Rick Brauen Email & Phone Number

Kirkland, Wa, Us

Bellevue, Washington, Us

I am having so much fun! I am back in the thick of it at a smaller company. I have my hands in the tech, I talk with customers every day, I am responsible for Sales, Marketing and Partnerships as well as Operations while working with Engineering, Finance and Customer Success teams. We are building data collection, workflow and analytics for a wide range of companies across all industries around the world. Deep Tech at Meta and VMware was fun, but this is a blast. We bring more value every day than much larger teams did in weeks at the big firms.

Bellevue, Washington, Us

Dedicated to making our customers delighted and our products scalable, reliable and feature packed. Primarily focused on improving our delivery processes by working with specific customers with unique needs.

Menlo Park, Ca, Us

Merged with the Configuration Management team to enlarged scope to all services in Service Foundation. 26 PEs and 3 managers partnered with 134 SWEs across 6 teams and 11 Engineer managers. Created the new Service Foundation InfraCloud team to provide consulting and advising to the next generation of IaaS under development with two Senior Engineers. I coordinated the Summer and Fall Intern programs for Production Engineers in North America leading selection, pairing, project review, evaluations, team building activities and overall logistics.

Menlo Park, Ca, Us

Added a second team of 10 PEs partnered with multiple SWE Teams supporting locking, queuing, distribution, and core meta data storage (blob and schema) . Hired a manager dedicated to the team and supported the migration of these features to a new set of microservices, including the seamless migration of 1000s of users. Kicked off the new SEV Readiness team dedicated to verifying recovery tooling for the Core Systems fleet beginning with my services. The team built tooling, lobbied for software, policy and infrastructure changes across organizations creating a framework integrated into ci/cd that verifies restart and recovery procedures and tools which is now in use across Core Systems.

Menlo Park, Ca, Us

Joined a team of 2 PEs partnered with 12 SWEs supporting the Service Discovery products: 22 microservices, a widely distributed binary and 3 client libraries. Helped the engineers grow their careers, prioritized efforts and justified additional headcount growing the team to 4 engineers.

Palo Alto, Ca, Us

Delivering the next generation of cloud management software from VMware's Cloud Management Business Unit. These are micro-service SaaS offerings hosted on AWS and VMC, utilizing Kafka, Kubernetes, WaveFront, Machine Learning and other AI techniques. Responsible for all aspects of the engineering teams working on multiple products and internal projects: architecture, development, scrum management, testing, deployment and production escalations. Coordinate development with other regions: Bangalore, Pune, Armenia, Palo Alto. Work with Product Management and Marketing teams to define the capabilities and feature sets, establish pricing models and assist in presentation to the customer.

Palo Alto, Ca, Us

Architect and Product Owner for storage and availability offerings of VMware's subscription cloud, vCloud Air. Built software teams in Palo Alto and Shanghai, while working with software and QA teams in Bangalore and Cambridge and operations in Texas. Took on vendor relations including pricing negotiations, product support, and feature requests. ▪ Directed software team in Palo Alto through release of first product; following reorganization, hired a software team in Shanghai to release second product; worked with existing team in Bangalore to release the third product. ▪ Initiated efforts to adjust software design, operational procedures, and product definitions to radically improve offering reliability; backups successfully completed increased from 80% to 99.9%. ▪ Increased customer renewal rate from 65% to 95% by serving as escalation to concerns regarding backup limitations.

Palo Alto, Ca, Us

Brought into VMWare to complete architecture to host VMware’s PaaS and SaaS offerings. Worked directly with Cisco, EMC, and VMware to modify new releases to enable system to scale predictably, including entire eco-structure of services and network partitioning. Worked with Software teams to architect cloud infrastructure and changes to software for availability and performance. Optimized data redundancy and the software's failover features to increase availability.▪ Architected and Built a new hardware and software infrastructure, selecting components, defining network configurations, applying security policies, etc.▪ Minimized daily "restart" time for the Cloud Foundry application which was bottlenecked by overrunning the array's caching system; ultimately enabled a restart of 10,000 cloned VMS in two minutes. Required Architects, Vendors, Ops and Developers.

Round Rock, Texas, Us

Advised the Mozy Operations team serving 2M customers and 45PB of storage. Mentored a team of 8 to 12 System Admins, Network Admins, and DataCenter Techs to provide 24x365 support of Mozy Backup service, EMC Atmos On-Line service, VMware CloudFoundry and Discovery services. Efforts focused on automation of infrastructure provisioning, fault detection and automated remediation, Interfaced with software engineers to increase reliability and throughput, while decreasing costs. ▪ Automated Deployment and management, Expanded Monitoring/Alerting, created predictive failure response, established new data centers, consolidated older data centers, revised network architecture into a three-provider model including multi-site redundancy, including auto failover between sites. This site does 22Gb/s of internet traffic and store 100+TB every day with 100PB of managed storage. ▪ Expanded capacity from 45PB of storage to >100PB (availability 99.5 to 99.99); hired replacements and setup team for hand-off. ▪ Negotiated network agreements to reduce cost per Gbps by 38% while increasing points of presence and reducing latency. ▪ Optimized rack designs to add 3 data centers in 4 months to handle growth surge while reducing cost per GB stored by 45%.

