About Me: An experienced systems architect, web operations engineer, linux systems engineer, and hands on leader. Significiant experience in extremely large scale deployments, automation, metrics, agile methods, and continuous deployments. Interested in large scale deployments, infrastructure as code, finding useful appliation metrics, and automation.

Specialties: Very large scale and high traffic production engineering. Programming for automation, monitoring, and general systems engineering. Web application development in Python, Ruby, Perl and PHP with Linux, Nginx, Apache, and Mysql (LAMP). Programming in Python, Ruby, Perl, and Shell scripting. Capable with PHP, C, C++, SQL, Javascript.

Experience Highlights

Box
Senior Staff Site Reliability Engineer / Edge Performance
September 2018 - Present

• Technical lead and architect for Edge Performance
• Creating roadmaps and team vision, prioritizing features, design documents and reference architectures
• Develop strategy for Edge services supporting a full cloud migration
• Finding ways to apply Edge expertise to deliver timely solutions with Product and Sales teams to open up revenue opportunities
• Drive cost optimization efforts while focused on customer experience and performance

Box
Staff Site Reliability Engineer / Edge Performance
January 2015 - September 2018

• Built out world wide Edge point of presence infrastructure (physical and cloud based)
• Founded Edge Performance discipline and team at Box
• Built Linux based L4 and L7 load balancing infrastructure handling all ingress and egress traffic delivering traffic to physical datacenters and cloud hosted applications
• Develop tooling for automation, metrics, customer insights and analysis
• Focused on optimizing customer performance and experience worldwide working with development teams improving user experience APDEX, upload and download performance
• Use data analysis to locate new point of presence in areas that would maximize customer impact
• Focused on delivering cost savings by replacing expensive infrastructure with cost efficient technical solutions and by optimizing edge request routing for performance and cost
• Ensure adherence to a multitude of compliance efforts for finance and medical industries as well as federal and defense agencies (GxP, SOC, PCI, Fedramp High, DISA )

Rackspace
Linux Systems Engineer - Cloud Servers
April 2013 - January 2015

• Scaling and management of public Rackspace OpenStack compute cloud.
• Automating deployments of existing applications and developing strategies for new applications
• Responsible for Graphite and Elastic Search/Logstash/Kibana (ELK) scaling and operation
• Work with teams to create new metrics to aid in aanalysis of system performance and real user performance.

HomeAway Inc.
Linux Systems Architect / DevOps Manager
2012 - March 2013

• Developed Amazon Web Services cloud strategy
• Developed A/B deployment strategy
• Manage a small team of DevOps engineers
• Introduced Agile concepts and Kanban
• Formalized work processes for tracking and planning

Flickr a Yahoo! Company
Senior Systems Engineer / Service Engineer
2010 - 2012

• Responsible for production operations of Flickr
• Deployment and tuning of of nginx, Squid, Apache, MySQL, Redis, memcache and other services
• Manage MySQL databases - slaving, sharding, recovery, and performance
• Operational automation and standardization of installations
• Continuous growth and capacity planning
• Monitoring and Metrics with Nagios and Ganglia

Yahoo! Corporation
Senior Systems Engineer / Senior Production Engineer for Search
2003 - 2010

• Manage over 100 thousand Linux servers in a large scale clustered 24/7 production environment
• Responsible for all aspects of server management and production software from hardware turn over to the customer facing service in a revenue generating and business critical production environment
• Developed systems to automate full host lifecycle allowing a host to go from production, fault, repair, verification, and back to production without systems engineer intervention
• Monitor, respond, repair, and maintain services to protect revenue and maintain a quality user experience
• Author and maintain a large library of custom Perl modules for Linux install automation system, custom configruation management, and most other infrastructure systems
• Design and build software to monitor, maintain, and distribute software to thousands of servers with terabytes of data
• Build supporting framework glue to combine disparate products into a production service
• Represent production interests in product design meetings to ensure product performance, availability, scalability, and security
• Business continuity planning (BCP)

Inktomi
Systems Engineer / Cluster Administrator
1999-2003

• Managed large clusters that powered web search and crawling
• Wrote tools and libraries for system monitoring, automation, deployments, and configuration management
• Developed proof of concept system that directly resulted in a partnership with Amazon for Inktomi Paid Inclusion system
• Responsible for running the web crawling system and writing infrastructure to support it
• Built software for distributing gigabytes of software and data to thousands of servers with extreme speed using a binary tree expansion with rsync
• Migrated from Solaris to Linux based infrastructure

Supernews Inc / Remarq
Senior Unix Systems Administrator
1998 - 1999

• Managed over 100 Solaris x86 and Sun Enterprise servers supporting high traffic web based product
• Built out datacenter in co-location facility from ground up and managed its operation
• Wrote software release infrastructure and change control systems in Perl
• Handled evaluation and purchase of hardware systems
• News administration of Typhoon servers for use in conjunction with web service
• Managed DNS and mail servers for corporate and 'free e-mail' system
• Directly managed several contractors
• Provided 24/7 on-call support

3Com Corporation
Systems Administrator
1997 - 1998

• Lead migration of over 700 workstations from SunOS to Solaris in an engineering development environment
• Administration of DNS, NIS, HTTP, NNTP, FTP, and SMTP (sendmail)
• Management of email (sendmail) system for 14,000+ users
• Firewall management
• Database administration and programming
• Lead effort to get internal groups to utilize the intranet web for increased productivity and collaboration

Internet Doorway
Systems Administrator
1995 - 1996

• Built from ground up Mississippi's first state wide ISP
• Setup statewide network of PoPs to service customers
• Setup all services for new ISP: Web, FTP, DNS, NNTP news server, sendmail for SMTP
• Developed custom applications in Perl for both internal and external customer use
• Provided customer support to customers
• Built company website

General Skills

• Cloud platforms: AWS, GCP, OpenStack
• Operating Systems: Primariliy Linux including Redhat Enterprise Linux, Centos, Debian
• Networking: Fairly deep understanding of networking architecture and routing concepts, Linux networking internals and debugging
• Programming: Proficient with Python Ruby, Perl, Shell scripting. Capable with Go,C, C++, SQL, Able to pick up new languages as needed very easily.
• Databases: Some experience with MySQL and SQLite

Education

Mississippi State University:
Completed 4 years of university coursework towards a BS degree in Computer Engineering with an emphasis in Programming and Computer Architecture.