James Downs Email & Phone Number

San Francisco, California, Us

San Francisco, California, Us

Bentonville, Arkansas, Us

Brought OpenStack and other cloud technologies to WalmartLabs. Championed the adoption of Openstack within Walmart E-Commerce, leading efforts behind initial installs and production pilots. Starting with Essex, guided the cloud program from an engineering project to an operations practice, and through full production deployment. Successfully serving holiday traffic for Walmart.com in 2014 on OpenStack was the culmination of 2 years of work driving the use and acceptance of cloud application patterns and operational practices. As an evangelist of infrastructure automation and DevOps practices, other key efforts involved the evolution of organizational thinking and mindsets, as well as developing governance models for cloud applications and operations. Design, automate, and assist Data Team with infrastructure/platform for monitoring/graphing tools in preparation of holiday readiness. Primary focus on IaaS / Cloud Operations, Infrastructure/Platform Automation. Lead and Evangelize Cloud Adoption, Operations, and Automation. Part of M&A teams to evaluate, onboard, and integrate OneOps, which provides PaaS services into Walmart Cloud environments, and Inkiru, which provides fraud detection services for Walmart.

San Francisco, Ca, Us

Responsible for Production Operations, including production, staging and development data-center environments, internal services, AWS services, Audits, and Compliance with Controls. Coordinated system move planning, executed physical move, and day-of cutover for data center migration. Planned, designed, and deployed centralized access, audit, and logging systems and controls for PCI, and SOC2/type1 audits. Used Yubikey systems to develop 2-factor system. Designed distributed Point In Time backups for distributed feeds database across 45+ machines, 256 data-partitions, and related databases per partition, including PIT, encryption, and off-site storage. Improved ROI by replacing Zeus-based load-balancers for EC2-based services with new SSL-terminated ELB services, saving thousands of dollars a month on use/traffic fees, and improved ease of use.

Founded company to leverage contracting experience with internet technologies and to develop server/compute farm solutions along with grid and cluster technologies. Primarily served as Principal Engineer on Contract, providing services on a contract or as-needed basis to client companies. Primary focus is on Unix and Linux systems, and providing Internet-related services. Many services are provided remotely, reducing client costs.

Early-stage Executive, pre-beta. Instrumental in operational and technical framework, product and feature design and development. Managed contractors. Built Private Cloud and custom machine images to provide EC2-like access to test and pre-production environments. Developed and quality tested video encoding methods to provide best quality at real-time rates for target machine/connectivity (User systems). Drove the use of, and development with, real-time protocols to provide event-based interactive framework on which to build features. Developed schedules, forecasts, budgets, to drive business goals and related technology needs.

Us

Early-Stage employee, pre-launch. Built initial operations, IT, and developed website features including initial versions of administrative portal, and administrative scripts. Managed Operations and Corporate IT departments - consisting of in-house and contractors. Performed a data center move with no downtime. Moved corporate offices with minimum disruption to "ability to work". Responsible for technical operations and technology purchases both for Production environments and Corporate network. Special focus on providing secure access to private records, protecting private information of models and photographers. Segregated access for databases, file servers, and networks using a least-access policy. Planned disaster recovery, planned and deployed off site backups. Brought company into PCI compliance for accepting credit card transactions. Raised awareness of future concerns, including SOX compliance. Deployed technology configurations to ease future control implementation including single sign on (including LDAP based logins to websites), paswordless logins, and least-privilege access.

San Jose, California, Us

designed, planned project schedule, and deployed central authentication and authorization for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance across shopping.com platform, involving hundreds of Linux systems and a lesser number of Solaris systems. Developed SOP documents and provided training to NOC, Systems, and DBA personnel. Designed LDAP based Netgroups configurations for access controls and configuration management. Conducted internal quarterly audits for SOX controls. Supported internal and external audits. Worked as interim security engineer and developed access methods, enforced policies, including password control, and system access policies/rules. Served on the change control board to review and approve proposed system and application change deployments.

San Francisco, California, Us

worked on brokerage products providing systems engineering and support primarily for UAT and QA environments and as assistance to production support team. Worked on systems and application tuning, systems security. Worked with security team to implement design plans in order to deploy new applications. Worked with production teams to deploy application upgrades. Worked on initial and design phases of infrastructure and security upgrade project.

