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Résumé

Last updated Feb 13, 2024, 6 min read

Info

This is just a copy/paste from my LinkedIn profile after I retired.

About

Linux systems engineer who has worked in environments ranging from large-scale educational institutes, to small-scale startups, to consulting gigs. Also very involved in the open source community, contributing regularly to many diverse projects.

Has two decades of professional IT experience covering the gamut of infrastructure architecture design, system administration, and technical support. Particularly interested in configuration automation, CI/CD, security, cloud architectures, distributed computing, virtualization, and network design.

My aspiration is to continually automate & document myself out of a job, so I can move on to tackling bigger problems and more interesting projects.

Technical Competencies:

  • Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  • Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Salt
  • Apache / NGINX Web Servers
  • Arch Linux Fellow
  • BASH / POSIX Shell Scripting
  • CentOS, NixOS, macOS, Ubuntu
  • Cloud Computing Architectures
  • Content Delivery Networks
  • Continuous Integration & Delivery
  • Data Security & Encryption
  • Distributed Systems
  • Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
  • Hetzner / MacStadium Hosting
  • Network & Host Based Firewalls
  • Open Source Development
  • Packer / VirtualBox / Vagrant
  • Service Discovery via Consul
  • Trend Monitoring & Alerting

Experience

Principal Software Engineer II at Elastic

Aug 2015 to Apr 2022 | 6 yrs 9 mos in Mountain View, CA (Remote)

  • Technical Lead of the globally-distributed Engineering Infrastructure Team, consisting of 23 DevOps engineers focused on providing highly-available tools and services to enhance developer productivity

  • Wrote configuration as code to support the daily launching of over 25,000 ephemeral machine instances for in-depth continuous integration testing of our company’s suite of software products

  • Led a year-long cross-disciplinary working group focused on improving the user experience during major version upgrades for Elasticsearch and Kibana, running both on-premise and in the cloud

  • Spearheaded the creation of local Docker-based sandbox development environments for enabling employee experimentation with complex CI/CD workflows using tools like Jenkins and Hashicorp Vault

  • Designed a Packer-based image building process to regularly generate tiered images covering 25+ operating systems / Linux distribution versions used for running software compatibility tests on both Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Google Compute Engine (GCE)

  • Collaborated with internal and external auditors to ensure personal data collection from all services remained secure and in compliance with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) guidelines

  • Standardized patterns of using Okta for Single Sign-On (SSO) along with Terraform for management of access controls across multiple cloud providers and third-party vendors such as GitHub

  • Sustained company-high team engagement scores of around 90% through continual response to feedback as measured by semiannual Culture Amp surveys

  • Held weekly strategy sessions with executive team members covering roadmaps and project prioritization

Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Beatport

Dec 2013 to Jul 2015 | 1 yr 8 mos in New York City, NY (Remote)

  • Architected a fully-automated, Jenkins-based, zero-downtime, deployment pipeline utilizing immutable infrastructure that launched and terminated 800+ instances per week within the cloud

  • Wrote Ansible configuration management playbooks for multiple product teams to manage their development, staging, and production environments along with their supporting infrastructure

  • Created the open source project transcrypt to transparently encrypt files within a Git repository

  • Researched, tested, and documented new hardware and software technologies in order to formulate reliable technological recommendations and enable continual innovation

Senior Linux System Administrator at MNX Solutions

Feb 2012 to Nov 2013 | 1 yr 10 mos in Monroe, MI (Remote)

  • Developed full hands-off automation for deploying new servers into production; this allowed the client to deploy 60 hosts from scratch in 30 minutes compared to six hosts in a day previously

  • Converted 95% of a client’s existing servers to be under the direct control of Puppet and MCollective

  • Maintained 250 servers supporting an application used to process ~25 million email messages per day

Systems Engineer at Wolfram Research

Jun 2009 to Feb 2012 | 2 yrs 9 mos in Champaign, IL (Remote)

  • Created a centralized infrastructure for automated configuration management of all Linux machines

  • Acted as project lead on migration of legacy mail/calendaring systems to a modern groupware suite

  • Established consistent & streamlined software imaging procedures, which increased the efficiency of provisioning and deployment of Apple-based systems by over 800%

  • Designed and built an internal private cloud architecture and contributed many improvements to upstream projects

  • Operated as the primary administrator of all user access rights across company machines and intranet services via OpenLDAP, custom scripts, and diverse web tools

  • Implemented a secure, cross-platform, rsync-based backup solution for internal employee machines

  • Promoted from Systems Technician position within six months

Site Operator at Purdue University

Apr 2003 to May 2009 | 6 yrs 2 mos in West Lafayette, IN

  • Initiated a centralized infrastructure for automated configuration management of all Linux machines

  • Acted as project lead on migration of legacy mail / calendaring systems to a modern groupware suite

  • Established consistent and streamlined software imaging procedures, which increased the efficiency of provisioning and deployment of Apple-based systems by over 800%

  • Designed and built an internal private cloud architecture to improve resource utilization, and contributed pertinent code improvements to upstream projects

  • Operated as the primary administrator of all user access rights across company machines and intranet services via OpenLDAP, custom scripts, and diverse web tools

  • Implemented a secure, cross-platform, rsync-based backup solution for internal employee machines

Development Director at openBook Technologies

Sep 2005 to Apr 2007 | 1 yr 8 mos in Lafayette, IN

  • Administered numerous Linux and Windows boxes running various mission critical services such as Apache, MySQL, Subversion, VMware, and Bind DNS

  • Instituted numerous policy changes regarding organizational infrastructure (security, revision control software, backup policies, off-site hosting, etc.)

  • Mentored developers on standards-based web design and best practices for XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, the Document Object Model (DOM), usability, and accessibility guidelines (Section 508 and WCAG)

Network Administrator at UCN

Jul 2002 to Dec 2002 | 6 mos in Bluffdale, UT

  • Handled troubleshooting of all technical problems (hardware, software, peripheral, and phone) site-wide for a company of 150 employees

  • Managed individual machines, user accounts, and their associated access rights across the company’s domain using Microsoft’s Active Directory

  • Set up reproducible, automated software deployment procedures, which eliminated hours of error-prone manual steps when configuring new hosts

Education

Bachelor of Science (B.S.) with Highest Distinction at Purdue University

May 2009 in West Lafayette, IN

Major: Computer & Information Technology

Specialization: Network Engineering

Grade: 3.97 / 4.0

Activities and societies:

  • Dean’s List
  • Phi Kappa Phi

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