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Gary Heller is listed as Sr. Director Enterprise Architecture at Northwestern Mutual, based in Nashville Metropolitan Area, United States. AeroLeads shows a matched LinkedIn profile for Gary Heller.
Gary Heller previously worked as Manager, Systems Engineering at Reed Elsevier and AWS Architect / SW Architect at Reed Elsevier. Gary Heller holds Music Theory And Composition from Conservatorio Superior De Música Manuel De Falla.
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I'm a highly technical leader with a robust blend of technical prowess and strong soft skills. Above all, I am a solution creator, thriving on mentoring, coaching, and cultivating teams to deliver world-class solutions while fostering productivity and sense of accomplishment.My extensive experiences span the technical trenches of bare metal device drivers, Cloud & Microservices, through roles in the C-suite, and everything in-between. This empowers me to act as a superconductor between business and technical personnel, communicating comfortably with both.Breaking down large, complex challenges into smaller actionable units is where I excel, enabling the discovery of innovative and sustainable solutions. While being the hero isn't my goal, cultivating whole teams to overachieve, with each member elevating their performance, truly motivates me.Beginning my professional journey with a military kidnapping into the land survey and cartography squadrons in Africa, I quickly discovered my passion for computers. (It was a lot more fun than being shot at in the jungles of Angola). From there it has been a scintillating ride of learning and invention, on four continents, in seven countries. Speaking multiple languages, I embrace and thrive in diverse cultural settings. I've been awarded "Best In Show" at the Comdex Linux Pavilion, Computerworld Honors Laureate, and recently rated better than 96% of all managers worldwide.If your development or DevOps department feels like the wild west, I can help transform it into a low friction, streamlined extension of your business.
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Milwaukee, Wi, Us
In my role as Sr. Director Enterprise Architecture at Northwestern Mutual, I provide expert guidance on Application Architecture, Infrastructure Architecture, Cloud Migrations, Cyber Security, and FinOps. I lead a team in implementing cutting-edge solutions to drive operational efficiency and security enhancements, while also managing and mentoring a team of professionals to achieve organizational goals.
Amsterdam, North Holland, Nl
Build team of DevOps & software developer tool provisioners and tool subject matter experts to serve 250 product development teams. Standardize purpose-built tools and reduce to a single tool for each purpose. Integrate all tooling from distinct vendors and assist the End User Computing, M&A and other teams to onboard the tooling ecosystem. Develop custom tooling where tools were unavailable from vendors. Manage multimillion-dollar budget, vendor relationships, team recruitment and training.Achievements:Rolled out new DevOps and Developer tools, support runbooks, and training across the enterprise for securing, monitoring, and observing entire estate consisting of some 14,000 servers, five cloud providers, across 14 world regions. Established the CMDB, deployed Tanium, New Relic, Status Page, OpsGenie, Flexera and other tools, onboarding 250 applications. Provided essential cost management and other reporting for senior management. Created and integrated automations for plethora of tools including Terraform, Jira, Freshservice, New Relic, Status Page, Solarwinds Orion, AWS Billing, ABACUS, SCCM, Active Directory, Dell Asset Inventory, Flexera Data Platform and CyberArk, utilizing RDS, Containers, Kubernetes, ECS, Lambdas and EC2 servers. Provided End User Computing group laptop inventory management tools for over 10,000 employees, and other services to the EUC team. Delivered the principal estate visibility to InfoSec/Cyber-Security, Software Asset Management and Data Analytics teams. Conceived and initiated company Data Lake that became the Operational Data Platform, becoming the mainstay of all estate insight and reporting. Built and lead a team of systems engineers and tool provisioners, of whom 80% were awarded the bronze or silver medallion for excellence, commitment, and innovation — a greater percentage than any other team in company (100% of team are remote, located in England or the USA) and 60% of whom received promotions in last eight (8) months.
Amsterdam, North Holland, Nl
Transition 89 software products from on-prem data centers to the cloud, Amazon Web Services. Travel Europe & the USA, and work with existing product architects and AWS employees to analyze product architecture and design and assess for best method of transition into cloud.
