Learn how to pitch your business and secure investment with SheBoot, a women-led program for women founders jointly established by Invest Ottawa and the Capital Angel Network.
Learn how to pitch your business and secure investment with SheBoot, a women-led program for women founders jointly established by Invest Ottawa and the Capital Angel Network.
Our expansive facility at Bayview Yards equips the most promising entrepreneurs and technology firms with technical, business and market capabilities to take on the world.
Accelerate the market readiness of your tech solution at Area X.O, a technology-rich, secure R&D complex for next-gen smart mobility, autonomy and connectivity technologies created for all-weather experimentation.
Read about the programs and services that help fuel the growth and success of the entrepreneurs, community and companies we serve, and our collaborative economic impact.
Entrepreneurship programming at Invest Ottawa helps product or services based entrepreneurs to start or grow their business. The advisors listed below are business experts, offering guidance, advice, and/or resources to help address your needs and challenges.
Bill has worked in the service and trade industries for over 25 years. From customer facing, to shared services and executive management, he has experience in all roles within an organization. Bill has worked across Canada, but Ottawa has always been his home base. Bill’s experience in business development has driven organic growth by expanding current and new services to existing customers and new geographic markets. Operationally he has lead change management projects improving efficiency in business workflows and processes. After many years of management experience he completed his MBA through the Executive Program at the Telfer School of Business at Ottawa University expanding his experience even further. In his current consulting role, Bill works with product and service based businesses to strengthen and grow their businesses.
Darlene Moore
Business Advisor
I am a digital strategist, analyst, trainer, and owner of DriveTraffic Digital Marketing. I have been working in the digital marketing industry since the mid 90s. My career began with doing email marketing, affiliate marketing, SEO, and Google Ads but then morphed into managing teams of digital marketers, webmasters, graphic designers and content creators while ensuring a successful client journey.
I’m a huge dog lover, petting each one I walk past, and I also enjoy kayaking, snowshoeing, and cycling depending on what time of year it is in Canada!
I want to help you build a marketing strategy uniquely suited to your business goals. I want to ensure that you are visible where your target market is looking for the products and services you provide. Working with me, you get an account manager, a marketing strategist, an analyst and someone who views success as seeing their clients happy with the results I have helped them achieve!
Every project and every client is unique — but two things remain the same: I value collaboration and meaningful client relationships. It starts with getting to know you: your brand, your challenges, and your goals.
Josephine Mensah
Business Advisor
Josephine Mensah is the owner of Oneness Career Coaching Inc. and has over 8 years of professional experience in career coaching, employment services and human resources practices. As a career coach, LinkedIn consultant and speaker, she meets clients individually and facilitates workshops for those seeking career changes as young professionals, new Canadians and aspiring entrepreneurs. Josephine also has a part-time role of Project Coordinator for the Foreign Credential Recognition Mentorship Program at Ottawa Community Immigration Services Organization, targeting internationally trained professionals in regulated professions.
Josiane Gomez, CPA, CGA, MBA
Business Advisor
Josiane holds designations as a CPA, CGA and MBA. She is the founder and CFO of Zivo, a registered CPA firm that provides online bookkeeping, payroll, accounting services, and expert financial advice to small businesses, entrepreneurs, not-for-profits, and charities.
Before founding Zivo, Josiane worked at KPMG, one of the Big Four in Ottawa, and a national CPA firm for several years where she had the opportunity to work with a wide range of for-profit and not-for-profit clients. Her work in the private sector-led her to hold several senior leadership positions overseeing the accounting and financial reporting of organizations with multi-million dollar budgets. Josiane’s main areas of expertise are accounting, financial reporting and management, audit, tax, payroll, budget and resource management, business advisory services, and accounting systems optimization.
As an entrepreneur herself, Josiane understands the significant role that finances play in the success of a business. That is why she is on a mission to use her expertise to help entrepreneurs, small business owners and leaders get more out of their company.
Josiane is fluently bilingual and works with clients in the language of their choice.
Karla Briones
Business Advisor
Karla Briones is a Mexican-Canadian serial entrepreneur with retail, food and beverage, and e-commerce businesses.
In her consulting role, Karla coaches new immigrants on how to become successful entrepreneurs in their adopted country. Karla provides business advisory to immigrant entrepreneurs and female entrepreneurs who are building main street businesses from ideation through growth stage.
Karla hosts Immpreneur Canada, a podcast that interviews successful entrepreneurs about their journeys of building successful businesses as immigrants.
She is the recipient of 2018 City of Ottawa Immigrant Entrepreneur Award, given to an immigrant who has made an impact in local economy and entrepreneurship ecosystem.
She is also a business mentor for Futurpreneur Canada and for several local community groups.
Rob Brown
Business Advisor
Rob has spent nearly 30 years in the finance industry working with organizations across Canada, putting together credit facilities for a wide cross-section of businesses. His approach has been holistic in providing clients with a complete understanding of how the credit process works and setting expectations to get results.
During his tender, he has been successful in cultivating relationships with a wide network to gain access and generate new sales growth opportunities, delivering smart business solutions for common issues. Along with this, he has also been recognized for the development of key accounts, execution of corporate strategies, and surpassing financial and performance metrics.
