About SZTek

Founder

Zafer Khan

Founder, SZTek Inc.

Zafer Khan has spent more than twenty years in technology. He comes from a Karachi family of soldiers and poets shaped by generations of migration, and he added three of his own. He left home for the Gulf, then the United States, and then Canada, and each time he started over from the bottom in a place that did not yet know his work.

In Canada he rebuilt that work one step at a time. Over the past decade and five roles at JELD-WEN, a global door and window manufacturer, he rose from plant-level IT support in Toronto to Manager, IT Business Operations for Canada, the role he still holds today, accountable for IT operations across every JELD-WEN facility in the country. He founded SZTek to bring that same enterprise discipline to smaller companies and build AI tools they can actually use.

A decade of documented performance reviews records, among much else, that he:

• built Canada's first centralized IT asset management system, its first national IT procurement process, and its first annual IT budget, institutions that had never existed there before;
• kept JELD-WEN's national workforce running through COVID-19, sourcing and building laptops in a matter of days during the global shortage;
• had solutions he designed in Canada adopted for rollout across JELD-WEN's United States operations;
• held financial accountability for a Canadian business generating over $350 million a year, which went on to significantly exceed its revenue and profit targets;
• was voted an employee MVP five times, with a zero-safety-incident record across his teams.

He is a very strategic thinker and looks for every opportunity to make the operations more productive and cost effective.

His manager, in a performance review

He knows what it is to start over and to be underestimated, and it shapes how he builds. The best technology, he believes, gets out of the way and makes a hard thing feel simple for the person on the other side. That is the standard he holds SZTek to.