Omega Point is on a mission to “democratize” quant investing by making it easy for fundamental asset managers to understand, visualize, and optimize their portfolios using advanced machine learning algorithms.The Platform team is responsible for: * Data Engineering * Software design and development (Go, Python, Ansible, Terraform)* Optimization * Infrastructure OperationsIn addition, I handle:* Leading technical due-diligence program* Agile project management for development* Cloud provider vendor management* Architecture, governance, and oversight for security programs, processes, and policies* Leading Disaster Recovery and tech leading Business Continuity programs

At Apcera, I manage our Site Reliability Engineering group -- we take software engineering approaches to traditional operations tasks. We do everything from software development in Go to traditional operations tasks, from new Dev feature consulting to professional services engagements. As an SRE manager, I've focused on building an excellent team -- and keeping that team interested, engaged, and happy. With a great team, everything else is much easier. Some highlights of what I and our team have done at Apcera: * Work with the rest of Eng to make sure our platform is reliable, easy to operate, performant, and config-managed. We ensure that upcoming features have considered things like upgrade and rollback, security implications, and other nonfunctional needs, and assist QA to make sure that the happy path isn't the only path. * Built a Terraform/Chef based installation system for our platform that works across multiple cloud and on-premise infrastructures, including hybrid configurations where multiple providers are used as part of a single platform. * Manage computing infrastructure across multiple cloud providers (AWS, Google, Azure, OpenStack) as well as on-premise VMWare, including the budgeting and optimization of utilization of our cloud providers. * Maintain 24/7 availability and operation of our container-based platforms and systems as well as traditional legacy apps through automation, monitoring, and alerting. We focus heavily on root-cause-analysis of problems in order to find and fix problems at their source rather than throwing a band-aid on it and moving on, which enables us to scale the systems under management without scaling personnel to match. * Provided professional services, working directly with the customer to identify requirements, analyze and build the best implementation of our platform that we can for them. * Act as a support escalation path, working with support and the customer to troubleshoot, identify, and resolve problems.

Joined Oracle with the acquisition of Involver in September 2012.Manage the infrastructure and operations team (DevOps). Charged with the maintenance, reliability, and scalability of the Engage application. Judged on maintaining uptime, performance and scalability while being agile enough to support multiple dev teams.As a development manager, I gather stories, and plan and prioritize our sprints based on business needs and input from development, support, and QA. We're responsible not only for traditional operations tasks but also performing development and optimization, mostly ruby, on infrastructure systems such as databases, background processing, and caching layers. We also provide advice to other teams on performance and optimization techniques as well as cross-system impacts of upcoming projects.Some highlights of what I and our team have done at Oracle and Involver: • Built an application-aware caching layer with average response times of under 5ms at thousands of pages per second from a single server• Built a reliable, clustered background processing system which processes ~8 million messages per day• Managed annual infrastructure budget. Planned capacity needs, specified hardware, and handled vendor relationships.• Accountable for uptime, with 2012 year-to-date uptime of 99.99% (including planned downtime)• Transitioned our service from Amazon AWS (EC2/S3/EBS/CloudFront/VPC) to private managed hosting with ZERO downtime• Defined processes and policies for the DevOps team• Built automation and monitoring infrastructure using Chef, Nagios, Graphite, etc.• Technologies used included Xen, Linux (CentOS and Ubuntu), Chef, Percona MySQL, Mongo, Solr, Java, Ruby/Rails, Memcache & Membase, Redis, ActiveMQ, Capistrano

This role moved to Oracle as part of the Oracle acquisition -- see that position for details.

• Led month-long project to redesign the company data lifecycle, resolving a number of defects and greatly increasing code maintainability• Implemented several new data feeds to retrieve and process location, financial, and reference data from varying third-party providers• Improved build system, resulting in faster, more repeatable builds with better handling of fixture data and including static analysis

Joined Numerex as part of Numerex's acquisition of Ublip.

