Israel Felix started his professional life in 1994 at Nortel Networks, debugging software for a company that was, at the time, one of the most powerful telecommunications firms on earth. Five years later, he moved to Cisco Systems, where he eventually managed a global test team responsible for the Catalyst product line - the switching infrastructure running inside thousands of enterprise networks worldwide. He grew that team's automation, regression, and lab operations. He owned the quality of something genuinely critical. Then, in 2015, he left and started CBQA Solutions.
That decision tells you more about Felix than any resume line. Most engineers with his seniority stay. The comp is good, the perks are reasonable, and the enterprise problems are hard enough to stay interesting. Felix looked at what he'd built inside other people's organizations and decided the next build would be his own. CBQA Solutions was that build.
What CBQA Actually Does
The name stands for Cloud, Business, Quality, and Automation - a deliberately broad mandate for a firm that has stayed disciplined about its actual differentiator: software testing and automation done at enterprise scale. CBQA offers three core lines: business strategy consulting that goes from concept to execution with measurable outcomes, software project delivery (development, DevOps, security, and QA automation), and staff augmentation that places vetted engineering and QA talent inside client organizations.
The client list reads like a survey of industries that cannot afford software failures: Bio-Rad in life sciences, where a bad build in lab diagnostics has consequences beyond a bad quarter. Honda and Toyota in automotive, where quality processes are practically a religion. iRhythm in cardiac health monitoring - software bugs in that context are literally a matter of life. And United Airlines, an organization running operations where failures cascade instantly across every airport in its network. Felix did not build a firm for startups iterating fast and breaking things. He built one for organizations where breaking things is not an option.
The Career Behind the Company
The Cisco years gave Felix something unusual: operational fluency at genuine scale. Managing a global test team is not a technical role. It's a coordination role - you're aligning automation engineers across time zones, managing regression suites that span thousands of test cases, and making judgment calls about when a product is actually ready to ship. That combination of technical depth and operational breadth is what CBQA sells to its clients.
Between Cisco and founding CBQA, Felix spent time at Veeva Systems as Sr. Automation Manager. Veeva, which builds cloud software for the life sciences industry, was growing fast when Felix joined. He inherited an automation team of three engineers and grew it to sixteen. That trajectory - small team, specific mission, dramatic expansion - would later look like a rehearsal for what he'd build at CBQA.
His education from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly SLO) grounded him in Electronic Engineering. Cal Poly's "learn by doing" philosophy is practically a cliche about the school, but it's a cliche because it's accurate - the engineering program runs heavy on lab work and real systems, not theory on whiteboards. For someone who would spend three decades working on the gap between how software is supposed to work and how it actually behaves, that background was the right one.
Building Across Borders
CBQA Solutions operates out of Pleasanton, California, but Felix built the company as a cross-border operation from early on. The firm has additional operations in Mexico - with a Leon, Guanajuato office and a Mexican phone line (+52 477 104-3350) - and Colombia. For a QA and automation firm, this is a strategic advantage: the talent pool for skilled QA engineers in Latin America is deep, and the time zone overlap with California makes collaboration practical. Felix's roots in that cross-border professional world are reflected in his membership in LBAN - the Latino Business Action Network - as part of Cohort 16.
"He took a three-person automation team at Veeva and turned it into sixteen - then decided the next team he'd build would be his own."
The Auditate Chapter
In May 2020, while running CBQA, Felix co-founded a second company: Auditate. The platform addresses fixed asset management and auditing - the unglamorous but genuinely complex problem of tracking physical assets across large organizations. It's an area where manual processes are still common and software solutions are often clunky. Felix took the CTO seat at Auditate, which means he was simultaneously the operational CEO of an 80-person firm and the technical lead on an early-stage startup. That's a particular kind of endurance test.
Auditate reflects a pattern in how Felix thinks about software problems: he looks for places where industries have accepted bad tools because no one credible has bothered to build better ones. QA automation was like that for many enterprises when he started CBQA. Fixed asset management is like that now for many mid-to-large organizations still running on spreadsheets and legacy systems.
The AI and Automation Frontier
CBQA's keyword list - QA, cybersecurity, software development, automation frameworks, AI, artificial intelligence, software automation, data analytics, cloud migrations, web automation, networking automation, mobile automation, Industry 4.0, cloud-based software, AWS, QA automation - is not marketing filler. It maps to the actual technology stack Felix and his team deploy. The firm works across Playwright, Selenium, Appium, AWS services (S3, Lambda, Step Functions, Glue, Redshift, Athena), Salesforce (Sales Cloud, Financial Services Cloud, Field Service, Live Agent), MuleSoft Anypoint Platform, Python, JavaScript, and .NET.
The AI layer is increasingly central. As testing frameworks become smarter - able to self-heal when UI changes break fragile selectors, able to generate test cases from specifications, able to analyze production logs for anomaly patterns - CBQA is positioned at the intersection of automation expertise and AI tooling. That's the frontier Felix is building toward: intelligent quality assurance that scales with software complexity rather than falling behind it.
Pleasanton, California
CBQA's Pleasanton headquarters (4847 Hopyard Road) places it in the heart of the East Bay tech corridor - close enough to Silicon Valley's talent and client networks, far enough from San Francisco's cost structure to run efficiently. For a 80-person professional services firm, location economics matter. Pleasanton is home to the offices of companies like Workday and Ellie Mae, and sits inside the Tri-Valley area that has quietly become a serious tech hub in its own right.
Felix's LinkedIn presence - his handle is simply "ifelix," with characteristic efficiency - shows consistent engagement with the projects his team is working on: United Airlines integrations, Salesforce builds, pharmacovigilance and patient safety platforms. He posts about the work, not about himself. For a founder who came up through technical management rather than venture-backed startup culture, that orientation toward the craft rather than the narrative is consistent.