Promoted to VP of Platform Engineering within three (3) years, directing a team of 5 engineers to drive scalability. Overseeing projects focused on refactoring/refining code, migrating configuration management systems, and building robust CI/CD pipeline systems.✦ Achieved $600K+ in cost savings through strategic migration initiatives, enhancing user experiences, maximizing productivity, and enabling efficient loan processing and servicing. Unblocked critical projects, including resolving Java code issues. ✦ Orchestrated migrating LendKey’s entire operations from a SaaS provider to an internal AWS environment, impacting 150-250 employees globally, including 30-40 customer service representatives (CSRs).✦ Designed and implemented a scalable platform using Infrastructure-as-a-Code (Terraform) to replace the SaaS infrastructure, creating a solid foundation and enabling seamless upgrades and migrations of critical databases without downtime.✦ Leveraged Kubernetes to enhance the platform's scalability, reliability, and flexibility, supporting a Loan-Origination System that originated over 1B in loans annually and services over 3B in total.

Transitioned from Samsung Research America to Samsung Electronics America in June 2015. Spearheaded the creation of a robust infrastructure that managed all North America Samsung TVs API retrievals, enabling seamless integration and improved performance for Samsung TVs across the region. ✦ Mentored system engineers and led DevOps initiatives, including closing feedback loops, creating shared ownership, and implementing comprehensive measurement and monitoring practices. ✦ Accelerated software delivery and improved productivity by encapsulating custom Scala, NodeJS, and Rails applications within lightweight Docker containers and testing and compiling them via Jenkins Pipeline definitions. ✦ Automated scaling, deployment, and reduced code reuse by developing scalable Kubernetes clusters using Terraform and leveraging custom Chef resources for effective configuration management. ✦ Designed and implemented a scalable VPC infrastructure using custom Terraform modules on AWS to improve efficiency.

Transformed the dating site’s infrastructure by executing migrations that enabled the company to effectively accommodate growth, ultimately leading to a multi-million-dollar growth acquisition by Match.com in July 2014. ✦ Increased scalability by migrating the HowAboutWe dating site from RackSpace to AWS with minimal downtime and designing the new AWS infrastructure using CloudFormation and SparkleFormation DSL, streamlining management and securing savings. ✦ Reduced test times from 4+ hours to under 20 minutes by implementing parallel unit, integration and cucumber tests.✦ Centralized the logging infrastructure by utilizing Logstash, Kibana, Redis, and ElasticSearch to support 15M+ daily log entries.

Empowered a high-performing team of 20+ engineers by expertly implementing and managing a suite of Atlassian products, including Jira, Confluence, and Fisheye/Crucible, to foster seamless communication and optimize workflow and productivity. ✦ Secured $300K in cost-savings within the 1st year by migrating from a co-located managed solution to cloud-based hosting, sustaining cost efficiency through service and bandwidth expansion. ✦ Directed a team of system operations engineers to design and implement continuous integration and deployment pipelines, utilizing Kanban methods, Jenkins and custom scripts to support Agile development. ✦ Implemented Chef configuration management and provided AWS virtualized infrastructure for a web-based investment site. ✦ Designed, integrated, and maintained a highly scalable, fault-tolerant infrastructure utilizing open-source applications, including HAProxy, MongoDB in a replica set, Redis, replicated PostgreSQL, ActiveMQ, clustered CouchDB, Zookeeper cluster, Apache, and Jetty to support a service-oriented architecture (SOA) based web application.

Recruited to drive business objectives of establishing a streamlined and scalable environment, overseeing a team of six (6) system administrators, and leading a 20+ member support team of Developers/Quality Assurance in Ukraine, ensuring consistent operations and simplified administration.✦ Scaled infrastructure to handle a 75K% surge in traffic, boosting page views from 4M to 290M and cutting page load latency by 50% through nGinx tuning, caching optimization, and instance type upgrades.✦ Implemented configuration management via Puppet to bootstrap servers and employed mCollective to provide parallel job execution across the entire enterprise.✦ Engineered migration from MySQL community to Percona XtraDB, providing performance enhancements and additional features to debug bottlenecks.

Successfully implemented advanced auto-scaling solutions for this high-traffic online investment tool website (a Dow Jones/IAC venture), ensuring seamless functionality during substantial traffic peaks.✦ Engineered and maintained an AWS-based cloud solution to handle 6M monthly visitors, 20M monthly page views, and surges of up to 10X normal traffic levels. ✦ Optimized database performance by tuning MySQL database configuration, migrating from MyISAM to InnoDB and subsequently to Percona MySQL and XtraDB. ✦ Installed and maintained Zabbix monitoring solution with custom monitoring, notification, and auto-registration scripts to replace Nagios and OpenNMS installations.✦ Reduced page load times by 50% by utilizing xhprof, Firebug, and YSlow to identify bottlenecks and implementing JavaScript/CSS minification, Apache tuning, and Memcached servers.

Architected highly available and redundant core infrastructure for this photo-sharing website, leveraging open-source technologies such as Apache, MySQL, Vagrant, and Tomcat, to ensure optimal performance and reliability.✦ Planned and executed two (2) data center relocations, consolidating all major projects. ✦ Saved $500K+ within the 1st year by architecting and managing a high-capacity 150TB NAS solution for in-house storage.✦ Managed and mentored a team of three (3) Systems Administrators in development work involving C#, Perl, ActionScript, and PHP.✦ Enhanced code rollout methods, optimized MySQL query tuning, and performed daily DBA tasks to maximize PHP application performance with PHP Zend Studio. ✦ Implemented Nagios, Cacti, yslow, and ab to ensure efficient network monitoring, performance trending, and tuning for optimized system performance.

Managed a diverse portfolio of 30+ Linux systems serving ads to 20M+ clients, leveraging Apache 1.3 and 2.0 with mod_perl.✦ Improved scalability by maintaining, configuring, and installing pix Nortel Alteon load balancers and Foundry Server Irons to provide a high level of redundancy and strengthen security. ✦ Managed systems security, including patch maintenance, intrusion detection (Prelude), active systems scanning (Nessus), and backups/disaster recovery (Arkeia).✦ Configured and maintained network monitoring systems utilizing Argus and Nagios open-source software.

Advanced from Junior Systems Administrator to Senior Systems Administrator within 3 years, expanding responsibilities to include managing new system deployments, administering 6 TB of network attached storage, hiring, mentoring, and managing junior staff, participating in 23/7 on-call rotations, and effectively managing assigned projects. ✦ Independently managed all systems supporting 22K paying web-hosting customers, including Apache web servers, FTP, BIND DNS, customer MySQL instances, Exim, Postfix, and custom applications.✦ Ranked the 36th largest web property by Media Metrix in August 2021, serving 30M dynamic HTTP requests across 3M advertiser-supported websites. ✦ Instrumental in a data center migration involving 30+ Solaris servers, 20 Linux servers, 15 Windows NT servers, 2 EMC Symmetrix, 2 EMC Celerras, 2 EMC EDMs, and 2 ATL TLUs. ✦ Gained extensive experience in deploying and administering Solaris, Linux, Apache, BIND, Postfix, DB2, MySQL, Cisco Pix, Cisco Local Director, Cisco Catalysts, Alteon content switches, as well as EMC Celerra, Symmetrix, EDM, and PowerPath.✦ Administered the network-attached storage and associated backup; adopted a disaster recovery regiment.