• Designed, implemented, and operated a system for us to provide high-end hosting for customers building Ruby on Rails apps on our GPS software framework, leveraging several outside services to support 50 customer systems (Linux VMs, Xen-based) with 1 support person and no infrastructure.• Led project to bring servers in-house after Ublip's acquisition, designing solution, identifying hardware, vendor bids and management, implementation and migration of over 80 systems (internal and external).• Designed and implemented system for quick provisioning and centralized configuration management based on Puppet to create a personalized customer VM in minutes with single-point updating of all VMs when needed.• Experienced with several virtualization and cloud-computing platforms, including VMWare, Amazon EC2/S3, Joyent, IBM z/VM.• Recommended, acquired and implemented a number of development services/tools to improve code quality, knowledge, and communication, including bug tracking, a wiki, coverage analysis, continuous integration, instant messaging, repository analysis.• Software development for the gateways (Java) and UI (Ruby on Rails) as needed

• Developed a highly-reliable communications system in Java for transcription based on use of ActiveMQ and Continuent to exchange binary voice files and transcripts with clinics and third-party transcription services.• Added Dependency Injection via Spring to reduce redundant and framework code.• Evaluated and recommended options for reliable clinic-to-pharmacy messaging, including use of EJB 3 MDBs, XA (2PC) Transactions, Jencks (Spring MDBs), and various JMS (ActiveMQ) configurations.

• Directed technical resources (6 FTEs) to customize and integrate our software in concert with project managers, successfully completing three major Professional Services engagements. Requested by past customers for future projects during project talks.• Defined and implemented practices, processes and tools for use in Professional Services software development including automated testing, continuous integration, source code management, and bug tracking.• Conducted business and functional requirements gathering sessions with non-technical customers, providing technical recommendations and estimates.• Architected high-level design with focus on key business and technical requirements, working with customer to prioritize development order.• Authored and delivered training sessions to customers during and after development, receiving excellent feedback from participants.• Developed a Spring/Struts webapp for RFID tag printing as well as internal DB/web services tools to automate client services tasks, reducing time to add a device by 96%.

• Led development of the services layer of our core (server-side) J2EE platform, everything from JDBC interaction with the Oracle database to the web services interface for UI and backend clients.• Defined Oracle schema and object model mapping and definition, at first manually and then later choosing and implementing Hibernate-based solution.• Designed and implemented web services interface, including security (predating but similar to WS-Security) and failover mechanism.• Evaluated, recommended and implemented tools such as bug tracking (Bugzilla, then Jira), continuous integration (AnthillPro), unit test code coverage (Clover), object- relational mapping (Hibernate), and DB connection pooling (DBCP & C3P0).• Maintained and promoted use of the company wiki and bug tracking system, increasing usage from 2 issues raised per month to over 250.

We founded Living Room Games, a publisher of table-top roleplaying games books, in 1999 in order to take advantage of the recently abandoned Earthdawn IP. We published a number of books in that IP as well as a couple of original IPs over the 6-year span of existence, eventually shutting down the company as a result of an overall downturn in the tabletop RPG industry.

Acted as lead designer for the Admin GUI, developed several client-side GUIs using Java Swing and RMI following an MVC pattern.• Designed/developed standalone GUI installer framework and program allowing for a flexible, XML-configurable modular installation process• Performed performance analysis/tuning for four releases of the server software. Due to my efforts, event processing speed (our main metric) increased 200%.

• Designed/developed client-server EMS/NMS software in Java using Swing• Designed and developed RMI-based Java classloader that allowed for remote upgrading and feature customization of a client from the server. Also provided hooks for persisting the downloaded classes across client restarts to reduce network load (with version checking), and updating on the fly (without a client restart).• Designed/developed a generic messaging system where protocol formats could be read dynamically from XML files, adding new device types without server downtime.• Designed/developed a standalone GUI program for customers to define custom TL1 protocol formats to enable device-specific behavior on a generic messaging system.• Developed application-level protocol message parsing/sending functionality for network element alarms and implemented a TL1 message encoder/decoder

• Implemented in C++ data retrieval from an ATM switch w/ failover and retries• Implemented Advanced Intelligent Networking (AIN 0.2) features over SS7 networks and added new TCAP parameters/messages to the DMS-250 phone switch.