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Summary

Seasoned Cloud Professional with nearly 15 years experience building, supporting, and improving complex systems in a number of industries including Cloud Hosting, Finance, Networking, and IoT.  I have a passion for ethical technology, open source, and collaborative teams.  I focus on tools and practices that improve automation, observability, and design simplicity to empower developers of all kinds.

I am seeking positions that allow me to learn and grow alongside other technologists to build better teams, companies, and technology.

Qualifications

  • Built and led teams focused on developer empowerment, standardization, and sound infrastructure practices.
  • Led Kubernetes adoption efforts, leading to rollout company wide.
  • Led SOC 2 Type 2 certification efforts to success, maintaining certification and compliance programs year over year. 
  • Responsible for cloud cost optimization, security, and architecture for a variety of fast moving companies.
  • Lead architect for diverse cloud deployments including distributed graph databases, Java web applications, and IoT platforms.
  • Created IaaS CI pipelines for tech stacks using a mix of tools for IoT, Finance, and Big Data Platforms.
  • Designed AWS VPC networking for both pure AWS and hybrid AWS / on prem infrastructures.

Technologies

  • AWS - EC2, S3, RDS, VPC, ECS, EKS, Route53, Cloudfront, Opsworks, Cloudwatch, CloudFormations, IAM, Lambda, and others
  • Cloud Automation - Vagrant, Terraform, Packer, CloudFormations, Spacelift
  • Containerization - Docker, ECS, Kubernetes (EKS, K3S, and Rancher), Nomad, Docker Compose
  • Continuous Integration - Git, Jenkins, Gradle, Maven, AWS SDKs, CircleCI, Github Actions
  • Configuration Management - Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Ignition (FlatCar Linux)
  • Programming LanguagesPython, Ruby, Perl, BASH, Go, Java
  • Big Data - Hadoop, Accumulo, Solr, Spark, EMR
  • Databases - Mysql, Postgres, MSSQL, Timescale DB

Work experience

Director of Engineering

Jan 2023Present
LoanStreet, Inc

Technical leader managing infrastructure and security practices end to end.

  • Successfully led SOC 2 Type 2 compliance effort to completion.
  • Led adoption of SOC 2 automation platforms to reduce the overhead of maintaining a security program.
  • Drove a migration from ECS to EKS to increase transparency and improve tooling around infrastructure management.
  • Oversaw development of a kubernetes based, auto-scaled, Github Actions private runner fleet.
  • Championed Observability via adoption of Datadog, including all onboarding and technical development.

Staff Engineer

Jan 2022Jan 2023
LoanStreet, Inc

Started as the first DevOps Engineer at LoanStreet, and built out a team of 5 encompassing IT, InfoSec and Infrastructure professionals.

  • Successfully led SOC 2 Type 1 compliance effort to completion.
  • Led efforts to introduce necessary compliance systems including an ITSM helpdesk, MDM solution, company password manager, and others.
  • Standardized release processes and environments to allow for smooth deployment of code to production.
  • Introduced Terraform as a way to consistently manage infrastructure.
  • Built a library of CI actions using Github Actions to standardize deployments.

Platform Engineering Manager

Jan 2021Jan 2022
Density, Inc

Building teams that focus on continuous improvement, sustainable development practices, and developer enablement.

  • Built Platform Org from 1-2 engineers to 12 over a 6 month period with no attrition.
  • Responsible for staffing and building 3 teams - Platform (DevOps), Production ETL (Software Eng), Data Engineering (Data Eng).
  • Leading architecture for a global infrastructure including investments in CloudFlare, Aiven (Data Provider), Data Dog, and lesser known tools such as spacelift.io.
  • Bootstrapping a team to aggregate core business data in an AWS-based Data Lake for analysis with Snowflake.
  • Supporting a team that handles ingest for millions of events a day via data pipelines built in Python and Rust. 

Staff Engineer - DevOps

May 2020December 2020
Density, Inc

Primary DevOps Infrastructure Engineer and Architect for a fast growing startup.

  • Championed DevOps and SRE practices that prioritized greater empowerment and ownership for application developers.
  • Created DevOps onboarding resources that got developers pushing code day / week 1.
  • Lead architect of an on-prem solution, first for rpm-based and then kubernetes-based versions of the platform.
  • Owned technical roadmap and documentation for cloud and on-prem infrastructure.

Senior DevOps Engineer

May 2019May 2020
Density, Inc

Primary DevOps and Infrastructure Engineer for a fast growing startup.

  • Took over and expanded existing micro-service based platform based on Hashicorp Nomad. 
  • Evaluated Nomad vs other options (Kubernetes), and built out a roadmap for transition to Kubernetes.
  • Built a custom CI toolchain based on Nomad and Terraform, implemented mutual tls for all control plane connections.
  • Standardized build tools for python-based application containers.
  • Introduced Terraform for infrastructure management and migrated from CloudFormations to Terraform.
  • Significantly refined / rebuilt in-house monitoring, logging, and api gateway platforms.

