Brandon Leach

• Led a team of up to 5 database administrators, managing on-premises and cloud database infrastructure (SQL Server, Snowflake, Azure SQL Database) for seamless operations.
  
  • Defining team goals and roadmaps.
  • Prioritizing tasks and projects and delegating to team members.
  • Mentored database administrators, coaching team members to meet professional development goals and fostering a culture of accountability and operational excellence.
  • Collaborated with HR to successfully hire a new senior DBA, enhancing the team's expertise and capabilities.
• Managed the teams implementation of Data Dog for monitoring, including the implementation of custom metrics, building of custom dashboards, and integration with our inventory tracking system to improve overall visibility into the health of the environment.
• Designed an automated historical control plane system to track database inventory for both on-prem and cloud environments, including ownership, notifications, approvers, current state, and growth rates.
• Spearheaded cross-functional projects, coordinating resources and managing timelines to achieve project goals while fostering strong inter-departmental relationships through synchronization meetings.
• Guided the team in Snowflake security hardening, mentoring direct reports on leadership and project management skills as we went.
• Spearheaded and coordinated major cross-team modernization efforts including hardware upgrades and moving from SQL Server 2016 to 2022 resulting in a 60% increase in overall performance of our systems.
• Designed a Business Continuity strategy for SQL Server 2022 using availability groups, ensuring compliance with regulations and achieving a 99.5% SLA by coordinating with Legal, Compliance, Windows, Storage, Network, and Datacenter teams.
• Developed and executed a new backup strategy, evaluating both on-prem and cloud options, resulting in an 80% decrease in our backup storage footprint and 75% time reduction for backup and restore operations.
• Conducted health checks and developed a remediation strategy, implementing
  best practices that improved overall monitoring and increased performance by
  30%.

• Served as a Senior DBA/Database Infrastructure Architect at Citadel, responsible for designing and building a control plane to automate management and provide self-service/reporting capabilities in a data-driven and state-aware approach.
• Oversee and manage 400 SQL Server instances, with many processing upwards of 400k transactions per second in a 24/7/365 environment.
• Define and implement strategies to optimize index management, statistics, and security, resulting in improved performance and data integrity.
• Successfully implemented a new high availability/disaster recovery (HA/DR) topology using availability groups, reducing complexity and ensuring reliable automated failover. This included designing a new OU in Active Directory with appropriate permissions for better cluster management and automating IP address management via custom REST services.
• Develop and maintain automation scripts and modules in PowerShell, streamlining routine tasks and improving efficiency.
• Provide training and coaching to team members, sharing expertise and promoting professional growth.
• Built a comprehensive control plane to centralize and streamline data infrastructure management, improving operational efficiency and reducing manual effort.
• Design and implement telemetry and configuration systems to capture and store data about current configurations and desired states, enabling proactive monitoring and maintenance.
• Develop integrations between the control plane and other systems, including SCCM, ServiceNow, Active Directory, and VMware, ensuring seamless data flow and efficient workflows.
• Create automated build and patching processes to provision new systems and ensure they are up to date with the latest software versions.
• Worked to remove DBAs from security permission workflows, streamlining processes and improving security controls.
• Serve as a fourth-tier on-call support and subject matter expert for SQL Server, providing timely and effective resolution to critical issues.
• Actively participated in the SQL Server 2022 Early Adoption Program, providing valuable feedback and contributing to feature requests for the upcoming release.

• Oversaw the day-to-day operations of a six petabyte financial market data and research models database infrastructure, ensuring smooth functioning and high availability.
• Led a team of four database administrators, providing coaching, skill training, and feedback to foster professional growth and development.
• Monitored ticket queues in ServiceNow, ensuring timely resolution of issues and adherence to service level agreements.
• Acted as third-tier support for database infrastructure, providing 24/7/365 on-call support to address critical incidents and minimize downtime.
• Collaborated with the team to identify and implement new processes and workflows, leveraging PowerShell and T-SQL automation to improve the resiliency of the environment.
• Managed on-call schedules and rotations, ensuring proper coverage and availability of support at all times.
• Led efforts around quarterly and semi-annual compliance and audit requirements, ensuring adherence to regulatory standards.
• Oversaw a large-scale migration project, successfully migrating hundreds of SQL Server 2012 instances to 2016 and 2017, minimizing disruption and ensuring data integrity.
• Participated in change management processes, proactively identifying potential conflicts and coordinating work with other teams in platform operations.
• Initiated and oversaw the revamping of monitoring and alerting systems, identifying gaps, eliminating duplication, and optimizing thresholds to reduce unnecessary notifications and improve incident response.
• Designed and implemented a new monitoring process for the jabber chat environment, ensuring early detection of issues that could impact legal compliance.
• Mentored the team in developing automation skills, collaborating on automated fixes for cloning issues, resulting in significant time savings for the team.