Amsterdam, North Holland, Nl
Complete development of stalled health industry predictive analytics application. Upgrade software architecture, operations, and software engineering of 10 health industry predictive analytics products and data warehouses built on Hyperion, Oracle OBIEE, Linux, Windows & other technologies. Modernize the business and development processes and install a predictable SDLC.Achievements:Administered budget of $12M and directed 24 staff consisting of software engineers/architects, database administrators, data analysts, quality assurance (QA) professionals, and project managers. Collaborated closely with four PhD scientists and medical doctors to develop accurate models for predictions. Created and managed personnel, budgets, business cases, vendor and contractor relationships, including the RETS organization and data center in Boca Raton, Florida. Saved company $7M and reduced development costs by 35% by rescuing stalled business intelligence/big data predictive analytics application development project and delivered numerous improvements to data warehouse BI applications by creating and managing an effective software development life cycle (SDLC); completed project in five months.
Plaistow, New Hampshire, Us
Developed a MIDI editor to run on Mac OS, Windows and Linux (and installers), for use with the Fractal Audio Systems MFC-101 MIDI Foot Controller, used for controlling the Fractal Audio Axe-Fx, the worlds most powerful Amplifier and Effects Modeler, used by the likes of John Petrucci/Dream Theater, Steve Vai, Taylor Swift Band, Keith Urban, Goo goo dolls, U2 and so many more. I originally developed the editor for my own use, but the Fractal Audio community delighted by it that Fractal Audio contracted me to skin it with their own corporate brand, with colors, logos, fonts etc. and resold it as their own product. We split the support and revenue from it.
Portland, Or, Us
I was contracted to help migrate the www.boats.com web site, application and data store from an on-prem data center to AWS Cloud. The data, photo and video content was so massive (half a Billion files and databases and growing massively each day) that months into the project the data could still not be moved to AWS using the AWS toolchain. I was able to learn the complex and huge legacy boats.com data store, including files and databases and translate that into a few "C" language utilities and some Bash scripts that accomplished the migration to AWS in a few short weeks. What made this achievement extraordinarily difficult was that the www.boats.com site was _live_ and in use 24x7 as the new AWS-resident version came online and the two implementations (AWS and On-Prem) had to be kept in sync.The task was accomplished, on time, without drama, without data loss and without using any AWS infrastructure. Just my software.C/C++, Bash, Python, MySql and PostreSQL.
Raleigh, Nc, Us
SOFTWARE ENGINEER, TECHNOLOGY STRATEGIST (www.redhat.com)RedHat INC., Raleigh, NC (Nov. 2010- April 2011)--global leader in open source technology solutions.Senior Software EngineerDesigned and coded the data storage tier using Ruby On Rails for the RedHat Subscription system.
Developed debian LINUX-based digital forensic software for certain government agencies (under NDA). C, C++, Python, PHP
Seattle, Wa, Us
Manager III, Software DevelopmentRecruit and develop a team of software engineers to create Amazon merchant web site services and contribute to Amazon.com’s ecommerce ecosystem.Achievements:Recruited and developed six-member team of web software engineers who accounted for two-thirds of 120-person division's revenue by delivering most used features including baby and wedding registries. Created and operated numerous key retail websites, including Target.com, Sears.ca, and bebe.com. Contributed substantially to overall Amazon ecosystem. Led Enterprise Merchant software development initiatives. Co-designed, built, and delivered personalization and community features, including Wish Lists, Wedding/Baby Registries, email campaigns, and loyalty programs. Provided scalable, fault-tolerant, international 24/7 websites and web services for integrating with merchant in-store kiosks. Developed model applications integrating Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Python/Perl/PHP, SOA using Agile and Scrum methodologies. Delivered and supported client-facing software and services.
