Robert Hafner's Location
Chicago, Illinois, United States, United States
Robert Hafner's Contact Details
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About Robert Hafner
I have been working at the intersection of software and infrastructure since 2005. During that time I have witnessed first hand the industry evolution from individual bash scripts to configuration management up to infrastructure as code. I’ve worked on projects ranging from high availability sites, large data analytics (with 30+ million daily clients), to large scale gpu clustering and machine learning model hosting- all while maintaining high security and availability.In addition to my direct industry experience I have also authored literally dozens of open source projects, with the most popular libraries having more than 20 million combined installations. Programming is not just a profession but a passion, so I spend much of my time learning and programming personal projects.Specialties: ⚛ Development Processes⚛ Software Architecture⚛ Distributed Systems⚛ Project Management⚛ Security and Compliance Systems⚛ Vendor Relations and Negotiations⚛ Cat Herding
Robert Hafner's Current Company Details
Robert Hafner Work Experience Details
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Distinguished EngineerComcastChicago, Il, Us
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Senior Principal ArchitectComcast Feb 2023 - PresentPhiladelphia, Pa, UsMember of the DevX Team.
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Principal EngineerAptible Mar 2022 - Nov 2022San Francisco, Ca, Us• Architected and lead development on the next generation Aptible Platform. This platform is designed to allow Aptible customers to securely and quickly launch AWS resources without having to worry about the nitty gritty of the underlying resources.• Designed and built a microservice that manages AWS Organizations and Accounts to enable rapid account creation, provisioning, and registration with our new Platform. This enabled customer environments to be created and isolated on the account level, while also allowing those accounts to be detached from our organization for customers that needed it.• Designed and built a Terraform abstraction layer that allowed Aptible to expose AWS (and other cloud providers down the line) resources through their SaaS for customer use. This enabled rapid prototyping and creation of "Aptible" resources built on AWS VPC, RDS, ECS (with features such as autoscaling), ElastiCache, and SecretsManager.• Designed a "Connection" system between resources so that all customer created resources were isolated by default but could easily (and explicitly) be connected to resources they need to work with.• Built a variety of now open source projects and libraries, such as a python wrapper for Terraform that enables full programmatic creation and review of Terraform plans and applies.• Restarted development on the Aptible Managed Terraform Provider by holding a mini hackathon to fix a major authentication problem. Fixing that bug opened the floodgates as customer adoption of the provider grew. -
Principal EngineerExplosion Jul 2021 - Mar 2022Berlin, De• Joined the Prodigy Teams group to resuscitate a project from three years of stalled development by focusing on improvements to the code base that allowed for easier development. This project consists of an on premise broker that connects to a SaaS platform.• Instituted the companies first knowledge base and created a process for developing proposals with an asynchronous process.• Built out the new AWS Environment from scratch, introducing AWS SSO, multiple accounts through AWS Organizations, and an “Infrastructure as Code” first approach.• Built dozens of reusable terraform modules that can be composed into larger projects. This includes VPC, Lambda, VPN, ECS, Secrets Manager, and EC2 modules with extremely versatile option sets.• Created the first staging environment for the project’s “Software as a Service” component as well as a deployment process for the on premise components.• Rebuilt the broker infrastructure and registration process from scratch, enabling customer controlled portions of the application to connect to our SaaS offering.At this point my manager left the company so I moved on as well. -
Principal EngineerKenna Security Apr 2021 - Jun 2021Santa Clara, California, Us• Worked with the Exports and Ops teams to reduce the error rate of data exports, moving from multiple high impact failures a week to zero failures.• Reduced the time taken for large exports by half while also utilizing worker machines that were cheaper than the original deploy, saving money on two fronts while also improving customer experience.• Acted as primary on call for one rotation, and joined in multiple incidents to help speed up resolution time.• Defined the standards and workflow for the company's Terraform adoption efforts.At this point Kenna Security was acquired by Cisco, and I decided not to continue on with Cisco. -
Principal Software EngineerRad Ai Mar 2020 - Apr 2021San Francisco, California, Us• Architected the Product, Research, and QA Platforms and led their development. • Acted as Security and Privacy Officer, preparing the company for SOC2 and HIPAA+ audits, which in turn directly impacted our ability to sell to the healthcare market.• Created reusable Terraform modules that allowed the company to rapidly prototype and expand its platforms, including modules for the quick release of micro services on top of ECS.• Built a stable CI/CD pipeline utilizing Git Flow, Terraform Cloud, and CircleCI for our platforms that easily allows the entire team to safely deploy on a fast paced basis.• Architected an extremely resilient and highly available product platform, capable of being launched in a new region with one command in less than an hour (despite having more than 600 separate resources).• Maintained the physical research equipment, including multiple DGX machines, and their connections to their cloud counterparts, allowing for significant cost savings over a pure cloud environment.• Created our entire inference platform, from the base images and containers up to the Terraform modules themselves. This included a “mock models” system for testing without GPUs. -
Vice President Of EngineeringRad Ai Apr 2018 - Mar 2020San Francisco, California, Us• Built out engineering team as employee one, hiring for Fullstack, ML, Data Science, and Windows Devs.• Created the first research platform, enabling HIPAA compliant machine learning research for the company. This includes a combination of HPC (slurm) for CPU based processing, a hybrid ML training environment utilizing DGX and AWS Cloud GPUs.• Architected and built much of the SaaS platform behind our first product, including the initial API and analytics layers (built with python, Docker, and AWS).• Created multiple fullstack internal tools for the research team, including a model storage system built on top of S3, a custom NLP experiment validation tool that allowed radiologists to to evaluate models, and a browser based annotation system.• Worked directly with the sales team to reassure customers of our security and privacy practices, helping to drive forward sales.
