George S. Email and Phone Number

People Solutions is an education and training company which focuses on providing opportunities for underprivileged youth to prepare for several industry-standard certifications (RHCSA, Linux Foundation, CompTia) while building job experience in entry-level positions at the same time. As the Lead Developer, my role entails ensuring curriculum is current, ensuring our lab environments are functional and functional to streamline operation and lab implementation, and overseeing the operation of corporate resources to ensure they are efficient and secure. Key technologies employed in this effort are: Active Directory, okta, consul, terraform, AWS, GCP, vultr, Rundeck, vault, nomad, Saltstack, NATS, PowerShell, bash, and Go.

In this role, I worked closely with the VP of Engineering to re-architect several key legacy systems and related work flows, which determined the direction of development for the US, Canada, and India teams. Working in GCE, some of our workflows integrated Kubernetes and containers; others relied on nomad and .NET binaries. We adopted consul for service discovery and vault for secret storage and authentication. Several technical challenges were involved, including compliance across multiple political boundaries, graduated security as required by local statutes, and global scalability. The plan devised was inclusive of best practices in terms of revision control processes, automated workflows, integration with Git, releases managed by QA team. Comprehensive testing during the QA phase involved pen testing as well as “soft” performance benching. I am the primary architect for our new application infrastructure and related security models; my role includes architecting and implementing the infrastructure, automation, and processes necessary to facilitate CI/CD. New pipelines were built-out using the Hashicorp ecosystem (consul, nomad, packer, terraform, vault), Salt, shellscripts where necessary, and Go.

SF is heavily invested in AWS; much of my work involved maintenance of the existing application stack (EC2, RDS, RedShift, S3, OpsWorks), or iterative improvement on the same. My remaining time was spent developing a prototype CI/CD pipeline based on the Hashicorp ecosystem (packer, terraform, consul, vault) and architecting other solutions as required for capacity, performance, and troubleshooting.

Successfully designed and developed software and methods to analyze large datasets (> 32 gigabytes) in pursuit of investigating performance and stability issues; investigated and resolved software, systems, virtualization, and automation on AWS and physical servers. Researched and tested the viability of a number of solutions to enhance performance and further automate service provision. In short...DevOps to the dictionary definition, if one exists. PHP, MySQL, JVM, Puppet, Java, Tomcat, NGINX, CentOS, EC2, splunk, nagios, Zabbix, SOLR, rundeck, JIRA, XML.

Successfully supported UK International Intensive (enterprise) customers, on primarily RedHat Linux 4/5/6. Effectively provided support for both supported and unsupported software, including: Apache 2, nginx, Varnish, MySQL, MariaDB, PHP 5, Memcache, Java, Tomcat, VirtualBox, VMWare ESX 5, OpenStack, postfix, Redis, and Percona. Service configurations ranged from single-instance MySQL servers to load-balanced Apache/nginx/Tomcat instances with distributed replicated database backends. Wrote extensive bash, PHP, and PERL scripts to streamline and/or automate common administration tasks; performed in-depth data analysis and processing (such as Apache logs). One of four engineers on the UK Third Shift (3:00 PM to 2:00 AM) responsible for monitoring, administering, and maintaining customer systems at 4 data centers across the globe. Cloud, virtual, and physical systems fall under the purvey of third shift; on the UK Intensive second and third shifts, I was known as the “MySQL guy.”

Successfully designed and implemented LAII’s IT network and systems infrastructure; effectively organized and managed LAII’s IT Unit, which was responsible for all network, systems, and information security, as well as system, network, end-user, and general IT operational support.Effectively managed information assurance across all domains of LAII’s business operations. Led multiple application development/IT projects to successful completion. Directly supervised 6 individuals (LAII’s support team); managed 15-25 people as required for LAII’s project and software development efforts. Represented LAII in all IT- related affairs, including coordination with the UNM CIO’s Office and the Office of the Vice-Presidents.Pursuant to analysis, I presented the administration with an 18-month plan to implement the infrastructure, services, and provision of support for end-users, research efforts, and both new and ongoing projects. The plan outlined the hardware, services, support, and policies necessary to provide LAII enterprise-level IT operations capable of sustaining LAII’s 50+ end users, multiple application development projects, myriad information and data management efforts, as well remedy a number of FERPA and PICS related security deficiencies.Pursuant to the approval and adoption of my plan by LAII’s directorate, I led my support team to accomplish the completion of each plan objective by August, 2012– several months ahead of schedule. I effected the organization-wide adoption of Standard Operating Procedures (which emphasized customer service and the reliability, security, and flexibility of the computing environment) which were the result of productive collaboration with LAII personnel, UNMMain Campus IT, and UNM’s Security Officers. It is worthwhile to note that LAII remains the second most heavily targeted department at UNM, in terms of intrusion attempts (second only to the Physics department), which number into the scores of thousands per day.

Successfully initiated the creation (and effected the adoption) of operational, support, and security policies; provided effective leadership for the team which supported ISR’s systems, network, and desktops. I successfully managed IT-related HIPAA, FERPA, and UNM regulatory compliance, and was recognized by UNM’s Main Campus IT Department for exceptional diligence as pertained to information assurance.Provided effective leadership for 2+ desktop support personnel and 6+ developers, whom comprised the support and development teams, respectively. I initiated the planning and directly supervised the development of two web-based applications for ISR clients, which culminated in successful completion of contract deliverables.