Round Rock, Texas, Us

Hired as a consultant to the Atmos product team, working with software engineering teams on features, operations group on process to bring product to release. Worked with the program management team to establish offerings and marketing strategies; collaborated with EMC manufacturing to optimize the physical product and optimize its power consumption profile. ▪ Identified non-productive hardware components and reduced hardware costs by 30%; ▪ Completed numerous software availability improvements and operational efficiencies to ensure production readiness.

Seattle, Wa, Us

Progressed into a director role, overseeing server capacity forecasting, repair strategies, operating systems, virtualization, firmware, software, network architecture, datacenter capacity/design/build/operation, vendor negotiating, and relationship management for global company’s hosting services program. Administered $125M budget; supervised staff of eight direct and 100 indirect reports, while coordinating with five facilities in Europe, two in Japan, and nine in the US; facilitated launch of European facilities. ▪ Reduced hardware costs by 35% and increased product reliability 25% by migrating from single hardware vendor to multiple vendors supplying generic ‘white box’ hardware. Negotiated terms to customize offerings per Amazon’s needs. ▪ Managed development and implementation of hands-free provisioning system that automatically detected new servers, installed OS, tested operability, deployed users’ software, and placed server into production stream.

Seattle, Wa, Us

Brought on board to manage all database structure and schema changes; progressed to add operational responsibilities so maintained, supported, and improved all databases for Amazon and its subsidiaries. Supervised team of 10 design DBAs and 24 operational DBAs. Oversaw evaluation, design, testing, and operations for >300 databases and associated servers, including some of world’s largest transactional databases. Created SLAs, automated compilation of database performance metrics, and led issue resolution. ▪ Negotiated contracts and support agreements in order to prepare for organizational scaling. ▪ Saved $35M and increased database availability from 95% to 99.99% through process improvements, migration to Redhat Linux, implementation of new technologies, enhanced monitoring and automation. ▪ Reduced costs by establishing partnership with Oracle and migrating from annual licensing to multi-year enterprise level licenses. ▪ Decreased database downtime from >250 minutes per year to less than 15 minutes per year.

Seattle, Wa, Us

Bend, Oregon, Us

Responsible for Sales Associates and Marketing team offering long term technical and engineering contracting/consulting into Federal and State government agencies.▪ Won $1M project and two $500K assignments in first three months, and qualified for two master contracts; expanded company’s business into new sectors within federal contractor market. ▪ Facilitated $2M in business by establishing relationship with General Services Administration

Oversee all aspects of $20Million dollar division of a high end consulting company specializing in custom software development including e-commerce sites. ▪ Took over faltering territory and grew to profitability within three months.▪ Increased revenue 75% within existing client base. ▪ Successfully transitioned > 95% of employees to new owners

Transfered to England to integrate 3 newly acquired companies. Revenues of $15M, 200 consultants, 3 cities with clients across Europe, Israel and Egypt.▪ Restructured Management team, promoting high achievers.▪ Analyzed market conditions and reassigned employees into newer technologies that are in higher demand.▪ recruited 10 critical positions to establish technical competency.▪ engaged vendor/partners to help inform prospects of new skills and capabilities.▪ Doubled revenues in first 9 months.▪ Realized profitability in first 6 months.

Establish new offices in the midwest (Denver, Dallas, Chicago, Minneapolis) for a west coast firm. Used Technical experience to displace incumbent firms with better solutions and by providing personnel that are a better match to the customers by understanding the customer's concerns, issues and needs. Generated Revenue of $15-25M per year.

Successfully established new markets in State, Local and Federal Government. Solicited new business, developed marketing and proposal responses, managed customers, staffed positions, often defined project needs/scope. responded to 30 RFPs generating $2M in Revenue in first year,

Senior Consultant handling all types of software development projects for teams of 4 to 10 members. Performed software development (requirement, design, coding, testing), project management, training for: Budgeting Tracking for Navy Submarine group. Cisco's provider's training registration/delivery system. ConEd's Electricity Buying/Selling "Wheeling" system supplying New York City. Central Southwest Power's Distribution management system. Alaska Marine Highway System Registration/Ticketing systems. Blue Shield of Idaho's Medical Treatment Outcome Data Mining system.

Kent, Wa, Us

Held all positions in a 10 person IT department in a 6 year period, choosing hardware, designing and building business and administrative software, implementing 40 location LAN and WANs, managing personnel, recruiting, submitting budgets, etc.▪ Rewrote HR, Payroll, Retirement, Budgeting into modular, library based programs. Converted to Oracle, added custom features. ▪ Installed and Managed all Hardware and Networks, automated Operations. Designed and deployed Building LANs, 32 site WAN. ▪ Managed Developers and Operations teams. Member of Corporate Management team, completed MBA.

Mba

Ba, Computer Science, Business