Rick Higgins Email & Phone Number

Hoffman Estates, Il

Hadoop Infrastructure, Big Data Real Time Infrastructure and Administration at Sears Holdings CorporationManage the team that does the Architecture, Engineering, Deployment, and Support of the hardware and software components. Manage all production Hadoop clusters in the enterprise, as well as related infrastructure that supports real time processing components such as MongoDB, Cassandra, Storm, and Kafka. Manage BI tools that integrate with our supported Hadoop platforms, such as Datameer and Platfora. Tableau is currently being tested for potential future integration. Also manage additional infrastructure used for configuration management and monitoring of all supported environments. We utilize Nagios, Ganglia and the Hadoop UI's to monitor the environment. Cobbler and Puppet are utilized to provision machines for the Hadoop environments and also maintain version control. In some newer clusters, we are using Cloudera Manager and Ambari to deploy and manage Hadoop clusters. Both Cloudera and Hortonworks distributions are deployed and supported by the Hadoop Infrastructure Team.

Hoffman Estates, Il

Responsible for support of multiple open source Hadoop environments including; infrastructure planning, scaling and administration. Work closely with infrastructure, facilities, network, database and application teams to insure business applications are highly available and performing within agreed upon service levels.Primary responsibilities included:• Providing day to day production support of all our Hadoop infrastructure• Implementation of new Hadoop hardware infrastructure, OS integration, and application installation• Leverage Cobbler and Puppet for configuration management of all environments• Cluster maintenance: HDFS support and maintenance, adding and removing cluster nodes, backup and restores• Provide support and troubleshooting for user and application issues associated with Hadoop• Assist Hadoop application development teams with troubleshooting MapReduce Jobs as required• Cluster Monitoring and Troubleshooting: Manage Nagios and Ganglia monitoring, Manage and review Hadoop log files, filesystem management and monitoring• Hadoop Cluster capacity planning• Work with the team to implement new business initiatives as they relate to Hadoop• Work with the team to install operating system and Hadoop updates, patches, version upgrades as required• Review/approve proposed application changes within the platform to ensure stability• Provide the same Hadoop administrative support services to external big data customers of the former MetaScale division, which was a subsidiary of Sears Holdings Corporation

Member of centralized Distributed Systems project team. Assist with new application deployments within the enterprise.Primary responsibilities included:• Review new application implementations for consistency with corporate direction and design standards• Initiate procurement for hardware and software assets for projects as needed• Assist in technical server deployment designs on Windows and Linux based solutions• Provide consultative knowledge to other application teams and business units• Perform standardized windows/linux server deployments according to the documented design solution, and turnover to the customer

Served as a technical Architect on all Wintel projects for Sears. Worked to deliver standard, supportable, and cost effective solutions on behalf of the customer. Interfaced with CSC and Sears Project Management to gather initial customer requirements. Created the technical solution, and produced all of the CSC technical documentation for the solution. Submitted applicable deliverables to Project Management and Wintel Operations staff for final implementation of the solution. Key among major accomplishments on the Sears account was the deployment of the non-retail child domain (SEARS2) into the production Active Directory environment at Sears. This was done in accordance with the standard CSC models for Active Directory Deployment and Security Design. Ran applicable schema changes to allow for Windows 2003 domains in the mixed forest, and for other AD integrated applications such as SMS and Bindview. Also implemented the lab environment for this new production domain. During implementation of lab and production domains, worked closely with members of the Wintel Operations team so they would be fully prepared to takeover daily AD domain support and legacy migration activities.

Designed and implemented technical solutions for all non-retail Wintel based projects. Collaborated with application project managers and third party software vendors to implement cost effective server solutions. Among the dozens of implementations handled, some of the major implementations included SSG/Labor Management, Enterprise Portal Framework, and Solutions Development Framework.