Mitch Ferguson Email & Phone Number

Earth Codes Observatory creates digital tools that leverage artificial intelligence (AI), indigenous knowledge, and contemporary science to see what the future could look like. EarthCodes attempts to extrapolate from the timeless codes the Earth has employed for billions of years to envision and imagine a redesigned human-built environment.Providing Technical leadership on Security and infrastructure for product development and architecture resourcing.https://www.earthcodesobservatory.org/team

San Francisco, Ca, Us

Hired as 1st Head of IT, reporting to Head of Engineering. Managed budget of $9M. Provided technology vision and strategy for company-wide IT and engineering architecture, security architecture, and systems. Transformed IT infrastructure to provide stability, sustainability, and scalability for corporate systems. Proactively sought solutions to save costs while maximizing effectiveness. Collaborated with executive leadership team. Attracted, hired, built, and led IT team of 14 and SRE team of 7. KEY ACHIEVEMENTS• Delivered 30% overall cost savings for IT, saved 80% on printing costs, and reduced IT budget 20% in year 1 by establishing strategic purchasing relationships with new vendors, leveraging managed services, enterprise licensing, and volume discounts.•Saved $200K yoy, driving implementation of IBM Aspera UDP file transfer system to accelerate and stabilize file transfers with off-shore BPO partners.•Saved $500K by implementing CoLo SAN storage for heavy image workflows to replace AWS S3.•Directed set up of 3 remote offices (120K sq. ft total) with complete infrastructure, e.g., wireless access, security, AV, digital signage.•Rolled out 2 new retail sites with point-of-sale (POS) devices, wireless, security, digital people counters, AV, and digital engagement kiosks. •Directed move from server farm to colocation data center, resulting in improved uptime, redundancy, and stability. PEOPLE LEADERSHIP ACHIEVEMENTS•Achieved highest employee retention rate within company for 7 consecutive years, providing supportive, people-first culture. •Created culture of promotion, training and developing seasonal staff for FTE opportunities. •Designed targeted staffing strategy to attract and hire top talent for IT Team.•Installed optimized, scalable onboarding process for new company employees.•Developed sustainable, repeatable onboarding/offboarding process to support annual seasonal hiring (maintain/manage 3X+ staff in Q4).

San Francisco, Ca, Us

TECHNOLOGY ACHIEVEMENTS•Developed vision, strategy, and roadmap to provide scalable, sustainable IT for company.•Led platform migration from Rackspace Cloud to AWS to enable scalability; migrated platform and security architecture from Heroku to GCP, reducing AWS cost and improving performance on EKS clusters. •Drove implementation of CI/CD pipeline and security protocols for secure, scalable code deployment. •Led migration of consumer-grade NAS to scalable, sustainable Enterprise SAN to increase security and performance, while reducing administration costs.•Led implementation of middleware layer and secure API to enable secure data share across HR systems with Slack App API integration to ensure secure, scalable staff terminations. •Initiated and led email migration from MS to Google Workspace, improving collaboration with increased stability and consistency across organization. SECURITY ACHIEVEMENTS•Developed vision, strategy, and roadmap to provide enhanced security posture for company.•Directed installation and execution of baseline security tools, including Prisma cloud, CrowdStrike, centralized logging, endpoint logging, code vulnerability scanning, pen testing.•Led implementation of Okta SSO for Minted users and 7M customers to enable secure scalability.•Implemented AWS Security Hub for production and staging environments.•Developed Disaster Recovery Plan for all IT systems and directed installation of systems monitoring processes.•Drove implementation of scalable physical access control systems across all locations. •Ensured sustainable IT security and compliance; managed credit card PCI and data privacy.•Led remediation of IT systems to prepare for SOC 2 Type 1 audit, partnered with Security Team.

