Imran Kasam

Imran Kasam grew up in Coral Springs and Coconut Creek, in South Florida. In June 2002, nine months after September 11, he walked into the Military Entrance Processing Station in Miami and enlisted in the Marine Corps.

The war in Afghanistan had begun the previous October. The argument for Iraq was being made in public, and the invasion would come in March. A recruit who enlisted that summer entered a Corps that was already at war and about to get a second one.

Recruit training took about three months. Then came Marine Combat Training, about a month, and then the schoolhouse. The Marine Corps sends its 2651s to Goodfellow Air Force Base, in San Angelo, Texas, for the Tactical SIGINT Operators Course. The pipeline ran most of a year, and he reached the fleet in the middle of 2003.

His specialty was 2651, special intelligence system administrator and communicator. He was assigned to the 4th Special Security Communications Team, the team that serves the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing at Miramar.

A team is about fifteen Marines. Its job is the wing commander's classified communications: the special intelligence and special security office record traffic, the cryptographic guard, and the terminal equipment inside the wing's Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. The team receives, processes and stows the material, keeps the circuits and the equipment, and maintains a ground-mobile tactical terminal it can deploy. The Marines who do it are communications intelligence specialists, and they work under the wing's G-2.

The wing itself is the aviation element of I Marine Expeditionary Force. In the fall of 2002 it began moving to Kuwait for the invasion of Iraq — 435 aircraft and more than 15,000 personnel, the first time the entire wing had deployed since the Gulf War. By the time he reached the wing, the invasion was over and the rotations had begun.

He deployed to Iraq twice between 2003 and 2007. On one tour he ran the team's fixed terminal at the wing's main base. On the other he went forward with elements of the wing and set up the tactical terminal where they operated. Both are the team's mission; a 2651 does whichever the wing needs.

He made sergeant and served as noncommissioned officer in charge of a team of five Marines. He was decorated for his service, though the record does not hold the citations. He left the Corps in June 2007, after five years and one month.

He went back to South Florida and co-owned an AT&T wireless retail store. Then he started at a helpdesk.

From there the record is a man who kept learning. Helpdesk technician, then software developer, then engineering manager, then senior director of customer success. At eXp Realty he was an enterprise architect and engineering manager, and he led the team that built the platform architecture behind the company's growth from 3,000 agents to 60,000 — a 20x expansion that took the company from penny stock to a Nasdaq listing. The work won the Mendix World 2019 Award for Digital Transformation.

At Avertra Corp. he was global vice president of the low-code practice, leading a 90-person organization across engineering, quality assurance, DevOps, customer success and sales. He carried a $10–15 million profit-and-loss responsibility and delivered cloud-native systems for healthcare, finance and public-sector clients on three continents. At Inside Real Estate he architected a multi-tenant platform on AWS serverless services.

He became an AWS Certified Solutions Architect and a Mendix expert developer, and he finished a bachelor's degree in business management at Western Governors University in 2023.

He is now director of product management for platform at Constellation1, where he leads platform and artificial intelligence product strategy for residential real estate. He also runs his own consulting practice.

Around 2007 he taught a hundred Ismaili children in Fort Lauderdale to march in formation for the Golden Jubilee. He is one of the two administrators of the Signal group where this record is kept, under the handle Dr. Gonzo.

He lives in Houston.