Along with the finance industry, Rob has spent time in both Information Technology and E-commerce in a consulting role.
Ryan Gencarelli
Business Advisor
Ryan is a seasoned marketing professional turned entrepreneur. He pivoted from the corporate world to co-found wild idea co. Offering tools, resources, and training, wild idea co. helps Canadian entrepreneurs take their business from wild idea to wild success.
Ryan has advised and mentored hundreds of aspiring and seasoned entrepreneurs. He’s passionate about supporting the entrepreneurial community and your success as a small business owner.
Above all else, he’s a people person. Building and nurturing relationships is central to his business philosophy. Ryan advises on many areas of business development and specializes in marketing, sales, project management, networking, and early-stage growth.
Sarah Gencarelli
Business Advisor
Sarah is an awarded brand strategist, copywriter, instructor, and entrepreneur. She’s a founding partner of wild idea co., a remote brand consultancy and creative studio based in Ottawa.
Sarah works closely with founders and marketing teams to clarify and amplify brand stories. She’s known for her ability to straddle both strategic and creative thinking and is a sought-after partner to agencies and start-ups for this reason.
She’s worked with brands large and small, from national brands like KitchenAid, Creemore Springs, and The Ritz-Carlton, to start-ups like Unity Wellness (CBD) and Air Matrix (drone technology), among others.
She’s passionate about supporting the entrepreneurial community. She has led workshops at Invest Ottawa, Women Mean Business, Energia Ventures, and Algonquin College.
This program is made possible through funding from the Government of Ontario.
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Embedded software engineer
Embedded software in high demand with Crank Software:
Crank Software helps easily develop and embed UI designs. With over 350 clients from startups to Fortune 500 companies, Crank Software has helped launch 500 million UIs. A day in the life of a Software Developer at Crank Software includes becoming an expert on its award-winning platform, Storyboard, and developing interface layers from UI to backend code. Taking home an award as one of Ottawa’s best places to work at the 2018-2019 Employee’s Choice Awards, a career at Crank Software is sure to be fun and rewarding.
Evidence Partners is changing the way researchers work. Its systematic literature review system, DistillerSR, helps deliver reviews up to 60% faster than spreadsheet-based processes. The SaaS company is exploding with growth, outgrowing its last office in just four months and taking home a Best Ottawa Business (BOB) award in 2019. This growth is driving Evidence Partners to look for Fullstack Developers and DevOps Engineers that are passionate about streamlining research in the academic and medical fields. Full benefits from day one and flexible work options are just a few of the perks you get working at Evidence Partners.
Kivuto helps schools go digital. Kivuto Cloud streamlines the management of educational resources such as e–texts and license keys, saving 20K+ schools an average of $50K. Kivuto partnered with educational giant Pearson in 2019 to bring digital education resources to academic institutions. A passion for education paired with skills in .NET Core Web API, AWS, Azure, React, SQL, and other tools and technologies make Kivuto a great place to grow your DevOps or Fullstack Engineering career.
Rewind Backups provides automated backup services, so businesses don’t lose their hard work.The development team at Rewind is made up of four teams of two to three people. Developers implement, test, document, and maintain back-end systems for high-traffic back-up services, delivering quality code and improving the development and deployment processes using AWS. A day at Rewind on the development team could look like anything from supporting Shopify’s new bulk APIs to creating Rewind-Connect; a wrapper for AWS SSM for connecting to Rewind staging and production systems. As the winner of the Ottawa Business Journal’s Employee Choice Award two years in a row, Rewind is an ideal place to work and grow.
Recently securing $10M in financing, Tehama is on the cutting edge of developing tools for the remote workforce. Tehama’s service delivery platform enables organizations to easily onboard, manage and scale a distributed workforce in a secure way. 150 companies are using Tehama. 600,000+ hours of IT services delivered. Zero breaches. Under the leadership of VP Engineering, Jacopo Toccacieli, you’ll be working as part of Tehama’s agile development team and immersed in developing new features for its cloud-based solutions. This will include helping define company-wide API standards, working in React and Angular, and having the ability to work with SQL. You’ll have the option to work remotely or at Tehama’s beautiful offices in the heart of Westboro, steps from some of the best shopping, coffee shops and restaurants in Ottawa.
Mobile developers are in high demand with these companies:
Field Effect monitors cyber threats. Amongst many organizations who trust Field Effort to safeguard their cybersecurity, Canadian Internet Registration Agency (CIRA) teamed up with this scaling Ottawa firm to deploy its new API. Talents with an agile and test-driven approach as well as skills in C/C++, Objective-C, and Java are invaluable in helping build and improve Field Effect’s key security products: Covalence, Cyber Range, and Noble. As one of the top Ottawa employers who scored the highest in the Employee Net Promotor Score Initiative commissioned by Invest Ottawa’s Scale-Up program, Field Effect is appreciated by its employees for its commitments to transparency, trust and openness.
