Long before Michelle Cavallo had to explain data platforms, cloud systems, or artificial intelligence, she had to watch a pool. Her first listed job was with the City of Burnaby, where she spent seven years as a lifeguard and swimming instructor. The work is immediate: read the room, communicate clearly, keep track of moving bodies, and notice trouble early. Years later, those same verbs would follow her into student recruitment, campus events, and finally the marketing office of a technology consultancy.
Cavallo is now Chief Marketing Officer at Cavallo Technologies, a Burnaby-rooted firm working across data engineering, analytics, AI, and cloud development. She has held the role since July 2018. The company’s technical vocabulary is dense by necessity. Databricks, Azure, machine learning operations, data pipelines, governance - each term opens into another system of choices. Her job sits where that density meets a customer, a colleague, or a community that needs to understand why any of it matters.
Her path into that role did not begin with code. It began with coordination. After the pool, Cavallo worked in student recruitment at the British Columbia Institute of Technology. She later spent eight years there as a meeting and events coordinator. The titles sound distant from enterprise technology, but the operating problem is familiar: many people arrive with different needs, expertise, and expectations. Somebody has to turn the moving parts into one intelligible experience.
“We’re thrilled to have you ‘permanently’ on our team! You’ve been such a valuable member.”Michelle Cavallo welcoming a colleague’s move from intern to data analyst
01 / The through-lineA room is a system
Event work is a blunt teacher. A sign points the right way or it does not. A speaker starts on time or leaves an audience waiting. Registration, food, lighting, and conversation combine into a judgment that no single checklist can control. Marketing in a technical firm has the same structure. A website, a customer briefing, a social post, and a team event may belong to different calendars, but the audience experiences one company.
A surviving BCIT procedure from 2014 makes that invisible labor unusually concrete. Requests for external use of the institution’s Townsquare rooms were routed to Cavallo in the events department. One week before a booking, reception was expected to notify security, custodial staff, catering, and the external-events team so conflicts and overlooked details could be caught. It reads like mundane administration. It is also a small map of operational trust: the right information, reaching the right people, early enough to be useful.
That kind of work changes how a person sees communication. A message is not complete because it was sent. It is complete when the recipient can act on it. The distinction matters in enterprise technology, where sales, engineering, security, and customer teams often carry different definitions of urgency. A polished phrase cannot rescue a broken handoff. Good marketing leadership has to care about both.
Cavallo’s education reinforces that combination of message and mechanics. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Professional Communication from Royal Roads University and completed credentials in marketing management and event management at BCIT. She also holds a Diploma in General Studies from Capilano University. It is a practical stack: learn to shape an argument, understand a market, and make the actual gathering work.
The languages are Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Italian. Fluency levels vary on professional profiles, and multilingualism alone does not explain a communications career. Still, the list fits the broader pattern. Cavallo’s work has repeatedly required an awareness that the same idea does not land the same way for every person. Translation begins before words are changed. It begins by noticing the listener.
Lifeguard and swimming instructor, City of Burnaby
Student recruitment liaison, BCIT
Meeting and events coordinator, BCIT
Chief Marketing Officer, Cavallo Technologies
02 / TranslationThe human layer of the stack
Cavallo Technologies describes her remit through communication, branding, social media, and marketing. Those categories can sound decorative when separated from the company’s engineering. In practice, they are connective tissue. A consultancy cannot simply possess technical expertise. It has to make that expertise visible, credible, and useful to people who were not in the room when the system was built.
That means resisting the easy refuge of jargon. Technical language can be precise among specialists and opaque everywhere else. The marketer’s challenge is not to sand away the complexity until every service sounds identical. It is to preserve the consequential detail while changing the angle of approach: what decision becomes easier, what work becomes safer, what bottleneck disappears, what team can finally move?
Her public interactions show the smaller scale of that same work. When a colleague earned a Databricks professional certification, Cavallo responded with a brief congratulations: “This is such exciting work!” When intern Suma Anumolu moved into a full-time data analyst role, Cavallo welcomed her as a permanent and valuable member of the team. Neither comment is a grand leadership manifesto. That is why they matter. Culture accumulates through repeated acts of attention.
A company in a credential-heavy industry has plenty of opportunities to broadcast badges. Cavallo’s instinct, at least in these public moments, is to put the person beside the credential. The certification represents difficult work. The new title represents a relationship becoming durable. Marketing is often described as attention capture; here it acts as attention placement.
03 / CommunityGood intentions need logistics
Cavallo’s community work has a notably operational shape. Since September 2020, she has listed volunteer responsibility for a bi-weekly hot-lunch program at Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic School. The duties include purchasing, cooking, delivery, and reports managed through lunch-ordering software. It is humble infrastructure, the sort that becomes visible mainly when it fails.
The detail adds texture to the polished C-suite title. Community is not only a value written into corporate copy. Sometimes it is a recurring deadline, quantities to calculate, food to move, and a report to close. The work is ordinary and exacting. It also resembles the best kind of operations: build a repeatable system so that other people can have a good day without needing to understand everything behind it.
“We’re so happy to announce this initiative.”Michelle Cavallo on the scholarship for women in technology
That initiative is the Cavallo Technologies Graduate Scholarship for Women in Tech in memory of Barb MacLean at Simon Fraser University. Established in 2025, it supports incoming students pursuing a Master’s in Professional Computer Science who identify as women and show academic excellence and community impact. The terms call for at least one entrance scholarship each year, valued at a minimum of $5,000.
When the scholarship was publicly announced in March 2026, Cavallo shared the news and expressed hope that it would continue progress in lifting women in technology. The mechanism is as important as the message. A recurring award creates a budget, a selection process, and an annual opening for someone to enter a field where access remains uneven. Values become more durable when they acquire paperwork.
04 / The useful lessonCoherence is an executive job
It would be easy to turn Cavallo’s career into a story about reinvention: lifeguard becomes events professional becomes technology CMO. The more useful reading is continuity. The settings changed. The core work stayed remarkably stable. Pay attention. Coordinate people and details. Create clarity. Make it easier for someone else to participate.
Those skills are easy to underestimate because they rarely produce a single dramatic artifact. They show up in fewer dropped handoffs, better questions, a room that feels prepared, and a colleague who knows her work was seen. In a data consultancy, they also show up in whether a prospective customer can connect a sophisticated platform to an actual business decision.
For technical founders and operators, there is something stealable here. Treat marketing as a feedback system, not a finishing coat. Bring the people responsible for language close to the people building the service. Ask what the audience needs to decide, not simply what the company wants to announce. Then examine every gathering - digital or physical - as part of the product experience.
Cavallo’s public footprint is measured. It consists less of sweeping pronouncements than a trail of roles, practical credentials, colleague congratulations, and community commitments. Together, they make a coherent argument. Technology businesses are built from systems, but they are experienced through people. Someone has to tend that human layer with the same care engineers bring to the stack.
The pool, the campus event, the lunch program, the scholarship, and the cloud consultancy all ask a version of the same question: can a person enter this system and find a clear way through? Michelle Cavallo has spent her career working on the answer.