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 a 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 with mentorship and technical leadership.

Core Proficiencies:

• Strategic planning, technical leadership and roadmap management for my team.
• 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 to technical requirements and roadmaps with a close partnership 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 savings 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

Marqeta
Senior Principal Infrastructure Engineer
June 2021 - Present

• Introduced observability of customer traffic and performance
• Migrated on-prem ingress services to a cloud based edge managed with terraform and CI/CD platforms
• Launched new cloud infrastructure in EU to enable expanding international business
• Streamline existing processes and new architectures with Infrastructure as Code tenets
• Technical lead and architect for newly founded Edge

Box

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

• Technical lead and architect for Edge Performance
• Creating technical 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
• Cultivated environment for the success of my team with mentoring, partnerships, and clear alignment garnering wide spread influence and respect from across the company

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.