• Led high-profile initiatives as the project lead, demonstrating expertise in SQL Server and VMware in the areas of performance, scalability, high availability, and disaster recovery.
• Successfully replaced an outdated SQL Server 2008r2 FCI with distributed availability groups, ensuring improved performance and reliability.
• Designed and presented architecture options to meet SLAs, effectively communicating complex technical concepts to management.
• Developed and documented standard operating procedures for system build-out and management, ensuring consistency and efficiency.
• Automated deployment processes for nodes and replicas, streamlining the setup and configuration of database servers.
• Implemented custom monitoring solutions to proactively identify and address availability group issues, enhancing system stability.
• Scripted and executed the migration of over 100 database servers from SQL Server 2005 and up to SQL Server 2016, ensuring a seamless transition and minimal downtime.
• Built custom monitoring tools to address monitoring gaps related to mount points and free space, providing valuable insights to system engineering teams.
• Acted as a liaison between multiple related projects, facilitating collaboration and ensuring alignment of objectives.
• Provided training to team members on automating tasks using PowerShell, enhancing productivity and efficiency.
• Led the data masking initiative in its early stages, contributing to data security and compliance efforts.

• Designed, secured, and maintained a highly available SQL Server infrastructure with approximately 50 instances and VLDBs with tables measuring in terabytes, supporting tens of thousands of transactions per second in a 24/7 environment.
• Collaborated with product development teams, providing custom scripts for data fixes and offering expertise in schema design and stored procedures.
• Led the planning and execution of infrastructure upgrades from SQL Server 2012 to 2016, including the migration to distributed availability groups, resulting in improved performance and reliability.
• Played a key role in building new data centers globally, both on-premises and in the cloud, utilizing AWS technologies.
• Developed and implemented a migration plan for user batches as part of the Priority One Plans and Pricing project, generating millions of additional revenue for the company and receiving the Trailblazer Award for outstanding contributions.
• Implemented a new monitoring solution using SentryOne, enhancing the ability to troubleshoot and resolve issues using wait stats, system DMVs, error logs, and historical performance data.
• Managed and maintained database backups, ensuring data integrity and defined a comprehensive backup strategy.
• Analyzed and planned for future capacity needs, proactively addressing potential scalability challenges.
• Participated in an on-call rotation, providing timely support and resolution for critical database issues.
• Acted as a subject matter expert for VMWare, providing guidance and support to the team.
• Performed maintenance and management of Pure Storage arrays, ensuring optimal performance and reliability.

• Managed and maintained hundreds of SQL Server instances, including both OLTP and data warehouse databases, as the sole Database Administrator at Tufts Health Plan - Public Plans (Network Health) from March 2012 to January 2015.
• Resolved database-related issues across various business units, ensuring smooth operations and minimizing downtime.
• Provided 24/7/365 on-call support as the sole DBA, promptly addressing any critical database issues and ensuring continuous availability.
• Collaborated with a key application vendor to optimize the loading of claims, resulting in a significant improvement in efficiency and processing time.
• Worked closely with external auditors to ensure compliance with HIPAA regulations, developing and generating reports to meet their specific requirements.
• Actively participated in the change management board, assessing and mitigating risks associated with database changes to maintain system stability and data integrity.
• Maintained clear and concise documentation of database configurations, procedures, and troubleshooting steps, facilitating knowledge transfer and ensuring consistent practices.
• Diligently proofread all reports and documentation, ensuring accuracy and compliance with industry standards.

Training given by Paul Randal who led the SQL Server Storage Team at Microsoft.  Training covered the internals of the storage engine and advanced performance tuning/troubleshooting

High school and vocational studies.  Earned Diploma and Certificate in Web Development and Programming