Phillip D. Moore
Georgetown, Texas | pdm@pobox.com
| 512.850.4736 | LinkedIn
About Me
I’m a Principal Engineer with deep experience leading the
architecture and delivery of global-scale software systems. Over my
career, I’ve worked across the entire production stack, from systems
internals to user-facing platforms, with a focus on observability,
resilience, and performance.
I’ve built and led high-throughput, customer-critical systems at
Yahoo, Flickr, and Box. At Box, I founded the Edge Performance team,
delivering a global edge network that significantly improved reliability
and user experience. I operate at the intersection of software
engineering, infrastructure strategy, and organizational influence,
partnering closely with product and engineering leadership to align
architecture with business outcomes.
I’m known for strong technical ownership, pragmatic problem solving,
and creating high-functioning engineering environments through
mentorship and collaboration. I’ve consistently mentored junior and
senior engineers toward impact and autonomy, and I support Staff+ peers
through strategic alignment and architectural influence. I bring a
non-dogmatic mindset to technical decision making, balancing best
practices with business needs. I stay committed to continuous learning
as both a contributor and a leader.
Core Strengths
- Leading architecture and roadmap execution for large-scale
distributed systems and hybrid cloud/on-prem compute platforms
- Production systems engineering: infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD,
observability
- Deep software & systems expertise: UNIX/Linux, network
protocols, platform code
- Translating business goals into scalable, data-driven software
strategies
- Building high-trust cross-functional partnerships and mentoring
early to mid-career engineers
Experience Highlights
Senior Staff Site Reliability Engineer September
2023 – Present
- Designed and built a new architecture for an OpenAPI-driven API
Gateway and edge infrastructure in AWS.
- Introduced foundations for an Operational Excellence program,
including Developer Portal adoption, Operational Maturity and Service
Scorecards, SLI/SLO adoption, deployment tracking, and self-service
workflows for monitoring and observability.
- FinOps-related efforts to optimize AWS and Datadog
expenditures.
- Created a virtual SRE AI/LLM assistant to streamline common SRE
tasks, including SLI/SLO guidance.
Senior Principal Infrastructure Engineer June
2021 – August 2023
- Migrated on-prem ingress services (F5) to a cloud-based edge managed
with Terraform and CI/CD platforms.
- Developed customer-focused observability to improve customer
experience.
- Launched new cloud infrastructure in the EU to enable expanding
international business.
- Streamlined existing processes and new architectures with
infrastructure-as-code tenets.
- Served as the technical lead and architect for the newly founded
Edge Performance team.
Senior Staff Site Reliability Engineer / Edge
Performance September 2018 – June 2021
- Led technical vision for Edge Performance, defining strategy and
scaling global routing infrastructure.
- Created technical roadmaps, team vision, prioritization, and
reference architectures.
- Engineered advanced worldwide routing capabilities for performance,
cost and resilience utilizing NS1 for DNS, Cloudflare and Akamai for
CDN
- Developed a comprehensive strategy for Edge services, including load
balancing, CDN integration, and traffic routing, to support a full cloud
migration to GCP.
- Applied Edge expertise to deliver timely solutions with Product and
Sales teams (DISA, FedRAMP, private peering).
- Delivered $500k/year savings through targeted edge optimizations
that improved customer performance and resiliency.
- Mentored teams and collaborated with product, engineering, and
leadership teams to align technical strategies with company-wide goals
and initiatives.
Staff Site Reliability Engineer / Edge Performance
January 2015 – September 2018
- Built worldwide Edge infrastructure (physical and cloud-based).
- Founded the Edge Performance discipline and team at Box.
- Built Linux-based L4/L7 load balancing infrastructure using IPVS,
BGP anycast networking, and Apache Traffic Server (ATS) with HAProxy,
later migrating to NGINX.
- Developed tooling for automation, metrics, and insights.
- Improved customer performance globally (Apdex, upload and download
speeds).
- Applied data science techniques to guide new PoP placement for
maximum customer impact.
- Delivered cost savings and ensured compliance (GxP, SOC, PCI,
FedRAMP High, DISA).
Linux Systems Engineer – Cloud Servers April
2013 – January 2015
- Responsible for OpenStack Cloud observability and log analysis
tools.
- Automated manual processes with Ansible and Puppet.
DevOps Manager 2012 – March 2013
- Developed AWS cloud strategy for on-prem migration.
- Implemented blue/green deployment framework for services.
- Introduced Agile and Kanban methodologies to the organization,
improving quality and velocity.
Senior Systems Engineer Flickr 2010 – 2012
- Deployed and tuned various services (nginx, MySQL, Redis,
etc.).
- Developed an nginx health check module to improve photo-serving
failure recovery.
- Managed MySQL sharding and performance.
- Migrated manual deployments to a standardized and fully automated
system.
- Conducted capacity and business continuity planning.
Senior Systems Engineer Yahoo Search
Technology 2003 – 2010
- Managed over 100,000 Linux servers in worldwide datacenters.
- Automated full service and node lifecycle processes.
- Authored Perl modules for service automation, node orchestration,
and config management at very large scales
- Built software to support very large-scale service
infrastructure.
- Engaged in business continuity planning and product design
influence.
Systems Engineer Inktomi (Acquired by
Yahoo!) 1999 – 2003
- Managed high performance computing clusters for web search & web
crawling.
- Developed infrastructure automation tools for managing thousands of
cluster nodes.
- Migrated infrastructure from Solaris to Linux.
Additional Experience
Senior Unix Systems Administrator Founding engineer
for Supernews’ first web-based application, Remarq.
Systems Administrator Founding engineer for
Mississippi’s first statewide ISP.
Education
Mississippi State University
Computer Engineering Emphasis in Programming and
Computer Architecture.