Currently the chief cloud architect at the US Department of Veterans Affairs

Chief cloud architect at the US Department of Veterans Affairs

Chief architect at the National Cancer Institute

CSRA's technical lead for the delivery of cloud-based computing services for the FAA Cloud Services program. Responsible for development and evolution of the program architecture.

Chris supports both program and project delivery as well as contract capture. He has experience in solution design and implementation, vendor negotiation, and writing in the context of RFP and RFI responses. He specializes in cloud services with an emphasis on Amazon Web Services (AWS), legacy infrastructure, Agile software development with an emphasis on Scrum methodology, operations, monitoring, and application performance management (APM).While working as a principal solution architect, Chris provided architectural and design input into a greenfield application having national visibility and of mission critical importance to the customer - the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). He worked with a team of others to design and deploy a cloud native and auto-scaling application in AWS, exceeding 99.99% availability and achieving best in class application response times. The application was praised by FAA executive leadership, the White House, users in the public, and stakeholders in the industry.

Chris was responsible for the operations of a suite of applications that provide services to over 550,000 participating organizations that subject the system to more than 50 million queries annually. While working in this role, he completed several major operations improvements. These include upgrading 24 databases from Oracle 10g to 11g with minimal service disruption, leading performance testing using HP Load Runner and Performance Center, undertaking several application and infrastructure improvements that resulted in a more than 100% capacity increase, and managing approximately 300 service disruptions. Chris also made many significant contributions to ongoing development and release activities on the program. He supported four Agile Scrum teams in their successful transition from waterfall to Agile software development, and his program was the first winner of a USCIS award for successfully utilizing Agile methodologies. He worked on several major complex integration projects, providing software architecture and operations input. He was also a vocal advocate for continuous integration and delivery, and he worked closely with the development team and supported them in implementing automated testing and automated software builds and deployments – a high priority for the customer.

Chris was a technical lead in designing and implementing a disaster recovery solution with aggressive 15 minute RPO and 90 minute RTO requirements. The solution used Oracle DataGuard and NetApp SnapMirror data replication. At the successful completion of this project, he was invited to work full time for the prime contractor, CSC.

Chris provided technical support to enterprise customers leasing physical and virtual Unix servers. These customers included business customers, software developers, and other systems administrators. As the last tier of support, he was assigned the most complex Unix problems and requests.

Chris managed and extended a PKI system, built a helpdesk ticketing system using Ruby on Rails, migrated many legacy servers to Solaris zones on modern hardware, and implemented a company Wiki that became widely used and ingrained in the company culture.

Chris conducted security audits on client systems and developed a custom database backup application using VBScript. He also deployed and made updates to the company blog, publishing content to generate interest in the company’s products and services. He managed the company's infrastructure which included Windows and Linux servers, a VMWare VM lab, firewalls and network switches.

Chris maintained the IT infrastructure, developed numerous Perl scripts for billing and administration, and migrated the user database from LDAP to a high availability MySQL cluster. He administrated a Postfix mail server, MySQL database cluster, RADIUS authentication server, and multiple Apache web servers.

Chris supervised a technical support team, monitoring telephone calls to ensure high quality service, conducting performance evaluations, hiring new technical support representatives, and training new employees.

Chris provided technical support to customers of a regional dial-up internet service provider.