I've added the infrastructure engineering team and duties to my scope, including the functions related to the cloud platform, service pipelines, network, access control, security and compliance.I inherited a platform backlog and had the challenge of balancing priorities across competing stakeholders within a bare bones platform team. I've worked on creating a strategic vision for the team, to pave the way for team growth and scalability.- Building team dynamics, working agreement, focused responsibilities, and value proposition to the organization- Refreshing the Disaster Recovery plan - Ran interference for Emergency Response and network defense against malicious attacks- Facilitated project to upgrade Postgres databases- Clearing the path for engineers to focus on their pain with initiatives to make their tomorrow better than todayThe technical stack in this role includes AWS, Datadog, PagerDuty, Cloudflare, Sentry, Terraform, Gitlab.

I brought my previous successes in building an SRE program to The Zebra. Over a decade in software development operations has enforced my beliefs in the Google SRE principles. Starting with a small, newly formed team, we focused on implementing the foundation of site reliability practices. I created a roadmap to focus on observability, SLOs, incident response practices and resiliency. I designed the SRE function: vision, incident response training/docs, team growth strategy, career framework. - We established service level objectives on system endpoints with error budgets and are building a user impact framework. - We reduced developer toil with incident response automation and improved alert noise reduction and improved on-call life with mantra “Every alert has an action”. - We developed a service maturity rubric to guide development teams on operational best practices and pave the way for the founding of Reliability Team ownership. - We kicked off a long-term strategy for Resiliency Testing to be proactive, SLO based, automated and built-in through chaos engineering with Gremlin. Aside from my service to the SRE function, I enthusiastically drive initiatives around Engineering Culture - Agile transformation activities, virtual and in-office engagement events for teams and engineering management workstreams.

I had a vision of creating a new Site Reliability Engineering team with the mission to support Willis Towers Watson HR Software products in reliability, availability, performance and scalability. I was given the opportunity to make that vision a reality and now the team provides full scale monitoring systems, powerful diagnostics, emergency support and insightful product analysis. We brought stability into systems by defining Service Level Objectives with appropriate SLI, SLO and SLA. We used various monitoring methods for real user monitoring, user simulation, job processing, error detection and database monitoring to detect potential system problems and alert on-call response teams using the PagerDuty notification system. Business programs now have insights into their application health and scalability that help them analyze risk and prioritize reliability appropriately.

I was selected to be the strategic leader of the Global Technical Support Team, charged with increasing the scope of development operations and production support with minimal increase in resources. Daily responsibilities included debugging and mitigating application and system problems, acting as the primary technical escalation contact for production issues, liaison between development and delivery teams, and providing vision and leadership for improving operational methods within a development support team of 20-25 team members. The Global Technical Support Team put me into countless "fire drills" where I had to react quickly and decisively to restore services. These experiences fueled my passion for sustainable production support methods, balance between fulfilling client needs with reusable and automated solutions, and prevention over reaction.

I worked with the software delivery teams for Towers Watson’s talent and rewards products providing development operational support, custom code development, bug resolution and deployment management for SaaS applications. I also acted as the Atlassian JIRA Administrator: conducting JIRA upgrades and administration for application development groups.I received special recognition for acting as the sole architect and engineer by solving business needs and implementing a new installation of JIRA Service Desk to serve as the organization's client software support issue management tool.

I started my software career with the customer support team for a local government document and content management software: a Java based application, installed on Apache Tomcat on client-managed hardware. My persistent troubleshooting techniques helped me become a SME very quickly and I was asked to lead the team after one year. While I never stopped investigating issues, as Lead I learned the fundamentals of software support services: defining SLA's, using data-driven metrics to guide team behaviors and managing client escalations. Because Tyler's development group was a smaller business, I got the opportunity to conduct many aspects of delivering software. I used my influence to advocate for customers and support the vision of product development. I produced user documentation, conducted virtual and in-person trainings and hosted user conferences. I performed all of the product's release management – change and configuration management, Tomcat and application installation, beta testing, and client coordination. The experience with release management fueled my passion for automation and what I eventually came to know as DevOps.

I coordinated all communications operations for a Military Police company in peacetime and through a combat deployment.