Joseph Landers Email & Phone Number

San Francisco, California, Us

As usage of our Kubernetes based Compute platform at Zendesk has grown, so has the Compute team. Zendesk is now running close to 100% on Kubernetes, and my org is made up of scrum teams spread across the US and Australia, each with its own distinct concern. - Compute Platform team is the evolution of the original Compute team, now focused on building out a new layer on top of our Kubernetes solution, a control plane of control planes if you will, to automate workload placement and workload migration strategies. Our goal is to increase reliability and reduce blast radius through multi-cluster workload splitting & rebalancing, multi-dimension HA, and strategies for regional, AZ, and cluster level failover capabilities. Soon, we'll deliver Blue/Green cluster migrations with canary analysis to Zendesk. - Compute Infrastructure team focuses on automating the build, delivery, maintenance and upkeep of Kubernetes clusters at Zendesk. We have a complicated fleet of clusters, made up of many different host-groups. When rolling out updates to the fleet, we soak all our changes in a single AZ of just one hostgroup, where we run smoke tests and monitor SLOs. We continue through all Hostgroups and AZs, one cluster at a time. In short, our rollouts are complicated. Infrastructure team is building out a system of operators managing the process, orchestrated by Spinnaker pipelines. - Finally, the Compute Accelerate team is focused on elevating the business in 2 ways. First, by applying the features of our platform to balance the competing concerns of resilience, reliability and cloud cost control. Second, by enhancing and extending the features of our platform to provide more power and autonomy to engineers working the Zendesk suite of products. Currently, their focus includes developing a deeper integration between our Kubernetes platform and the Istio service mesh, and developing a more robust horizontal autoscaling capability.

San Francisco, California, Us

As a part of the Foundation organization, the teams I manage are working on building out Zendesk's next generation infrastructure platform and the associated tools needed to containerize, deploy, manage and monitor the myriad services, workers and apps that make up Zendesk's microservices ecosystem. Foundation Compute team is engineering an abstracted "cloud of compute" built on top of Google's Kubernetes container management system. We designed, built out and now maintain a fleet of Kubernetes clusters on AWS. We bake our own AMIs, managing a number of different hostgroups for different workload types, as well as their associated CloudFormation stacks and autoscaling groups. We've built our own bespoke auto-remediation system for keeping all cluster nodes (including etcd) healthy while we sleep. We're responsible for container networking via the AWS CNI plugin, and interfacing the clusters with the deployment pipeline, DataDog, Splunk, the ELK stack, Hashicorp Consul (for cross-cluster service discovery) and Vault (for secrets). Finally, we're tasked with building and managing the vision for how Zendesk uses EBS and EFS for Persistent Volumes on K8s, how best to use the Horizontal Pod Autoscaler and Vertical Pod Autoscaler for workloads running on the cluster, and how to interface the Cluster Autoscaler to On-Demand, Reserved and Spot instances for optimal cost control. Looking forward, we're planning to enhance our clusters with an event driven cloud function capability built on top of Google's KNative platform. As their manager, I'm looking for opportunities to capitalize on synergies across Zendesk's many scrum teams by finding common usage patterns and helping other teams integrate into the platform.

Novato, California, Us

SafetyChain is a SaaS company providing the best-in-class system for food safety and quality management. Though I was hired as a Principle Architect, my role quickly evolved into that of an Engineering Manager. I worked side by side with Director of Product Management under the CTO, responsible for all aspects of the SafteyChain SaaS platform. I was directly responsible for defining the architecture of the system and seeing it delivered to production, including the integrated transaction processing and reporting subsystem, document management function, Workflow automation and ERP integration. I spent the last 2 years of my time there managing the build-out of their 2nd generation SaaS platform. To see that vision realized, I functioned as Engineering Manager over a team including software developers, QA/test professionals and integrations technicians, all focused on transforming the system from the ground up to provide the most complete suite of automated safety and quality monitoring functionality, up and down the supply chain.

Plantation, Florida, Us

I was hired here as the Software Development Team Lead & Systems Architect responsible for design and implementation on a project to replace the companies legacy web site and back-end ERP. Our team actively practiced Agile methods and employed both cutting edge techniques and best practice design patterns to ensure the most robust, scalable and flexible system possible while simultaneously offering a best-in-class experience to users, regardless of desktop browser or mobile platform.

New York, Ny, Us

I started here as an application developer, but was eventually promoted to team lead over a small team working on a portion of the Infor Enwisen brand's rich internet application development framework. This framework supported rapid application development, and easy SaaS client site customizations by empowering developers to design loosely coupled components, then assemble them into composite screens, subsystems and full blown single page JavaScript web-apps. Though i did many other things at the company, working on that framework was my pride and joy.

Sacramento, Ca, Us

I started here as an application developer, mainly acting as a liason to the state hired contractors, assisting in requirements gather and coding tasks. However, after my first year I was promoted to head of a small team of programmers and IT's focused on performing concurrent analysis, design and implementation of medium to large scale, 3-tiered software systems for the departments internal use. We never fully broke the departments dependency on contractors, but we did write some systems internally which saved the State allot of money. My crowning achievement was leading a programming team that designed and built a distributed, 3-tiered web application that fully automated a manual employee timekeeping process. The new system saved the State man-hours while also increasing data accuracy, and was my baby. ;-)

Master Of Business Administration (M.B.A.), Executive Leadership

Bachelor Of Science In Computer Information Systems, Computer Software Engineering