Robert Borkowski Email & Phone Number

Mountain View, Ca, Us

Supporting Spanner: Google's planet scale distributed relational database. 2 Billion QPS and 8+ Exabytes of data under management.Leading two squads: - Spanner rollouts, responsible for developing tooling and processes to safely and scalably roll out new versions of Spanner.- Pod Spanner which aims to simplify Spanner database ownership, providing a well lit path and integrating many of the various systems required to stand up a database and safely roll out schema changes.

Sunnyvale, Ca, Us

Leading the adsrv-sre team, supporting advertising delivery at LinkedIn.

Sunnyvale, Ca, Us

SRE in the Marketing Solutions organization. Embedded with ads developers, supporting LinkedIn's advertising systems.

New York, Ny, Us

- Remote work from Canada- Significantly improved the performance of a monitoring dashboard system, and extended its functionality

IT consulting with a focus on ecommerce and web operationsMajor clients were HP, Ideeli, and iCrossing.Shut down operations in order to relocate to the USA for LinkedIn

Nyc, Ny, Us

Ideeli was an early e-commerce flash sale site with a focus on clothing and accessories, and the consignment business model. My role was design and management of production systems. The team was highly decentralized in multiple countries, and I was working remotely from Canada.Highlights:- The business model was a daily sale starting at noon, and this presented a unique challenge to scaling and performance. Database in particular was a bottleneck that required heavy optimization.- Refactoring the puppet manifest multiple times to make it deterministic and easily scalable.- Migrating production services from AWS to Terremark with minimal interruption- Migrating production services from Terremark back to AWS :-)- Development of an autoscaling solution (before AWS had that feature), using performance metric feedback from our monitoring system, and anticipating the daily traffic surge.

Houston, Texas, Us

Colleagues from my earlier HP engagement brought me on for a similar project, but this time with Comcast in the USA, at a much larger scale. Team lead / Level 4 support on the project, later transitioning into the postmaster role responsible for anti-abuse systems.Highlights:- Automating server configurations and standup through cfengine- Automating hardware standup at scale. Configuring blade chasses, firmware updates, OS installs, LUN assignment, network configuration across thousands of machines in two datacenters. Validating configuration correctness, hardware health, and resolving issues found until the fleet was healthy.- Working with the network, SAN, datacenter ops, and HP support to resolve large scale infrastructure failures.- Developing a migration system to compress all customer's mailboxes, regaining a large amount of SAN storage with minimal customer impact.- Visiting the SF Bay area to meet with teams, planting the seed for future adventure

Toronto, Ontario, Ca

Novator was an early e-commerce trailblazer, developing software for, and operating e-commerce websites for clients. The largest clients were FTD flower delivery, and newline cinemas which presented special challenges for surge traffic with popular movies, as well as the yearly cycle of Christmas, Easter, Mother's day. I started as a system administrator responsible for production services, and by the end was in the host manager role after my manager's departure.Highights:- Setting up production environments in multiple colocation facilities. From an empty cage to a multi-rack Novator service stack. Involved travel to interesting places like Chicago, and London to work on datacenters.- Maintaining and scaling database systems. Identifying a tunable which mostly solved one large customer's performance problems was memorable.- Developing a microservice offering postal code lookups for the stack- Evaluating and characterizing performance of different types of server hardware for our workload to make intelligent purchase decisions.- Automating load balancer hardware configuration to speed up onboarding of new clients and setup of LB hardware- Design and implementation of our own managed package repository to control deployment of OS packages.- Evaluation of new colocation facilities, vendor relationship management

Houston, Texas, Us

Rogers is Canada's largest residential ISP, and the task on this contract was setting up and running their residential services: email, webmail, personal web space, Usenet service, etc. My focus was on personal web space services, and Usenet. My first exposure to scale, and expensive server grade hardware. I had the opportunity to learn how to tune SAN controllers, large file systems, solve challenging problems.The environment was Tru64 UNIX running on some beefy Alphaservers.Highlights:- Automating Usenet server file placement so that hot newsgroups were on higher performing disks- Automating filesystem maintenances to minimize impact on customers- Implementing a rudimentary monitoring system while the official one was being designed so that the team would be notified of failure immediately, reducing time to recovery- Automating server validation to ensure new servers were correctly configured.

Maptuit produced logistics solutions for industry. As part of a small team my role involved office systems administration, and setup/maintenance of Maptuit's production hardware and network. Production was mostly on Linux.

Markham, Ontario, Ca

My first full time job after University. Empress software produces an embedded database product which runs on many different platforms. The role involved two main areas:- Office systems support. Email server, printers, backups, networking, VPN, desktop services. Desktops were mostly Linux! The year of Linux on the desktop came early. - Maintenance and setup of the porting environment. In order to support clients running wildly varied systems, there was a lab that had pretty much one of everything. Solaris, SunOS, AIX, HP-UX, IRIX, DEC OSF/1, QNX, various flavours of Linux, and some RTOS oddities. My task was to keep everything running, set up different versions of OSes as required by developers including build tools.

B.Sc., Computer Science

Education record