Austin, Texas, Us

Drove expansion of IT services to support SolarCity 300% annual growth rate (500 to 15K+ employees) while maintaining high customer satisfaction levels. Provided strategic and technology leadership for Technical Support, IT Provisioning, and Desktop Engineering teams. Worked closely with engineering teams to streamline workflows and application and server availability. Directed all aspects of warehouse rollout and on-premise security, server, networking, and disaster recovery, collaborating with CTO, Facilities, Security Teams (physical, cyber), and VP Security. Directly managed team of 50. KEY ACHIEVEMENTS•Directed support of all earnings, investor, and CRO sales group calls/videoconferences (10 C-suite leaders), maintaining reliable communications and ensuring SEC compliance.•Attracted, hired, developed, and grew IT team 7X to support SolarCity hyper-growth.•Served as Interim VP of IT, reporting directly to CTO/Co-founder, when VP, IT departed; worked with General Counsel on open legal cases and e-discovery.•Provided project and people leadership and direction to ensure continued hyper-growth and SolarCity expansion, collaborating with Head of Networking and Infrastructure Lead.•Managed 9,000+ mobile devices for sales and internal support teams (known to be the first largest corporate managed android environment in world).•Drove scalable design, roll-out, and support of Las Vegas Sales/Call Centers to support Sales Team hyper-growth of 4X+ (800 to 4K); partnered with CRO.•Systematized and operationalized IT Support and Services, defining and installing sustainable, scalable processes, procedures, and SLAs.•Defined, tracked, and reported on KPIs and OKRs for executive leadership.•Designed and established company webcasting standard for All Hands and National Sales Calls presentations; increased event attendance by 50% while minimizing production costs.

Austin, Texas, Us

KEY LEADERSHIP ACHIEVEMENTS•Created culture of promotion, training and developing staff for internal career opportunities. •Spearheaded IT transformation and re-organization to enable customer-first culture; provided strategic, cutting edge, cost-saving tech solutions while maximizing employee effectiveness.•Managed IT integration and support for M&A (company acquisitions). •Implemented technical support incident ticketing system and IT call center to improve customer satisfaction and increase problem-solving efficiency.•Designed and implemented large digital signage solutions for Marketing Team to promote company brand and reputation across HQ plus 50 remote locations.•Developed vision, strategy, and roadmap to increase efficiencies and effectiveness of employee workflows with process improvement and automation.KEY PROCESS & AUTOMATION ACHIEVEMENTS•Increased printer uptime by 50% and reduced expenses by 35%, negotiating and implementing enterprise managed print solutions (MPS) and enterprise predictive toner management. •Reduced contact filing times by 34% for Sales Team by designing and implementing mobile scanning solution.•Decreased onboarding/offboarding data entry time by 70% by enabling automated HR forms.•Increased systems stability and uptime by launching change control process and leading monthly change control meetings to facilitate IT and Engineering hardware and server needs.•Introduced single sign-on (SSO) strategy for on-prem and cloud applications.•Increased efficiency of employee support and onboarding while enabling security and ensuring compliance with automation of all software distribution systems; initiated and established end-point and serve patch management solution.•Designed and standardized centralized access control for all corporate locations; standardized security ACS systems and cloud-hosted security camera solutions for all offices and warehouses.

San Francisco, Ca, Us

Managed company-wide software, security, patch, and application virtualization systems. Led a customer-focused team of 10 engineers to deploy and update software across the enterprise.KEY ACHIEVEMENTS• Architected technical roadmap to update 2400 desktops to the latest OS.• Re-platformed software distribution system to Microsoft SCCM.• Upgraded and maintained software distribution (BMC Bladelogic) servers.• Created a virtual development environment to test software packages and application functionality before deployment.• Planned and implemented Active Directory structure and Group Policy.• Collaborated with CISO to mitigate security risks and exposure; served as Technical Project Manager for cross-departmental security projects.

San Francisco, California, Us

Worked with business departments and 3rd party vendors to ensure SLAs and escalation procedures and enable 24x7 availability to 40K daily online customers.KEY ACHIEVEMENTS• Coordinated issue resolution with 3rd online banking vendors• Built relationships with internal technical resources including systems engineers, development engineers, networking engineers, and project managers to resolve issues quickly and effectively.• Led WAR ROOM emergency response meetings to resolve high and critical priority issues.

Led Customer Care Team of distributed technical support analysts to support eDiscovery application customer users (lawyers, paralegals). Measured, tracked, and reported CSATs and support ticket trends. Created and managed a budget of $2M. Reported directly to CFO.KEY ACHIEVEMENTS• Reduced open problem tickets by 80%.• Increased overall time to resolution by 60%, and reduced operating costs by 40%.• Created Level 2 Support Team to connect Engineering and Customer Care Teams; improved CSAT.• Led implementations and managed budgets for new incident tracking system and call center system, reducing ticket resolution time and increasing customer satisfaction.• Drove problem tickets to resolution; facilitated critical issue response and root cause analysis meetings.• Collaborated with Product and Project Managers to prioritize and coordinate software releases.• Created regular trends and call center operations reports for CTO.

San Francisco, California, Us

• Provided software deployment strategy and emerging technology implementations to reduce POS high software installation costs and legacy technology on 110K POS devices.

Walnut Creek, Ca, Us

San Francisco, California, Us