Summary and Objective

I'm a builder and I seek to apply this both technically and interpersonally. I think in order to be a great builder, you need to not only have a wealth of experience and technical knowledge but also an insatiable curiosity and passion for what you do.

I have a proven track record for building and scaling platforms to enable more frequent (and safer) releases, boost developer efficiency, transform observability and increase reliability.

Core Competencies

  • Implementing processes, frameworks and tools to enable incredibly well observed and self-service platforms.

  • Building safe, reliable and transparent CI/CD environments

  • Least privilege infrastructure and service ecosystems

  • Fostering trustful, open and passionate team/company cultures

  • Using all of the above to hire amazing teammates!

Technologies

  • GitOps with Flux, ArgoCD and Helm

  • Kubernetes as a basis for building platforms

  • Infrastructure-as-Code with Terraform

  • Canary and A/B with ArgoCD or Flagger

  • Ephemeral Preview Environments with Kubernetes + Tilt

  • OpenTelemetry implementation in TypeScript and Golang

  • Prometheus/Loki/Tempo/Grafana stack

  • Too many CI/CD systems to list

  • Mostly AWS Cloud now but plenty of baremetal experience

Experience

1build

1build (YC W20) enables builders to create estimates quickly and accurately using localized cost data.

    • Brainstorm and collaborate with the Head of Engineering to develop our engineering culture to foster a safe, healthy, trustful and passionate working environment.

    • Became the glue for our engineering organization during our complete application rewrite, ensuring friction was proactively removed from developer’s lives so all they needed to think about was shipping features.

    • Communicate with Product, Marketing, Engineering and C-Level leaders to ensure cross-organizational priorities receive the follow-through they need.

    • Led the GraphQL Federation effort in architecture, local development and productionization, ensuring developers could work with and test their subgraph services as pleasantly and reliably as possible.

    • Orchestrated and oversaw cloud spend reduction from 80k/month to 18k/month over six months with much cross-team collaboration and coordination.

    • Led mostly greenfield automation and setup of infrastructure, local development and data pipelines.

    • Implemented continuous delivery and guided the team away from “hand crafted” deployments.

    • Collaborated with data engineers to get our construction cost data pipelines off the ground while continuing to iteratively improve

    • Implemented Sarama for our Golang Kafka Consumers to achieve upwards of 10k msg/sec to both Postgres and Elasticsearch.

    • Utilized Terraform and Flux to achieve 100% “GitOps” infrastructure/configuration as code.

    • Integrated OpenTelemetry into our Golang and Typescript GraphQL APIs for searchability by Loki and ingestion by Tempo.

Pluralsight - Flow

Pluralsight Flow allows engineering organizations to identify bottlenecks and developer friction, improve flow efficiency and deployment, and build healthy development patterns using Git metrics.

    • Architected and Implemented GitOps repos/pipelines using Flux and ArgoCD in an engineering org where no continuous delivery pipelines previously existed. Added Argo Workflows to enhance self-service across engineering.

    • Standardized and implemented monitoring/alerting practices where none existed previously using the Prometheus stack.

    • Wrote common flexible application Helm charts to reliably deploy our various APIs using either Flux or ArgoCD and a zero-downtime migration feature with KEDA and Progressive Delivery (Flagger or Argo Rollouts).

    • Formalized Helm chart development testing and deployment using chart-testing, kind and Jenkins.

    • Wrote Terraform (in concert with Flux) to spin up new fully-automated and deployed EKS clusters in under 30 minutes.

    • Guided the architecture, testing, deployment and monitoring of three new core services to production using a combination of embedded and liaison ops. Continuously educated, supported, evangelized Helm, Kubernetes and GitOps to increase awareness and ease adoption.

    • Improved DevOps adoption by beginning the process of creating a roadmap/vision, opening communication, building trust, spreading operational knowledge and empowering development teams to understand and own their application stacks.

    • Led the effort to attain 100% Vault adoption across all applications running in our environments

Weedmaps

Weedmaps is the world's first marijuana technology and media brand; and the first and most comprehensive marijuana directory on the planet.

    • Re-developed Terraform tooling container to reduce the complexity of its use and increase security.

    • Developed CI/CD container and pipeline to migrate all lambdas from Terraform to Serverless.

    • Migrated Terraform state for several Terraform-based services to reduce the size of our codebase and increase deployment speed.

    • Wrote several services that were used to backup critical services for disaster recovery.

