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mroberts@sysengineers.net 210–378–2591
Objective:
Contribute meaningfully to the success of an evolving organization, both by drawing on my years of experience to solve challenging problems for my clients, and by demonstrating leadership to maximize the achievements of my team.
Employment History:
Led incident management focus area within Site Reliability team, coordinating SME responses during live Sev0 - Sev1 events, and shepherding developers through root cause analysis for our comprehensive postmortem process
Advanced best practices throughout project life cycles, from capacity planning to production readiness reviews, emphasizing observability and monitoring, and demonstrating a strong sense of outcome ownership
Assumed leadership of Infrastructure Platform team at a time of unprecedented uncertainty, delivered reliable IT services through periods of exponential growth, while leading engineering projects with code review responsibility
Developed job descriptions, established interview questions and answer guidelines, and evaluated candidates on technical qualifications and team fit compatibility for local and remote FTE roles and offshore contractors
Led development, from hardware and software vendor RFPs to global production deployment, of a hyperconverged geographically redundant hybrid cloud platform supporting full system image VMs and container based workloads
Re-architected VPN platforms to support WFH surge, adopted AWS Transit Gateway to unify cloud and physical networks, and harmonized heterogeneous servers through multi-provider Terraform code and GitHub Actions
Designed, built, and maintained performant, reliable and highly scalable mission-critical software systems both independently and in deep collaboration with business analysts and developers across the organization
Kindled a continuous passion for automating infrastructure as code and practicing consistent iterative refinement both of configuration management for technical resources and of documentation for team processes and standards
Documented policies for Enterprise Change Control process, set relevant expectations and communicated them department wide, and led weekly meetings of Change Approval Board for compliance of significant changes
Constantly evaluated emerging technologies and strengthened mastery of existing tools, such as AWS (VPC, EC2, IAM, Lambda, S3, RDS), Terraform, Chef, Python, Jenkins, GitHub, Cloudflare, Splunk, Datadog, and PagerDuty
Proactively supported all IT needs of global offices, from issue tracking with Atlassian Jira on Apache Tomcat, and data storage on EMC Isilon and FreeNAS ZFS, to optimization of custom GPGPU-oriented HPC platforms
Engineered scalable solutions using the Red Hat Spacewalk project for CentOS and Ubuntu desktop deployments and updates, SaltStack for server command and control, and Jamf for Apple laptop and mobile device management
Delivered presentations, developed demonstrations, configured initial implementations, and customized integrations of Python-based automation platform Cloudify for top tier enterprise clients and prospects
Developed industry-standard TOSCA blueprints as well as custom code in BASH and Python to automate the entire life cycle of complex multi-tier network applications including deployment, monitoring, scaling and healing
Engaged C-suite decision makers and system architects alike in persuasive and detailed business and engineering discussions, adding value interfacing between internal developers and external customers
Reported directly to CTO as a trusted advisor to anticipate organizational IT needs, plan and implement optimal solutions within schedule and budget constraints in a highly dynamic startup environment
Transitioned from server oriented development and deployment to a new microservice architecture using application containers running in Docker on CoreOS for improved resource utilization and scalability
Integrated heterogeneous components like the Elasticsearch / Logstash / Kibana ELK stack, PostgreSQL and Cassandra (Java) databases, and RabbitMQ (Erlang) for AMQP, all into a coherent backend system
Employment History Continued: mroberts@sysengineers.net 210-378-2591 Michael Roberts
Collaborated with CEO, COO and CTO on high-level strategy for product features, business model adjustments, and areas of concentration for specialized content development and marketing
Researched, created and deployed complex testing scenarios to objectively assess engineering skills in MongoDB, MySQL, Nginx, Apache, HAProxy, PHP, Python, Perl, Postfix, SSH, PAM, LVM and ACLs
Worked with a large established code base of over 50k lines of Python both to debug and enhance contributions from others as well as to write and submit my own modules in a git based workflow
Architected scalable Linux platforms ranging from flexible VMs through workhorse blade systems to $100k enterprise servers executing critical functions of flagship Bloomberg Professional® service
Supported peak growth rates of 200+ new systems each month as key member of elite team focusing on relentless process automation and monitoring with cfengine, BMC BladeLogic, Splunk, and Nagios
Developed all new cloud infrastructure, starting with AWS-based proof-of-concept, ultimately leveraging private VMware ESX cluster with a custom user interface for managing application-specific instances
Maximized performance for demanding applications by engineering systems with modern hardware features such as link-bonded 10GigE, CUDA programmed GPGPUs, and PCIe SSD accelerated storage
Assisted developers both in migrating to Linux from legacy Unix environments and in bootstrapping new applications on open-source frameworks like Hadoop, Ruby on Rails, Django, and Node.js
Red Hat, Inc., Raleigh, NC Linux Consultant April 2010 – January 2011
Independently deployed to implement enterprise open source software solutions for clients across the country, with sole responsibility for execution decisions to successfully complete project goals
Communicated detailed written analysis, findings, recommendations and project progress results, as well as documented designs and system configurations, for both business and technical stakeholders
Established a Standard Operating Environment (SOE) featuring Red Hat Directory Server, Satellite Server and a flexible Kickstart script to unify support for diverse needs of a leading hedge fund
Rackspace University Senior Linux Trainer May 2007 – April 2010
Researched, developed and delivered classes and materials to teach Linux and internet related topics to all levels of technical and managerial employees in global offices and data centers
Prepared over 300 technicians for Red Hat Certified Engineer exam with a 75% pass rate, nearly double the industry average, earning Rackspace more RHCEs than any company outside of Red Hat
Led students in traditional long term classroom-based training sessions, while also contributing multimedia material for innovative computer-based, online, self study learning programs
Designed original technical challenge to engage the interest of top-tier candidates for recruiting and led a comprehensive on-boarding program to accelerate new hires to shoulder support-team responsibilities
Rackspace Backbone Engineering Network Engineer June 2006 – May 2007
Achieved flawless operational record while held accountable for performance and availability of all DNS server infrastructure essential to Zero-Downtime Network in global Rackspace data centers
Collected and analyzed trend data for long term capacity planning and short term response time tuning, including emergency paging automation to prevent interruptions during periods of high load
Increased responsiveness and flexibility for Rackspace DNS customers with tripled update frequency from web interface to production systems by optimizing BIND on Debian GNU/Linux
Rackspace Managed SMB Linux Engineer August 2004 – June 2006
Resolved server issues regarding web sites, databases, email and related technology, specializing in Apache, MySQL and Postfix on Linux and FreeBSD
Collaborated with account managers and inside sales staff to maximize customer satisfaction and growth, embodying principles of Fanatical Support® to all
Documented problems and solutions for future reference by customers and teammates, clearly explaining technical details both to fellow-engineers and to non-technical audiences alike