James Simas Email & Phone Number

Seattle, Washington, United States

✔ Writes services and tooling in Python 3, Golang, and Ansible to assist team in making global changes, managing our fleet more effectively, and to fix production issues

Greater Seattle Area

✔ Leads a team of 7 Reliability Engineers responsible for operating a $25M global network spanning 13 international points of presence to provide WAF service to global customers✔ Writes tooling in Ansible, Python 3, and BASH to assist team in making global changes, managing our fleet more effectively, and to fix production issues ✔ Functions as SME, training and educating team and other technical engineers on the WAF service, internal APIs, and tooling✔ Facilitates weekly standups and team meetings for planning and executing projects effectively✔ Troubleshoots and fixes issues within production environment, implementing resolutions network-wide ✔ Manages the team’s workflow, prioritizing projects and creating roadmaps for moving projects forward ✔ Leads service reviews for analyzing product telemetry, support ticket trends, incidents and usage metrics to determine systemic issues and identify opportunities for improvement✔ Presents team’s challenges, results and roadmaps to executive leadership in bi-monthly reviewsKey Accomplishments:✔ Successfully expanded points of presence from 5 to 13 globally by expanding into AWS✔ Consistently performing as the #2 committer to main repository, contributing 1,159 commits to date and exceeding the team average by roughly 500% ✔ Effectively grew number of servers under team’s management by 400% in 2.5 years by writing automation that facilitated growth through reduction of workload and effort required✔ Co-developed de-duplication tooling that reduced amount of duplicate configuration in environment by 100% and subsequently reduced amount of hardware to be purchased by producing twice capacity ✔ Received 17 peer nominations for corporate recognition awards in 14 months

Greater Seattle Area

✔ Monitored and automated network challenges while operating within a large-scale environment ✔ Utilized Ansible, an open-source configuration management system, to design and develop tools for automation of workflows and data access✔ Worked directly with customers to troubleshoot and debug issues in production✔ Managed automation projects and project schedules within the team to ensure completion and delivery✔ Collaborated with engineering and operations to design functional solutions to identified issuesKey Accomplishments:✔ Wrote Python CLI utility for interacting with internal service APIs to increase engineering productivity✔ Created 30+ Ansible roles from scratch in order to improve the team’s ability to manage our fleet ✔ Developed a wiki to share technical knowledge and processes in a centralized, searchable repository

✔ Performed hardware, software, and network troubleshooting within Fortune 500 customer networks ✔ Provided primary point of technical contact for 200 devices for a $30M client contract, diagnosing and resolving issues immediately to allow for smooth and uninterrupted operations ✔ Operated an internal lab environment that allowed engineers to check in / out devices for reproduction of customer issues✔ Tracked and maintained lab assets while assisting engineers with issue reproductionsKey Accomplishments: ✔ Maintained an average of 9.999/10 customer satisfaction rating on over 120 surveys from customers across 2 years of service✔ Successfully averaged time to resolution at 2.1 days when team target was 7 days to resolution ✔ Promoted to Reliability Engineer within 3 months of service as Sr. Enterprise Account Engineer

Greater Seattle Area

✔ Managed customer communications for highly escalated cases with executive visibility, providing updated status reports of issues and resolutions to senior leaders within customer accounts✔ Diagnosed and resolved product issues for application load balancers, layer 3 and layer 7 firewalls, and DNS infrastructure within Fortune 500 customer environments✔ Operated and maintained internal lab gear, including VMware vSphere, 35+ BIG-IPs, DNS, and switching fabric for use by internal engineers to reproduce customer issues Key Accomplishments: ✔ Received prestigious 5 Star Award in July 2017 for excellence in leading the team by example and providing clients with superior support✔ Successfully turned around customer satisfaction for major telecom customer, retaining customer and leading to significant portfolio expansion✔ Wrote web application using Python 3 / Django that allowed users to check devices in / out of lab, which bettered the coordination and tracking of lab resources and improved workflow by 100% across the company globally

Springfield, Oregon

✔ Developed web application to track case assignment and distribute incoming work evenly across team ✔ Diagnosed and resolved top-tier product issues within customer environments for anti-malware product✔ Documented and published technical solutions to the public Symantec knowledge base✔ Mentored technicians to improve product knowledge and troubleshooting ability✔ Managed and participated in projects to improve inter-departmental collaboration and address issues✔ Collaborated with development team to obtain fixes for product defects✔ Coordinated resources from multiple departments, including engineering, support, and consulting services to resolve customer product issues✔ Created and delivered training to engineers on troubleshooting techniques, advanced tool usage, and technical information on upcoming product releasesKey Accomplishments: ✔ Authored and updated over 75% of internal technical documentation for Symantec engineers✔ Wrote 6+ Python tools to analyze large data sets and assist engineers in identifying esoteric issues which would have otherwise gone undiagnosed✔ Created a wiki, blog, and weekly newsletter to share technical knowledge internally amongst 100+ engineers and program managers

✔ Provided technical and political management of escalated cases with Fortune 500 customers ✔ Managed technical communications with clients’ senior leaders, providing synopses of bugs, issues, and resolutions in layman’s terms✔ Authored and updated customer facing articles on our public knowledgebaseKey Accomplishments: ✔ Successfully and single-handedly diagnosed and resolved a complex issue onsite for a client within 5 days that the engineering team had been unsuccessful in resolving for 6 weeks

Springfield, Or

✔ Partnered with clients directly to troubleshoot product issues within a large, high-volume production distributed environment✔ Escalated tickets to advanced tiers when necessary for resolution Key Accomplishments: ✔ Consistently ranked in the top 2 for volume of tickets resolved and quality of customer service