Phillip D. Moore

Georgetown, Texas | pdm@pobox.com | 512.850.4736 | LinkedIn

About Me

I am an experienced principal engineer focused on large-scale production systems engineering with significant experience in all aspects of the production stack and a deep understanding of the underlying technologies modern systems are built upon. I have a solid foundation of technical expertise and leadership, including as a founding engineer at the first statewide ISP; systems engineering with web search at Yahoo; delivering large volumes of image data and user-driven content at Flickr; and founding the Edge Performance discipline and building out a worldwide network at Box.

My career is distinguished by a sense of technical ownership and an ability to build effective relationships with product partners. I specialize in building large-scale/high-throughput architectures with metrics and analytics as a cornerstone to understanding and improving the customer experience.

Building a successful product and infrastructure requires a team where all members can contribute and feel ownership. Over my career, I have created environments for growth and success for my teams through mentorship and technical leadership.

Core Proficiencies

• Strategic planning, technical leadership, and roadmap management for teams.
• Comprehensive hands-on experience with a wide range of operating systems and programming languages, with an extensive understanding of UNIX/Linux and systems programming.
• Large-scale systems engineering at all levels based on infrastructure-as-code tenets, build and deployment pipelines for cloud and on-premises systems.
• Translating business needs into technical requirements and roadmaps with close partnerships with cross-organizational peers, product teams, and leadership.
• Use of metrics, observability, and analytics with data analysis tools such as Tableau to help make technical and business decisions and drive cost-saving efforts.
• Extensive understanding of Internet and network technologies.
• Creative and non-dogmatic problem-solving. I seek continuous improvement and understanding of modern best practices.

Experience Highlights

EarnIn

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.

Marqeta

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.

Box

Senior Staff Site Reliability Engineer / Edge Performance September 2018 – June 2021

• Technical lead and architect for Edge Performance.
• Created technical roadmaps, team vision, prioritization, and reference architectures.
• Developed 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).
• Drove cost optimization while improving customer experience and performance, achieving $500k/year in savings on upload acceleration alone.
• 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).

Rackspace

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.

HomeAway Inc.

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.

Yahoo!

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

Supernews Inc / Remarq

Senior Unix Systems Administrator Founding engineer for Supernews’ first web-based application, Remarq.

Internet Doorway

Systems Administrator Founding engineer for Mississippi’s first statewide ISP.

Education

Mississippi State University

Computer Engineering Emphasis in Programming and Computer Architecture.