Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning Engineer

Lightspeed Commerce appoints technology industry veteran Rupal Hollenbeck to Board of Directors. Ms. Hollenbeck brings 30 years of global technology and go-to-market leadership experience to help advance Lightspeed's strategy and profitable growth. Lightspeed Commerce Inc., the unified omnichannel platform powering ambitious retail, golf, and hospitality businesses in over 100 countries, announced the appointment of Rupal Hollenbeck to its Board of Directors, effective October 1, 2026. "I'm delighted to join the Lightspeed Board at such an exciting time in the Company's journey," said Rupal Hollenbeck. "Lightspeed has built a differentiated platform for ambitious independent businesses around the world, and I look forward to drawing upon my global technology track record and go-to-market expertise to help the Company realize its full potential, and create long-term value for its shareholders." Hollenbeck is a technology industry leader with 30 years of experience across hardware, software, and services, with a track record of building and transforming brands and businesses across global and local markets. Hollenbeck currently serves as the President and Chief Business Officer of NextSilicon, a leader in next-generation computing solutions for AI and high-performance computing. Prior, Hollenbeck served as President and Chief Commercial Officer of Check Point Software Technologies, where she led global go-to-market operations. She has also served as Chief Marketing Officer at Cerebras Systems and Oracle, and held senior sales, marketing, and general management roles at Intel, including leadership positions in the data center business and across the Asia-Pacific region. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of Cequence Security, a privately owned enterprise software security company. "Rupal's combination of operating leadership, commercial expertise, and global perspective will be an invaluable addition to our Board," said Manon Brouillette, Executive Chair of Lightspeed's Board. "Her experience scaling technology businesses and building high-performing, global go-to-market organizations sets her up extremely well to add immediate value to Lightspeed as we execute our strategy and continue to deliver profitable growth for our shareholders." Simultaneously, Lightspeed announced that Nathalie Gaveau will step down from the Company's Board of Directors, effective September 30, 2026. Lightspeed thanks Gaveau for her valuable contributions and dedicated service to the Board.

News and Insights Lynked Lightspeed X-Series integration: loyalty that drives customer retention. Customer loyalty has evolved far beyond rewarding purchases. Today's retailers need to understand what keeps customers coming back, which promotions influence buying behaviour and where opportunities exist to increase customer lifetime value. Integrated with Lightspeed X-Series, Lynked gives retailers that visibility. Every purchase contributes to a richer understanding of customer behaviour, helping businesses measure customer retention, identify purchasing trends and build loyalty campaigns that deliver measurable commercial results. Retailers using Lynked are already seeing what this looks like in practice. Turn customer retention into A measurable KPI. Every retailer wants customers to return, but without the right insight it's difficult to understand whether a loyalty programme is genuinely influencing behaviour. Integrated with Lightspeed X-Series, Lynked tracks every customer interaction automatically, allowing retailers to measure repeat visits, purchase frequency and long-term customer engagement from a single dashboard. Repeat customer rates measure the percentage of customers who return to make another purchase, making them one of the clearest indicators of customer loyalty and long-term engagement. Rates reached as high as 85.5%, while another retail network achieved 80.9%. Customer loyalty remained consistently strong, with 74.4% of registered customers returning to shop again and averaging more than nine visits each. These insights allow businesses to move beyond simply counting loyalty members. Instead, retailers can identify which customers are becoming regular visitors, recognise those beginning to disengage and make informed decisions to strengthen long-term retention. Loyalty rewards that deliver results. Reward engagement is one of the clearest indicators of whether a loyalty programme is influencing customer behaviour. Because Lynked is fully integrated with Lightspeed X-Series, points, digital vouchers and stamp rewards are issued automatically at the point of sale and stored within the customer's app, creating a seamless experience from purchase through to redemption. Customer engagement reflected this. One retail network achieved a voucher redemption rate of 76.5%, while another maintained a redemption rate of 65.4% across a large multi-site estate. Together, customers redeemed almost 100,000 vouchers during the reporting period. Lynked gives retailers complete visibility over reward performance, making it easy to understand which campaigns encourage repeat visits and which incentives generate the strongest customer engagement. With automated push notifications reminding customers about available rewards, businesses can encourage redemption without creating additional work for store teams. Understand your most valuable customers. Not every loyal customer behaves the same way. Some customers visit frequently with smaller basket values. Others make fewer purchases but contribute significantly more revenue over time. Understanding the difference allows retailers to communicate more effectively and build campaigns around real customer behaviour rather than assumptions. Through integrated buying data, Lynked automatically builds detailed customer profiles that highlight purchasing frequency, visit history and spending patterns. This makes it easy to identify loyal regulars, recognise high-value customers and create targeted campaigns based on how customers actually shop. Instead of sending every promotion to every loyalty member, retailers can personalise offers using meaningful customer insight. Build smarter promotions using buying behaviour. Blanket promotions often reward customers who were already planning to buy. Integrated buying data makes it possible to take a much more targeted approach. Using Lynked's Lightspeed X-Series integration, retailers gain clear visibility into recurring purchasing behaviour. Using Lynked's Lightspeed X-Series integration, retailers gain clear visibility into recurring purchasing behaviour. Recurring purchase products consistently delivered the strongest performance, helping retailers identify where targeted loyalty campaigns can have the greatest commercial impact. Retailers can then create SKU-level promotions, member pricing, digital stamp cards and targeted vouchers directly through Lynked, all integrated with Lightspeed X-Series. Every campaign is measurable, allowing businesses to understand exactly how promotions influence customer behaviour and refine future campaigns using real purchasing data rather than guesswork. Measure growth beyond customer sign-ups. Acquiring loyalty members is only the first step. The real value lies in turning those members into repeat customers. Using Lynked's integrated reporting, retailers can see how customer behaviour evolves over time. One retail network saw returning customers grow from just 11.2% of active customers during launch to 96.3% as the programme matured, demonstrating how loyalty shifted from acquiring new members to encouraging repeat purchasing. A second established retail network maintained a returning customer base of almost 90%, proving that engagement can be sustained long after launch. These insights help retailers understand whether campaigns are creating lasting customer relationships rather than simply generating short-term transactions. Connect your loyalty programme across every sales channel. Today's customers don't only shop in-store. Many expect to browse, purchase and engage with your business across both physical locations and your online store. Without an integrated loyalty programme, these journeys are often disconnected, making it difficult to understand true customer value. Lynked integrates with leading eCommerce platforms, allowing retailers to connect their online store with their in-store loyalty programme. Customers earn and redeem rewards seamlessly across every channel, while businesses gain a single view of customer behaviour regardless of where purchases take place. The commercial impact is clear. Customers shopping both online and in-store generated more than six times the revenue and visited over four times more frequently than customers using a single sales channel. By combining in-store and online buying data, retailers can build more personalised campaigns, better understand customer lifetime value and deliver a consistent loyalty experience across every touchpoint. To see the full range of POS, eCommerce and technology partners that integrate with Lynked, visit its Integrations page. Turn customer insight into long-term growth. Every retailer has access to transaction data. What they don't always have is visibility into the customer behaviour behind it. That's exactly what Lynked delivers. Integrated with Lightspeed X-Series, Lynked combines loyalty, customer insights and real-time reporting to help retailers understand buying behaviour, measure campaign performance and make more informed commercial decisions. Combined with Lynked's growing range of POS, eCommerce and technology integrations, retailers can create a connected loyalty experience that grows alongside their business. If you're looking to get more from your Lightspeed X-Series POS, book a demo with Lynked to see how integrated loyalty can help your business grow.

