Brian Simons Email and Phone Number

Implemented practices pulled from DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering, Agile, and Extreme Ownership in ways that fit the culture and business needs of Kuali. Stepped into a hands-on technical role as needed. Lead a SOC compliance initiative that focused on delivering business value, continuous improvement, and helping everyone level up. Rallied executives, peers, and engineers to find and codify practices that reinforced Kuali's company culture.

Leveraged my background in Site Reliability Engineering to re-engineer the most time consuming servers into infrastructure as code, reducing MTTR from 4 days to 5 minutes and empowering junior staff to manage them.Designed and implemented a change approval process that improved the System Engineers' change success rate from 31% to 99%, reduced lead time from 2 weeks to 1 hour, and raised uptime on all services from 90% to 99.99%.Identified waste in the handoffs between architecture, development, and infrastructure teams, and raised the 22% success rate to 99%.Raised visibility of important data by allowing a secure chat service to control infrastructure (ChatOps), making production changes visible to everyone and reducing knowledge silos.Reduced unplanned work from 80% of employees’ time to <15%, allowing IT to focus on projects with long-term benefit.

Provided specialized IT services in Utah Valley. Clients included Speakworks, Rain Interactive, Legato Media International, and Marketsplash by HP.

Maintained 99.99% uptime across hundreds of Websites running on fully-redundant servers at geographically separate facilities. Clients included Intel, Symantec, Rio Tinto, and NovellMigrated Web and Database servers to AWS to reduce costs and improve uptime and geographic redundancy. Leveraged CloudFormation for no-touch deployments.Implemented Puppet and SaltStack, making server deployments automatic and self-documenting. Reduced loss of redundancy due to catastrophic hardware failure from days to hours.Built a network management system to report and remedy network issues automatically. Reduced sysadmin pages 90% by making most issues resolve without intervention within 5 minutes.Mitigated a 2 month, 80 Mbps DDOS attack. Used apache mod_rewrite and iptables to implement effective auto-banning of botnet clients. Weathered the attack with 0 downtime.

Implemented and maintained mission-critical IT infrastructureBuilt a high availability web server and database cluster to host a high-trafficapplication.Redesigned company network to handle a growing headcount. Users reportedgreatly increased server throughput and ease-of-use.Engineered a user management solution to reduce the time needed to provisionnew employees from 60 minutes down to 5.

Implemented Persystent Enterprise Server for imaging corporate workstations and keeping software versions and patch levels current. Augmented an existing open source package to automate software installation; released improvements back to the community. Installed and maintained all 400+ workstations at location. Participated in IT help desk ticket queue.

Fielded support calls from end users and network administrators. Solved problemsranging from simple software installs to complete Microsoft Exchange servermigrations. Mastered GoodLink software and its use on all supported platforms.