Enabling, leading, mentoring and learning from a team of excellent programmers and analysts who support and operate the Certainly Certification Authority.

Solving security, resilience and toil with code-shaped hammers.

Building another Boulder CA at Fastly; Certainly is born!

Founding director of operations for Let's Encrypt. Implemented the entire infrastructure, security, monitoring and policies working with a phenomenal team that I built. Built 2 datacenters from the ground up to pass WebTrust audits including security, redundancy, policies, automation, monitoring and logging in 8 months. Played a critical role in moving the entire web from 36% average encrypted page loads to nearly 80% in 3.5 years.

Having realized that managing a team of 12 left me no time to get my hands dirty in doing the work, I asked Proofpoint to find a new manager for the core team. In turn they asked me to form a new DevOps team taking some of the best Systems Administrators and creating a bridge between development and operations for some of the companies most critical products. The chance to create this integration has been enjoyable and taking on the operations side of Proofpoint's spam infrastructure has been an intriguing challenge.

I managed the work of the Core Systems Operations Team to provide a stable, secure and improving cloud infrastructure consisting of 10 thousand plus nodes in datacenters across the globe. The members of this team maintain technologies from VMWare, KVM and Openstack to Hadoop and Cassandra. Advanced knowledge of Linux, Puppet, Bash and Perl are expected of the team as they handle high-level escalations and architect the next steps for the environment.

I was brought to Proofpoint and made managing team lead within a few months. From that point until I became the formal manager of the team I was carrying the load of a senior systems administrator and managing the workloads of about 10 systems administrators. This time saw some great steps forward for the team in terms of size, work organization, gating and flow of work to align with business priorities and improved DevOps collaboration with engineering.In my own systems administration work I worked heavily with the provisioning systems, Federal compliance and security improvements and multiple M&A projects.

I came to Tomax at a very exciting time as they were implementing a multi-tenant cloud infrastructure to better serve potential SMB clients. My primary responsibilities lay in architecting the authentication, authorization and auditing infrastructure and in putting together the PCI-DSS policy framework for the new environment. I really enjoyed the opportunity to take OpenLDAP and architect a solution that provided clean separation between each of the customers and selectively granted privileges to our support staff, although I ended up leaving before it could be fully implemented. I also had the chance to help with troubleshooting the company's firewalls and load balancers as the IT staff ran up against challenges they struggled to resolve.

The Village Bank was a wonderful opportunity to dive into the complexities of a regulated industry at an institution which was recognized by the ABA as 13th in the nation for best banks under $1 billion. I was the bank's first IT Officer and led them from using local, outsourced technical services to a robust internal support organization. Within my first year we went from struggling with the complex security issues regional banks face to receiving compliments from federal and state auditors, including statements that they regularly saw banks many times our size struggling to meet the standards we achieved. During my time I also developed the IT security program, risk assessment and policies (primarily following NIST guidelines).I made many good friends while at the bank. We shared the love of salsa and I learned how to present a solution to my executive staff in terms of business impact instead of sharing it's raw geeky beauty.

My studies at the University of Arizona transformed my life and my perspective on business and the process of discovery. I learned not to look for what everyone is doing now, but to visualize what they are seeing and look for the hole, the big question that the current work is shaping around, but most can't quite see yet, and then to go after it. I worked with phenomenal professors, maintained labs and trained students in computer-aided analytical techniques while refining my own statistical and analytical skills. Enrolled in a PhD in Materials Science and Engineering, but with no recent mathematics experience, the courses challenged me tremendously and I thrived on the challenge and pursuit of a dream. The opportunity I received to participate in the NSF IGERT program has instilled a love of cross-disciplinary efforts that is equally as applicable to the Dev-Ops paradigm as it was to blending anthropology and materials science.

Working as a research assistant I was able to assist in the creation of an important archaeometallurgy research database. Even more significantly, this was the time of my life when I truly learned that sleeping was for the weak and uncommitted. My masters program was the best possible preparation for on-call rotations at more recent places of employment and the sacrifices needed to meet deadlines.

Working at NetVision was what hooked me on information security. I worked heavily with Novell E-Directory and Active Directory, learning LDAP and really diving into authentication, authorization and accounting for the first time. I also lead restructuring the web self-serve and phone support products and learned from some phenomenal people before heading back to school to finish my undergraduate degree.It brought a little smirk to talk to my boss a few months after I'd left and be told he didn't really realize just how much I was doing for them until I left.