Solmaz Shahalizadeh is an executive, investor and advisor in technology and data space. She is a founding partner of Backbone Angels., an angel investing collective focused on funding more diverse and women-founded businesses making change.
Most recently as the Vice President and Head of Data at Shopify, Solmaz built the company’s entire portfolio of data and machine learning, overseeing a team of over 500 data scientists, engineers, designers and product managers who help leverage data to ensure Shopify merchants get the most from the company's scale. In her role at Shopify, played a critical role in their successful IPO, implemented and scaled the company’s machine-learning products, overseeing data science, data platform and merchant facing analytical products groups.
Solmaz is the winner of the Globe and Mail’s Report on Business Best Executive award, recognizing her leadership and work in the Technology field. In 2021, Solmaz was also recognized for her leadership and work in the technology field, and named a recipient of the Forty Under 40 by the Ottawa Business Journal.
Before her time with Shopify, Solmaz had an extensive career as a data scientist, working as an analyst at Morgan Stanley and McGill University, the latter of which she contributed to cancer research, using AI methods to build predictors of outcome for breast cancer.

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