development. Ali also spearheaded the creation of key frameworks that form the foundation of the engineering and operational capabilities at the studio and led several projects including: DreamWorks Cloud (an orchestration framework, API and UI for all infrastructure automation on-prem and in the cloud), Stella (a database as a service platform on Kubernetes adoptable for any stateful technology), ForestFlow (a Linux Foundation incubated policy-based cloud-native machine learning model server), Showbot (a framework to instantiate artist workspaces in any region of the world) and Health Dashboard (a single pane of glass view and API for service discovery, APM, measuring SLOs and triage/reporting for the show, SREs, NOC and developers).

Ali grew up in Pakistan and lives with his four kids, wife and mother in the San Fernando Valley. He is an uncompromising Lakers fan and has a completely unrelated distaste for all things Boston. He has a BE in Electrical Engineering from NED University of Engineering and Technology, Karachi.