Lumo

Lumo’s goal is to ensure that the entire travel ecosystem—from airlines to passengers to travel agents anywhere in the world—have the best information at their fingertips to help proactively manage disruptions and make travel more efficient and stress-free.

    • Use Terraform and Ansible to deploy/manage our infrastructure and resources in a repeatable and consistent way.

    • Developed method for deploying CIS compliant EKS workers using blue/green for zero-downtime node AMI updates. Migrated all existing production services from docker swarm to Kubernetes/API Gateway

    • Migrated all existing data pipeline cronjobs to Kubernetes cronjobs with automated builds/deploys.

    • Wrote service to process Stripe webhooks in addition to undertaking other software engineering tasks related to our API, data pipeline and other auxiliary services.

CA Technologies - Rally Software

Rally (formerly CA Agile Central) is the market-leading provider of agile software that can enable stronger teams and drive better business results.

    • Wrote Ansible/Terraform to deploy immutable (multi-AZ, multi-master) and CIS compliant Kubernetes cluster from scratch on EC2. Led namespaced Kubernetes RBAC from scratch implementation aligned with our Ansible user management module.

    • Work with service teams to help them figure out their deployment strategy.

    • Architected bulletproof cluster logging using rsyslog, Docker, Kubernetes and a logging aggregator (Loggly).

    • Implement CI/CD on our own IaC (both scheduled and PR-driven) for config changes and state/maintenance upkeep, etc. Integrated Molecule for Ansible role (including Kubernetes) unit and integration testing.

    • Rewrote core application deployment to use Capistrano and parallelism, speeding up deployment time by 300%.

    • Re-architected metrics collection in all production datacenters to use the carbon/graphite stack to increase in reliability.

    • Created/transitioned (from Puppet) several core Chef cookbooks to deploy critical services (Graphite, Bind, PXE/Kickstart, etc).

    • Assisted efforts to implement auto-remediation and automation around common alerts and processes with Rundeck and Ansible.

    • Continually worked within the team (in addition to related teams) to decrease our alert volume and harden services.

    • Part of a team that works to ensure the uptime and performance of services running on baremetal, VMWare guests, and Docker.

SendGrid

SendGrid delivers your transactional and marketing emails through the world's largest cloud-based email delivery platform

    • Audited and tuned monitoring/alerting systems to decrease the headaches/pain that comes with being in a 24/7 on-call rotation.

    • Troubleshooted Linux systems performance issues with various customer facing services and proposed solutions to remediate.

    • Developed software tools and reports to better manage SendGrid’s vast and diverse architecture.

    • Triaged outages and issues with services in conjunction with other engineering and customer facing teams.

Screened Images dba Corrections.com

Corrections.com (now OmniProphis) is responsible for implementing and maintaining cellular managed access systems for prisons across the United States, primarily for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

    • Technical lead for all systems, datacenter, facility maintenance and installation projects and issues.

    • Re-architected system data collection methodology using master-slave replication to centralized infrastructure and backup locations for reliability and redundancy.

    • Conceptualized and implemented all helpdesk / documentation / support / monitoring infrastructure and actively encourage use among team members.

    • Migrated cloud infrastructure from RackSpace RackConnect to AWS to save company roughly $500/month in costs.

    • Team lead for incidents and client ticket generation for critical issues or outages to uphold client SLAs nearly 24/7.

    • Monitor, maintain, backup, and tune over 150+ Linux servers + 400 other networked devices using Puppet, Icinga2, Graphite, monit, Splunk and other tools.

    • Created and maintained oVirt 3-node HA cluster for lab development/testing and future project development.

    • Led developer/maintainer for client facing web application providing performance metrics and configuration data for 200+ devices across 18 geographically separate locations.

    • Designed and implemented high availability network stack and VMware VSA cluster in new datacenter installation.

    • Deploy and monitor web applications and other server types in virtual environments for testing, development, and production.

Collaborative Partners

Collaborative Partners (now part of Hill International) provided Construction Project Management services for commercial projects in the Boston Area.

  • Continuation of IT Manager but as a contractor to hold the company over while they transitioned to Hill International due to the acquisition.

    • End user support and infrastructure maintenance for a mostly Windows environment.

    • Maintained inventory and performance of all systems/devices and worked with leadership to align technology upgrades with budgetary restrictions.

    • Redeveloped website using WordPress as a CMS to allow marketing and other departments to self-manage.

    • Managed several technology vendor contracts and negotiated new contracts as needed to align with budget.