Brian Pitts Email & Phone Number

Atlanta, Ga, Us

San Mateo, California, Us

In 2021, I joined SurveyMonkey to build an embedded SRE team supporting the eight development teams responsible for the core product. I served as the team’s technical lead and helped my manager define our approaches and drive execution.In 2023, my team moved to SurveyMonkey’s central Infrastructure organization. There, we acted as an enabling force for all of Engineering’s migration from legacy CI and compute to Github Actions and Kubernetes. My contributions included· Lead a project to define and implement a paved path for running applications in Kubernetes. This improved the quality and speed of migrations and now underpins most of SurveyMonkey’s applications.· Built self-service tooling for provisioning and verifying infrastructure components, decreasing the time and knowledge needed to perform these common tasks correctly.· Architected a system for service discovery and shared configuration across applications which facilitated transparent movement of workloads to EKS.· Served as subject-matter expert on many projects for improving our deployment, testing, and traffic routing capabilities. Advocated for them with leadership and helped the project leads design solutions and plan the work.· Watched for frequent migration questions and pain points application teams faced, identified the gaps in documentation or platform capabilities leading to them, and worked across teams to ensure they were addressed.Outside of my team’s responsibilities, I also· Assisted in the launch of Engineering Guilds, helping them develop effective processes for creating and promoting standards.· Rebuilt our Staff+ Engineer Chapter into a venue for information-sharing and peer support.· Joined a small group to champion and improve our architectural decisionmaking, resulting in a streamlined process with better uptake.· Helped design and run interviews for infrastructure-focused roles.· Mentored and coached engineers from junior to staff level.

San Francisco, Ca, Us

I took a mixed SRE and management role in a newly-formed team. As an SRE I supported over 30 services, including mozilla.org and MDN, primarily running on Kubernetes in AWS. As a manager I lead hiring, built out my team’s practices and roadmap, and coached my team members.

San Francisco, Ca, Us

I was part of a global team responsible for the many services used to create Firefox and support its hundreds of millions of users. I served as primary SRE for 6 services, working closely with their developers to handle their infrastructure needs. Additionally, I focused on several areas:Product Initiatives:· Paired with a developer to write and launch a PoC backend for improving affiliate tracking on Firefox’s New Tab page. This experiment validated a potential multimillion dollar revenue opportunity that was further developed.· Scaled our push notification system to handle every active Firefox user maintaining a connection. This unlocked the ability for other services to push notifications of changes rather than relying on periodic polling from clients. I helped rearchitect two of those, our experimentation and remote settings systems, to handle the new traffic patterns this caused.Service Onboarding:· Migrated Firefox’s crash reporting, internationalization, and CI services to run on our standard platforms with CI/CD and IaC.· Maintained our developer guidelines and sample code & CI pipelines for new services.· Advised development teams on meeting our production standards.· Guided launches of new services, coordinating engineering, product, and security teams.· Helped develop new approaches and tools for running services in Kubernetes on GCP.Monitoring:· Lead cross-department effort to select and migrate to a new monitoring platform, consolidating tools and reducing vendor costs by 75%.· Created reporting on service availability and on-call workload to help management evaluate service and team health.Costs:· Lead authoring of a cost optimization guide for AWS as part of an initiative that reduced AWS spend by 40%.· Collaborated with security and data teams to build a system for per-service cost tracking.· Lead the implementation of automatic auditing of cloud resources to enforce cost and reliability standards.

San Francisco, Ca, Us

San Francisco, California, Us

I was part of a small team responsible for the complex infrastructure of one of the world’s largest ticketing platforms. I assisted developers in designing and deploying new products and features while maintaining stability and capacity to handle traffic for high-demand events.Representative projects included:· Partnered with Platform team in design and launch of new approach to SOA.· Helped plan our VPC architecture, adapt our tooling for it, and migrate instances to it.· Migrated an acquisition’s venue management product to Eventbrite’s infrastructure.· Evaluated APM products and lead adoption of Datadog.· Contributed to internal libraries and tools for instrumentation, builds, dev environments, monitoring, provisioning, etc.· Partnered with teams introducing new technologies to make them production-ready.· Facilitated biweekly company-wide Ops Q&A sessions

San Francisco, California, Us

New York City, New York, Us

Work with developers in Nashville, London, and Melbourne to ensure that lonelyplanet.com can efficiently deliver a stable and fast product to travelers. Practice infrastructure as code and test driven development at all layers of our stack, from Fastly config to individual chef cookbooks.

Columbia, Mo, Us

Responsible for research computing resources in the Computer Science department, Informatics Institute, and Digital Humanities Commons; this included systems for interactive and batch computation, visualization, and web hosting. Focused heavily on building rapport with the users I supported. Supervised part-time junior sysadmins.

Menlo Park, Ca, Us

Part of the DevOps team managing a cloud communications platform. Handled product releases, testing them, deploying them, monitoring them, upgrading them, or rolling them back. And most of all, automating them! Worked at a startup's pace with coworkers distributed acrosss three continents.

Administer servers and SANs in Georgia and Pennsylvania. Lead implementation of virtualization (kvm), monitoring (nagios, collectd), and configuration management (puppet). Help maintain the uptime of over 100 production and development websites running on nginx, apache, mod_perl, tomcat. postgres, and oracle. Assist DBAs and developers by packaging software, automating tasks, and troubleshooting.

Administered web software stack including Linux, Apache, lighthttpd, and MySQL. Developed and maintained custom Perl and Ruby applications. Developed extensions for existing PHP applications.

Atlanta, Ga, Us

Student worker in the Linux Administration, Integration & Web Development group. Performed system administration duties for several digital library projects. Developed solutions to meet the needs of researchers and developers. Technologies worked with included clustering (OpenSSI), digital preservation (LOCKSS), web crawling (Heritrix), and GIS (OpenLayers and Mapserver).

One of five IT employees for Emory's student newspaper. Assisted with purchasing and personnel decisions. Led training and documentation efforts. Provided technical support for the business office and newsroom. Administered Linux servers and OS X servers and workstations. Projects implemented include fibre channel SAN, directory services, offsite backups, and groupware system.

Ma, Political Science

Ba, Political Science, Computer Science