Melody Walker Email & Phone Number

Redmond, Washington, US

Ensure stable software releases are deployed to production. Manage release branches. Unblock hardware related blocking issues. Increase velocity of release rollout to production fleet.

Redmond, Washington, US

• Strengthened partnership with vendor teams, enhanced team expertise, operational understanding and promoted Diversity and Inclusion community building, fostering a productive team culture. Developed a new compliance.
• Consolidated service support teams work to two existing vendor teams into one team, reducing costs by $500k while simplifying and maintaining the same level of service.
• Planned and deployed 3rd party software (YSOFT), improving security compliance and adding robust features. Handled integration work for the YSOFT / Universal Print connector, eliminating the need for Virtual Private.
• Directly contributed to product development of the Universal Print Azure product, including scenarios for distributed systems and 3rd party cloud technologies, focusing on information security and data privacy.
• Enhanced service experience by contributing to OKR plans and driving operational excellence through technical architecture improvements and migration to a Cloud SaaS based architecture.
• Performed design reviews on exiting Azure resources, targeting efficiency and optimization, reducing overall cost by $140k per year.

Redmond, Washington, US

• Focused on increasing reliability through increased telemetry and enhanced error handling of existing and new experience development. Championed data privacy standards through GDPR compliance. Contributed to the.
• Modernized 18 internal benefits related applications as lead engineer, to.net core from.net 1.1 or 2.0 and Integrated Azure DevOps CI/CD pipelines. Many systems had not been actively developed since the mid-2000s.
• Integrated configuration of all benefits services (20+) into secure services such as Azure Key Vault for increased security of secrets, and easier management of configuration.
• Implemented GCP encryption standards for data in transit for HR data APIs.
• Prioritized and advocated for increased compliance with a variety of initiatives and toolsets. This includes tracking of expiring objects, cataloging secret implementation details (where and why), and permission.
• Implemented 11 controls and toolkits designed to reduce vulnerabilities in both code and in deployed resources, including SaaS solutions, correcting hundreds of outstanding vulnerabilities in the Azure cloud computing.

Redmond, Washington, US

• Member of a service improvement Tiger team performing incident response for distressed internal HR services. Analyzed and documented key fault areas causing business process delays and poor user experience. Modernized.
• Negotiated and secured $2m for development capacity to prioritize code and process changes to improve system performance, including security architecture and implementing PKI solutions to maintain data privacy.
• Developed and implemented telemetry improvements in 5 payroll processing applications, improving root cause through better forensic data. These also enabled the development of custom alerting, reducing time to resolve.
• Collaborated with Product engineering and implemented a bi-weekly review process with critical path customers to review current thematic issues, recent performance of payroll processing, as well as upcoming changes and.
• Drove FMEA (Failure Mode Effect Analysis) for the payroll processing systems, and implemented 14 process improvements, and improving team accountability for handshakes between disparate systems in the process.
• Identified 5 business process inefficiencies that resulted in increasing their overall efficiency of the payroll administration team through modern technology solutions, reducing manual effort by 12 hours in a 52 hour.

Redmond, Washington, US

• Owned & operated all service engineering functions for many Finance BI applications. Managed all aspects of Operations for a portion of Finance BI applications, including Service Management, Service Design, Problem.
• Led quarterly cross-discipline service improvement efforts for the Mercury (SQL based General Ledger & Earnings Releases) and functioned as a Tier 4 application & business process subject matter expert.
• Designed and Implemented Service Level Requirements, a series of design standards to ensure that operational costs are minimized.
• Improved a ETL processing time by 20% and report execution time by 30% using detailed query, table, and index design analysis in SQL server.
• Designed, negotiated, and implemented a brand new $20m dollar server and storage environment that increased overall user capacity by 70%, and reduced ETL times by 75% and expanded scalability.
• Reviewed and modernized over 40 application specific SOX controls to account for technology shifts and the move to Azure, designed software to account for control intent and overall compliance.

Redmond, Washington, US

• Performed analysis on key service impacting incidents in the production environment for the Corporate Functions IT group (Finance, HR, Legal, Cross IT platforms). Drove key work items with application engineering teams.
• Led & managed the MSIT Ticket Volume Reduction project, resulting in an overall reduction of 43% of our overall ticket volume, and saving the company $12m in operations budget.
• Designed tooling and collection methods to track overall ticket volume across all of Microsoft IT.
• Performed ROI analysis for engineering leadership to fund the ticket reduction program. Negotiated budget and unilateral adoption of volume reduction project improvements.
• Developed Custom tools using PowerShell and SQL to track and report on Service Engineering created VSTF bug and requirement aging across 50+ VSTF repos.
• Provided detailed analysis and improvement steps on hardware and software faults and other system stability related outages.

Redmond, Washington, US

• Managed a team of Service Build Engineers supporting the Corporate Function & Business Intelligence areas. Led internal team process decisions for Change & Release functions. Served as escalation point for critical.
• Reported data for functional area at Monthly Business Reviews and represented service transition in shared goals reviews with organization leaders, and leaders of customer and partner teams.
• Partnered with many members of a virtual IT delivery team to improve process and overall level of service.
• Developed a service improvement plan focused on configuration management, vulnerability management, and information technology management, partnering with with engineering teams and other service delivery partners.
• Negotiated Vendor service contracts resulting in lower overall spend with increased capacity and scaling.
• Lead virtualization effort for CFE beginning in 2008 resulting in over 50% of the server environment populated with virtual servers.

Redmond, Washington, US

• Performed complex installations of new applications; Provided cost-effective solutions for improving quality of releases to engineering teams, which reduced the time required for releases.
• Performed advanced core OS and SQL troubleshooting techniques to determine root cause of issues encountered at the time of release.
• Ran consolidation project that reduced footprint of server environment which resulted in reduced hosting costs and improved utilization of existing capacity.
• Provided hardware estimates and performed right-sizing exercises on new orders to ensure that the correct capacity was being ordered for a given project.
• Worked with F5 to implement security features (IPSEC) to Big IP load balancers and internet facing firewalls.
• Successfully advocated adoption of a new build automation standard using MS Build and scripting languages like PowerShell, which is still a component of CFE automation standards, a precursor to modern CI\CD pipelines.