DevOps Engineer

June 2018May 2019
Aquent

First DevOps engineer working to bring a legacy AWS environment up to modern standards and practices.  My work encompassed architecting new solutions, establishing infrastructure as code practices, as well as security and compliance for AWS environments.

  • Introduced new solutions to engineering workflow including Kubernetes, EKS, and Lambda.
  • Re-architected existing PostgreSQL databases to address disk space and performance concerns.
  • Introduced more reliable change control by refactoring existing CloudFormations templates using CloudReach Sceptre.
  • Worked with Engineering to address legacy VPC and networking issues including VPC design, peering, and security group strategies.
  • Acted as Cloud Architect to help build out an identity resolution platform using Informatica Data Quality on AWS.  

Senior Cloud Architect

20162019
Bloomip

Technical consultant assisting a startup focused MSP to shift its product portfolio to AWS.  Involved in business level discussions to create a standard AWS product portfolio that both meets compliance targets and can be reliably reproduced per-client.

  • Led remediation of existing AWS solutions including EC2 provisioning, AMI selection, RDS deployment and VPC network security.
  • Created a series of designs incorporating Fortigate network appliances (both in AWS and on prem), VPC segmentation, and VPC peering to meet NIST security requirements.  
  • Created a Continuous Integration pipeline for implementing the CIS benchmark for Linux AMIs.

Senior Systems Architect

June 2016June 2018
Thomson Reuters

I acted as the principal Systems Architect and DevOps Engineer for a graph database targeted at financial and government sectors.  My primary responsibilities were to ensure reliable deployment of the platform, handle client relationships at the technical level (triage, support, relationship management), and to manage the technical transition to a cloud native architecture. 

  • Redesigned Hadoop deployment using a combination of  AWS EC2, S3, Opsworks, Chef, RPM, and a lot of Bash.
  • Built a code library around HDFS, MapReduce, Accumulo, and Solr to manage deployment, installation, and upgrades.
  • Managed stability, updates, and security for Hadoop, Accumulo, Solr, and Apache from source on a variety of Linux platforms. 
  • Architected push-button deployment for both internal (Terraform) and external (CloudFormations) IaaS / PaaS services.
  • Acted as a first point of contact for the development team to manage client relationships and triage issues at a technical level.

DevOps Engineer

Nov 2014June 2016
Bloomip, Inc.

Worked in a strategic capacity to streamline technical operations.  My main responsibility  was to break down barriers between day to day engineers and the business to increase transparency.  I accomplished this by introducing a number of new practices including source control for operational code, documentation via code, and configuration management.

  • Managed Cloud and On-Prem deployments using a combination of PXE, kickstart and Ansible.
  • Migrated the bulk of existing provisioning from one-off scripts to Configuration Management (Ansible).
  • Designed a toolchain to create application-ready hardened AMIs using Ansible.
  • Wrote an MVP for dynamic workload management using Openstack and Python.

Systems Administrator

April 2014Oct 2014
DataNet IT (Cisco)

Sysadmin for a large provider of network technology. Responsible for maintaining labs, resolving system issues,  as well as developing new monitoring and reporting systems for VMWare using Nagios and Ruby.

  • Developed an auto-discovery library for existing Nagios solutions using the Nmap library for Ruby.
  • Created a reporting system for VMWare-based internal cloud using Ruby, Mysql, and Excel.
  • Rebuilt shared file servers using a combination of Linux, Hardware RAID10, and XFS.
  • Troubleshooting and administration of large scale switching and routing infrastructure.

Systems Engineer

March 2010April 2014
Bloomip, Inc.

Brought in as a Jr. Systems Engineer for a small MSP that worked primarily with Silicon Valley startups.  Acted as a "go to" engineer for all aspects of DataCenter Operations including physical deployment (rack and stack), power budgeting, network design, systems provisioning (Hardware and OS), configuration, and triage.  Ultimately responsible for maintaining a diverse infrastructure of roughly 300+ servers across 15+ clients ranging in size from a single Virtual Machine to over 200 servers comprising complex highly available infrastructures.

  • Oversaw all aspects of physical and OS level provisioning for clients in the South Eastern US.
  • Provided on-call support for diverse issues in facilities across the US
  • Triage of systems ranging from single LAMP and Windows servers to complex tiered architectures based on Linux HA tools.
  • System Administration and configuration of Linux HA including DRBD, LVS, HAProxy, Hadoop, IIS and others.
  • Network Administration of Cisco, Netscreen, Fortigate, and Dell switching, routing, and firewall appliances.

Education

Bachelor of Science in Software Engineering

2020Present
Arizona State University

AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate

20182020
Amazon Web Services

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate

20172019
Amazon Web Services

Intro to Programming Nanodegree

20152016
Udacity

Bachelor of Arts in History

20032008
University of North Carolina at Asheville