Foko Retail helps retail stores manage tasks. Used by 60+ of the largest names in retail including Nike and Dyson, Foko Retail’s mobile-based task management software is easy to use from operations to visual merchandising. With a growing user base, Foko Retail is looking for mobile developers that are adaptable and passionate about retail and SaaS. While Foko Retail’s culture can be relaxed with office dogs and casual attire, it means business when it comes to its team, customers, and products. A competitive salary and benefits package doesn’thurt either.
Shoebox enables hearing care around the world. It creates, sells, and supports products that help clinicians identify hearing loss. The maker of Shoebox, Clearwater Clinical, hit a huge milestone in 2018 when they entered a strategic partnership with international hearing device company Sivantos. Shoebox lives by the work hard play hard ethos, and offers an array of benefits, team sports, bean bag chairs, and video games at their Glebe Annex office. If you want to be part of a team that does well by doing good, Shoebox is looking for developers with first-hand experience in AWS hosted solutions.
Full stack developers are in high demand with these companies:
BitHeads builds custom software solutions. With an impressive roster of over 500 projects delivered to Fortune 1000 companies, a career with BitHeads is dynamic with so much room to learn and grow. You could be working on projects ranging from designing an interface for a leading forensic ballistics company to building support for a mobile game with 10 million active users— it’s truly different every day. Whether you are a full stack, server-side, or front-end developer, or prefer to validate developed software, BitHeads is in constant need of skilled resources to build games, apps, and backend support.
Field Effect monitors cyber threats. Amongst many organizations who trust Field Effort to safeguard their cybersecurity, Canadian Internet Registration Agency (CIRA) teamed up with this scaling Ottawa firm to deploy its new API. Talents with an agile and test-driven approach as well as skills in C/C++, Objective-C, and Java are invaluable in helping build and improve Field Effect’s key security products: Covalence, Cyber Range, and Noble. As one of the top Ottawa employers who scored the highest in the Employee Net Promotor Score Initiative commissioned by Invest Ottawa’s Scale-Up program, Field Effect is appreciated by its employees for its commitments to transparency, trust and openness.
Rewind Backups provides automated backup services, so businesses don’t lose their hard work.The development team at Rewind is made up of four teams of two to three people. Developers implement, test, document, and maintain back-end systems for high-traffic back-up services, delivering quality code and improving the development and deployment processes using AWS. A day at Rewind on the development team could look like anything from supporting Shopify’s new bulk APIs to creating Rewind-Connect; a wrapper for AWS SSM for connecting to Rewind staging and production systems. As the winner of the Ottawa Business Journal’s Employee Choice Award two years in a row, Rewind is an ideal place to work and grow.
Recently securing$10M in financing, Tehama is on the cutting edge of developing tools for the remote workforce. Tehama’sservice delivery platform enables organizations to easily onboard, manage and scale a distributed workforce in a secure way. 150 companies are using Tehama. 600,000+ hours of IT services delivered. Zero breaches. Under the leadership of VP Engineering, Jacopo Toccacieli, you’ll be working as part of Tehama’s agile development team and immersed in developing new features for its cloud–based solutions. This will include helping define company-wide API standards, working in React and Angular, and having the ability to work with SQL. You’ll have the option to work remotely or at Tehama’sbeautiful offices in the heart of Westboro, steps from some of the best shopping, coffee shops and restaurants in Ottawa.
Data scientists utilize their analytical, statistical, and programming skills to collect, analyze, and interpret large data sets. They then use this information to develop data-driven solutions to difficult business challenges. Data scientists commonly have a bachelor’s degree in statistics, math, computer science, or economics. Data scientists have a wide range of technical competencies including: statistics and machine learning, coding languages, databases, machine learning, and reporting technologies.
Companies currently hiring data scientists
Transforming our data-driven world takes talent, and MindBridge is where it’s happening. This is where you’ll take artificial intelligence to enable and inspire humans to do more and be better. Our people, our customers, and our investors agree: No one else is accomplishing what we’re doing with data-driven AI right now. Learn more and Apply.
Front-End Software Developer
On the most basic level, software engineers write, debug, maintain, and test software that instructs a computer to accomplish certain tasks, such as saving information, performing calculations, etc. A software engineer will convert what needs to happen into one of many programming languages, the most common of which being Java, C++ and Python.
While many are self taught, most software engineers have obtained an undergraduate or graduate degree in computer science or computer engineering. The career of a software engineer typically follows one of two primary paths: they either progress through greater responsibility and ownership over technical architecture and systems or they progress into managing teams of software engineers and help orchestrate larger projects and help develop and mentor more junior engineers.
Companies currently hiring front-end developers
Tehama is enabling the digital workplace of the future. 150 companies are using Tehama. 600,000+ hours of IT services delivered. Zero breaches. The company’s head office is in the heart of the highly desirable Westboro neighborhood of Ottawa where you have your pick of the best of Ottawa’s cafes, restaurants and shops. Prefer to work from home? Tehama offers remote working options and flexible core hours. Join a team of the best and brightest and enjoy competitive salaries, benefits and a commitment to YOUR long-term success. Learn more and Apply.
Spartan Bioscience aspires to unleash the power of DNA testing for everyone. Like the Spartan warriors of Ancient Greece, our smart, hard-working, and honorable team members get things done. Learn 10 reasons for joining Spartan and apply today.