Cursor's Adam Ward: kill the "funnel of doom" and go name the ten people you want. Traditional hiring funnels are failing, prompting leaders to identify and pursue specific talent directly, prioritize work-life balance for retention, and leverage social reach over resumes for impactful hires. By Ray with my favorite human, Benjamin Scott. News Brief, Aug 12, 2026 The way you find, keep, and grow product talent shifted this year, and not in one clean direction. A top recruiter is telling founders to throw out the funnel. A London house is betting founders build better when they sleep. A VC just hired a creator out of an Instagram DM. Different moves, one thread: the old scripts for building a team stopped working. Let me catch you up. The deep cut. * Talent chases a person, not a posting. Cursor's Adam Ward calls the inbound funnel the "funnel of doom" and works backward from named people. * Balance is a retention strategy, not a perk. Lift House screens founders for a hobby and fitness to keep them from burning out and leaving. * Reach beats resume for finding people. Lightspeed hired Claire Zau off a DM because 250,000 followers signal a live audience. The funnel is where good hires go to die. Adam Ward, head of talent at Cursor, calls the standard inbound pipeline the "funnel of doom". You post a role, sort a pile of applicants, and settle for the best of who showed up. That is a filter for people who were available, not people who were great. His fix is a three-step loop: scope the role tightly, map the specific humans who could do it, then pursue them without giving up. It flips the work. Instead of screening a crowd, you name the ten people you actually want and go earn them. That takes more time up front and fewer, sharper conversations. For a lead, it means your recruiter's job is research and outreach, not inbox triage. Build so people stay, not so they crack. Six founders in East London built Lift House as the anti-San Francisco hacker house. No 72-hour sprints, no Demo Day countdown. They journal on Sundays, play volleyball on Tuesdays, and to even get in you have to show a hobby outside your company and an interest in fitness. Rowan Aldean's line: "build something that lasts, not necessarily burn out chasing a flash." Treat that as a hiring bar, not a wellness poster. They screen for a life outside work because a person with one lasts longer. John Cutler makes the operating version of this point: the best teams run on "a strong bias for action" and steady tempo, not heroics. A team sprinting flat out is a team you will be backfilling in six months. The DM is the new resume. Lightspeed hired Claire Zau, a creator with over 250,000 Instagram followers, after a direct message. The firm wanted her reach into founders and tech-curious people, and something else: real feedback. Zau said cutting checks on AI felt easy inside the Valley bubble, then she posted about it and learned Gen Z was "quite anti-AI." Call it humbling. It is also a signal you cannot get from a portfolio. The catch is you are hiring an audience, and audiences move. But the lesson holds for your own team. Where a candidate has traction, in a community, a repo, a following, tells you things a resume hides. The pull you can't build with money. Ward's whole model rests on a company being worth chasing. Lift House keeps people by giving them a life. Lightspeed built a media presence so founders come to them. All three are working the same lever: be the place talent wants to be, then the recruiting gets easier. Torres shows the flip side, retention through growth. After breaking her ankle, Teresa Torres went from using ChatGPT "as Google" to shipping a live AI product in three weeks. People stay where they are learning fast. If your team has stalled, that is a leaving risk, whether or not anyone has said it out loud. Three questions for your team. * For your next open role, can your recruiter name the ten specific people they want, or are they still sorting inbound? If it is inbound, you are fishing in the funnel of doom. * What in your team's week signals that a life outside work is expected, not tolerated? If the honest answer is nothing, you are training people to leave. * Where would you spot a strong candidate's real traction, and are you looking there, or only at resumes?