Us
FISERV BankLink, New York, NY (Nov. 2005-March 2008) (www.fiserv.com)Serve as sole leader of treasury management systems global leader, modernizing SDLC and business processes to make the product more resilient and scalable.Achievements:Trained and coached executives and supervisors, project and development managers. Led troubleshooting, testing tool selection, software engineering, and resource planning. Provided architecture, design, coding, and debugging assistance in critical situations. Directed 40 developers and QA staff. Maintained responsibility for recruitment and career path planning. Oversaw and remained within $2.5M budget. Wrote critical portions of image processing and check-scanner drivers in 10 days. Improved development estimate accuracy and product quality by implementing proven SDLC methodology, converting to Agile development. Delivered numerous improved sub-systems, including cash management, remote deposits, image and statement processing. Coded critical portions for image manipulation and data center health checks.
Software Engineering Executive DirectorSummary: Reengineered application development operations from the ground up.Scope: Directed an IT VP, 10 on-shore & 11 off-shore developers, and several QA & business analysts.Achievement HighlightsDelivered a 18-fold overall productivity increase in comparison to predecessor.Turned-around a failing web-based CRM (customer relationship management) project in 10 weeks blending various technologies including Windows, Linux, Oracle, MS SQL Svr, JAVA, JSP, Tomcat, Apache, XML, and PERL . Coded an entire data center process monitoring system in PERL.Managed a 24x7 development team with on-shore and off-shore personnel.
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Us
Director (2001-2004) Software Engineering & Chief Architect (2000-2004) andIT Vice President (2000-2001) Summary: Product development leader.Beginning as a contract software developer (C/C++), rescue troubled check image and statement printing application used by over 1,000 financial institutions. Later, as Director and then Vice President, manage the P&L, business plans, resource management, revenue & expense projections, strategic direction, and development of high-performance, high-capacity, distributed and image-enabled deep archive for financial institutions.Achievements:Directed operations, business, customer support and development activities. Rendered unprofitable operation into high-profitability enterprise over two (2) years by generating a comprehensive solution, increasing check imaging processing productivity 18 times, and delivered the USA’s largest independent checking archive, used by the Federal Reserve and 1,400+ banks and credit unions (100K+ branches). Directed, designed, and developed critical portions of application in C, C++, Java. Implemented support for optical jukeboxes & magnetic tape silos. Designed and built data parser and ETL technologies, earning multiple patents. The Titan e2 Archive, was named 2006 Computerworld Honors Laureate. Managed 44 developers, QA testers, technical writers, sales, and installers. Directed future development, analyzed market trends and competition, and instituted and refined internal processes to support growth and profitability. The check archive ingested upwards of 17 million check images and corresponding data and 160,000,000 transactions monthly, with a seven-year retention period, across three tiers of storage. With then monthly volumes of 2.5 million image pulls/views per month, it scaled by 1,800+ % with a 24/7 operation, without the need for additional hardware or software. These storage designs evolved to become staples in a well-known cloud vendor’s offering.
Software Architect, President and Engagement ManagerSummary: Serviced a corps of Fortune 100 leaders including HP, AT&T, Sun Microsystems, UNISYS, and NCR. Senior C/C++/Perl Software Engineer.Scope: Directed a team of 7 software engineers, 2 support personnel, and one office manager. Recruited and enhanced professionalism of the entire development team.Projects: Virtualized numerous legacy systems and pioneered a number of web interfaces. Designed and coded a Backup/Restore Engine and data mining & disaster recovery solutions. Pioneered data recovery and digital forensics technologies now employed by many organizations in the public, military, and government sectors.
Quick answers generated from the profile data available on this page.
Gary Heller works for Northwestern Mutual.
Gary Heller is listed as Sr. Director Enterprise Architecture at Northwestern Mutual.
Gary Heller is based in Nashville Metropolitan Area, United States while working with Northwestern Mutual.
Gary Heller has worked for Northwestern Mutual, Reed Elsevier, Fractal Audio Systems, Rip City Software, and Red Hat.
You can use AeroLeads to view verified contact signals for Gary Heller at Northwestern Mutual, including work email, phone, and LinkedIn data when available.
Gary Heller holds Music Theory And Composition from Conservatorio Superior De Música Manuel De Falla.
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