London, Gb

On-site management and installation of project servers including application software installation and configuration. Ongoing support of development teams, providing a stable development environment, configuration, and access as necessary. Ongoing support of production environment. Research of new capabilities and development of new products. Moved from Operations to Products and Services to focus on technology and product research. Worked with marketing lead to present a VGP solution for the Enterprise/SME Mobile PIM market. Presentation was to a Global Business Services workshop held in Spain, presented to ten leading Vodafone Operating Companies. Responsible for coordinating Network Engineers, DBAs, System Administrator/Architects, and working with Security (under a separate organization). JPhone JSky Technology Research - worked in Tokyo, JP and the US to bring research and demonstration systems to US-based research labs. Hosted engineers from three Japanese companies in order to meet deadlines to develop initial proof of concept system. This project was the first time this technology was examined outside of Japan. JSky is the JPhone picture-phone and phone-email (SHAmail) offering. Responsible for securing access to sensitive code, and proprietary information not before shared outside of Japan. Photo Storage Application - worked in Tokyo, JP as part of initial requirements gathering and technical design team with two Japanese companies to develop and deliver VGP technology integrated with a Japanese developed application. Delivery of Consumer Portals - was part of the team that designed and implemented development, QA, staging, and production environments for "R2" product. Lead design of build environments. Projects deployed consumer portal to four Vodafone Operating Companies around the world.

Senior Systems Engineer - Job duties include systems design and maintenance of Unix (Solaris, Linux) and NT servers as well as network planning and engineering. In addition to in-house projects, was also involved with customer projects both hosted, and on-site, solving networking, web-presence, and other Internet/Intranet related issues. Involved with sales support in a pre-sales and technical sales role including solutions presentations to customers. Migrated corporate Oracle database from SCO to Linux. Was part of the team to introduce Java-based web development for the company.Contract consultant at:TEXACO - Long Beach CA, Los Angeles, CATRMI Fuels IT and TRMI Marketing IT Ka - deployed Sun E3500 for initial web presence. Helped the company to develop their online business presence, which included deploying a method to allow magazine advertisers to submit advertising online. Responsible for performance monitoring, upgrades, backups and day-to-day operations. Data was also imported on a daily basis from legacy AS/400 systems that included printing specification files and advertising data. Medical Records Company - designed and deployed VPN solution to allow secure access to remote medical records stored on Sun Enterprise servers and Oracle databases. The database servers were dual Sun E250 machines. Developed for machine lay-out, hardware/software installation, performance monitoring, upgrades, backups and day-to-day operations. Since the servers contained databases of medical records, security and reliability were key. Data Center Move - was part of the team to design and build out a new data center and coordinate system/service cut-over and migration. Company Merger - coordinated system and infrastructure migration during acquisition of competitive ISP.

Us

Us

Systems manager - Contract for primarily remote administration of AIX, HP, Linux, and D/G unix machines. On-site management and installation of OS and firmware upgrades as well as special projects, including application migration. Provide day-to-day support for IT staff and end users for both OS level issues and application problems. Most servers host Oracle databases as application back-ends. Some exposure to specialized applications including Orbit, Lims, CIM/21, and in-house software. Supported system applications included real-time gasoline blending application and Honeywell process control systems Web SysAdmin - Contracted with TRMI Fuels IT and TRMI Marketing IT to support local systems. Worked with developers to support various web applications. Maintained NT web servers running IIS and Oracle Web Application Server using SSI, ASP, and Oracle databases. Client programs included Javascript and VBScript Performed software upgrades and patches Provided day-to-day support, monitoring, and maintenance. Provided project support for an in-house financial accounts system and database cluster.

De Pere, Wi, Us

Assistant Systems/Network Manager Job duties included systems management for student and administrative servers and related networking equipment, computer lab hardware and software as well as installation of new systems. Managed DEC 5000 series servers running Ultrix (DEC Unix), and Alpha 2100 machines running OSF/1 (Unix). Maintained networking gear including 3COM, Cabletron, Cisco. Maintained campus TCP/IP network. Provided technical support for students, faculty, and staff. Wrote software to allow self-service student account creation. Deployed Web Software - deployed Mosaic Web Browser software. Setup and configured Gopher and Web Server software. Deployed Internet Services - deployed Bind and sendmail to provide campus DNS and e-mail services. Taught Training Classes - taught E-mail and Unix user classes to students and faculty. Computer Lab Consultant Provided support for Unix servers providing programming environments and email services. Provided technical support for students, faculty, and staff. Supported PC and Mac systems campus-wide in computer labs and faculty offices