Strategic AccountsAI Principles Pioneer

I was the technical leader responsible for building, launching, and leading the company's first overlay team (Consul), including staffing, SE leadership, and general GTM. I also led the Central region SE team.

I led technical pre-sales and solutions for SwiftStack's AI practice. Focus areas included massive machine learning datasets, autonomous driving, and ML architecture.

I led Cisco's Hybrid/Multicloud technical presales practice and supported our customers' large-scale distributed cloud initiatives.

I helped our customers design, build, and deploy distributed private cloud architectures. Areas of focus included massively distributed cloud for telco, and highly secure zero trust cloud architecture for finserv.

In further support of our efforts to grow our private cloud business, I moved into a technical pre-sales role. Within one month I was actively working large opportunities, and within six months had several major wins under my belt. My role primarily consists of working with clients to understand their business and technology needs, the current state of their platform, and leveraging my Openstack and general IT expertise to design a solution that meets their needs. My broad experience within the IT space allows me to be extremely effective in the wide variety of tasks that this role requires, and allows me to convey a confidence in both the quality of our solutions, and our customer-centric design approach.

Shortly after accepting my prior position as Private Cloud Architect, I was asked by our product organization to fill a need for a Product Manager with both intimate knowledge of our private cloud offerings, and a solid understanding of Product. I worked on enhancing our private cloud portfolio by developing compelling storage offerings leveraging our existing capabilities, and identifying and prioritizing future product opportunities. I also advised product and segment leadership on current trends, and helped turn high-level concepts into actionable strategies by providing the appropriate context and technical detail.

Shortly after returning to the company, I was tasked with the creation of a private cloud support team. I was one of the founding members of the team, which became the fastest growing segment of the company. In addition to supporting our private cloud customers, I provided technical leadership for the team, and created processes and procedures to allow for a scalable and highly effective support organization. I provided monitoring specifications, and assisted in workflow automation and configuration management for our customer environments. Later, I was tasked with becoming our SME for Openstack Object Storage (Swift), and developed the architectures on which our private cloud storage offering is based. I also provided support to sales, and guidance to our support and product leadership.

I took a major VM Replication project that had gone "off the rails" and identified technical and operational roadblocks that were preventing the project from advancing. I coordinated with the relevant vendor and with internal Rackspace groups, and eliminated the obstacles preventing a successful launch. This involved working with the vendor's software engineers to rearchitect the product to function within the constraints of our environment.

I managed the platform on which all Clear Channel Radio station sites, iheartradio.com, and a variety of other content is hosted. I took a very unstable platform (multiple weekly outages) and tuned and rearchitected it to a stable state (no infrastructure outages so far this year). I implemented a backup strategy for critical data. I designed a monitoring solution, and coordinated the deployment and implementation with our monitoring group, including escalation processes, runbooks, and runbook automation. This solution was originally targeted only for the platforms for which I was responsible, but has now been adapted to monitor critical processes across the company. I also implemented and/or developed a variety of systems for process automation, including automated deployment, configuration management, and web-based "self-service" for user and site management. I was instrumental in the creation of a division-wide Change Management process, which allowed us to gain more insight into ongoing workflows, and limit the impact of potentially disruptive changes.

I returned to support to champion one of our Linux teams, who were without any L3 techs at the time. I acted as an escalation point and mentor for the team, and created a weekly training program "Unstoppable Linux Fundamentals" in which I both authored and delivered courses on a variety of topics, including Apache configuration and performance tuning, regular expressions, and others. I also wrote a variety of scripts to enhance our capabilities, including runbook-automation scripts to do reporting on full hard drives and compromised servers, a sar parser (Parsar), and a script to generate reports on weak passwords on Plesk servers.

I was responsible for design, implementation and maintenance of our internal patching, monitoring, and miscellaneous support systems, as well as providing input into corporate strategy in the aforementioned areas. I also provided mentorship and guidance for approximately 20 Linux engineers who supported our infrastructure. During this time I succeeded in simplifying our monitoring stack and reducing hardware requirements andcosts while retaining all functionality and increasing reliability. Ialso improved delivery times for our customers' system resource data from 24-hour latency to 15-minute latency.

I provided technical guidance and expertise throughout the product development life-cycle. I ensured that projects proceeded on schedule and that any technical hurdles were addressed quickly and effectively. I provided guidance on product prioritization and technology trends. I ensured that all stakeholders for a given product were satisfied with our proposed solutions. I launched RHEL5 in three months and MS SQL Server 2008 in 5 weeks, while the typical time to launch was six to twelve months. I was initially hired as the Product Engineer for virtualization, but due to a greater need, I was given the responsibility for all operating systems and applications: this includes both Linux and Windows. After demonstrating my ability to successfully manage multiple product lines, I was additionally tasked with developing our security product portfolio, where I built out our PCI-related product line.

I supervised a team of approximately 10 technicians, acted as the highest point of technical escalation, and mentored and advised my team members. I assisted my Team Lead with his managerial responsibilities, including interviewing prospective team members and providing hiring recommendations. I ensured that he stayed informed on the performance of the team. I attended meetings with the other SSEs to determine Rackspace support policy. I wrote several tools to assist our SSEs in monitoring and reviewing the ticket-related performance of their technicians, as well as adapting existing tools to better evaluate phone performance. I authored several guides on dealing with common issues that were highly problematic for our support team. I provided our technicians with tutorials and classes on general Linux topics, including bash scripting and iptables.

I performed a very wide range of installation, configuration, troubleshooting, scripting, and miscellaneous tasks on Apache, Sendmail, Qmail, Postfix, Tomcat, MySQL, the Plesk control panel, and others. I took customer calls, resolved a variety of emergency issues (coordinating with other departments when needed), and advised on hardware/infrastructure requirements. I developed and modified scripts for internal use, some of which are currently deployed on Rackspace RHEL kickstarts. I also created a knowledge-base for solving Linux-related issues at www.transcendlinux.com. During this time, I advanced to the highest "level" possible within this role before being promoted to Senior Systems Engineer.

I built, kick-started, and performed quality control checks of servers. I completed various maintenance and upgrade-related tasks, and troubleshot issues at the hardware and operating system level. I spearheaded a team that developed scripts to automate routine tasks. I advanced to the highest "level" possible in this role before being promoted to Linux Systems Administrator.

I sat on the CompTIA SME Technical Advisory Committee and consulted as a subject-matter expert during the development of the Linux+ exam.