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Vice President Of EngineeringVicarious Nov 2014 - Apr 2018Union City, California, UsMy responsibilities include modernizing their existing infrastructure, both corporate and research, as well as keeping the company and it's intellectual property secure.• Rebuilt all of the initial infrastructure using Configuration Management (Puppet).• Architected and built HPC clusters in a hybrid-cloud environment designed for "infinite" scaling.• Hired a world class infrastructure team, and assisted with hiring throughout the company.• Audited and improved security of the company infrastructure, including managing a third party audit.• Created a culture of self service by building tools developers and researchers could use to build out clusters.• Empowered researchers and developers by building tools they could use to customize servers and clusters directly.• Worked extensively with all departments on a variety cross company projects.• Advised the CEO and Operations team on start up "best practices" regarding recruiting, retention, and culture.• Built relationships with vendors access beta programs and product roadmaps. -
Travelling Developer"Epic Vacation Time" Jan 2014 - Oct 2014After my run with Malwarebytes I felt it was time to focus on some personal projects and growth- in other words, I took a vacation. Unfortunately for me I don't know how to stop being productive, so I managed to accomplish quite a bit-• Acted as an Advisor to multiple startups, helping them with hiring (including finding one a new COO), customer policies, funding, and general infrastructure.• Worked on multiple open source projects such as Stash, JShrink and Fetch (see projects below) as well as numerous smaller projects and fixes. • Organized a 45 member Burning Man camp and kept them all from dying in the desert.• Spent a month cat sitting in Paris, France.• Blogged, although not as often as I'd like.• Rebuilt my personal datacenter to make it more Puppet centric.
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Vice President Of ItMalwarebytes Corporation Sep 2010 - Jan 2014Santa Clara, Ca, UsThe Malwarebytes' IT Department was unique in that it had to deal with both the standard business needs as well as the development and hosting of internal and consumer facing applications. Malwarebytes also faced two very serious challenges- an exponentially growing user base and the anger of a large number of cyber criminals. This required constant coordination between departments and vendors as well as the application of scalable design practices. As one of the first people to join the company my advice was valued and sought after throughout my employment, which resulted in me stepping out of the traditional “technologist” role at many points. Directly I built and managed four departments-Server Side Development - This team's responsibilities included platform integration between our vendors, development of a major analytics engine to generate business intelligence and feed malware research, and a variety of consumer facing tools. Malware Intelligence - This team was one of two research teams in the company, with it’s specific focus being on educating the company and the public about the latest threats. Besides writing most of the technical portions of the blog, this team managed the IP/Network blacklist that powers Malwarebytes AntiMalware’s IP Protection engine and wrote in depth analysis of specific malware samples or threats for internal reporting.Dev/Ops - This is the team that kept the lights on. This team was responsible for delivering millions of updates a day to clients around the world, while also maintaining analytics and research systems that keep the company moving. Malwarebytes was a huge security target but were not hacked once during my time at Malwarebytes.IT - This team was responsible for the standard IT operations of the company. During my time there the company scaled from a dozen person company to one of over 125 distributed all over the world, which created many unique challenges and opportunities for an IT department. -
Director Of ItMalwarebytes Corporation Apr 2010 - Sep 2010Santa Clara, Ca, UsWhen Malwarebytes decided to bring their server side development in house it was a natural fit for me to come on and build out the team. My responsibilities included those which I was already managing- including upkeep and expansion of server infrastructure, development of server side applications and vendor relations- but now also added building out an internal team, taking on more traditional IT tasks, and an increase in development responsibilities.
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ContractorMalwarebytes Corporation Oct 2008 - Apr 2010Santa Clara, Ca, UsI was initially contracted by Malwarebytes on an immediate need basis, as a sudden surge of traffic (slashdot-like effect) had significantly degraded performance on their primary server. Within 24 hours of contracting with me they were migrated to a new platform that could support significantly more load for slightly less in cost. From there I took over all server side administration and development, including vendor negotiation and contracting. Ultimately this contract lead to a full time position.
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Devops Consultant / CofounderSolunanet Jan 2008 - Apr 2010In order to focus on high impact, large scale projects I founded SolunaNet as a Dev/Ops firm with a focus on secure and scalable development. I provided consulting services to numerous development firms for specialized needs they could not fulfill in house, while also working directly with larger clients to build out applications and infrastructure to sustain their unique needs. I was also called in for a variety of emergency situations where services needed to be restored, such as after an attack or explosion in growth.As a consultant for other development firms I worked to both build out projects and educate developers. A typical job included auditing code for performance and security improvements, then providing individually tailored lessons so the developers could incorporate these improvements in future code. In other cases I was called in before development began, either to help plan out the project or hire out a team to build it myself.In addition to working directly with development firms, I took on a number of clients directly. In a few cases these were emergency situations, ranging from hardware or scalability issue to security incidents. Security incidents often included an audit of systems and code, as well as education to prevent reoccurrence of those issues, while scalability issues had solutions ranging from quick code changes to the migration to new systems. Not all situations were emergencies, with the majority being simple (relatively speaking) development projects.
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Lead Developer And Server Administrator (Contract)Positronic Design Jun 2006 - Feb 2008A long term consulting contract, my work with Positronic Design started as a system administration and web development and grew into a project management role fairly quickly. Positronic Design acted as a clearing house for development projects, pulling in work and subcontracting it out to a variety of in house consultants of various sorts (primarily designers and developers). I coordinated development projects amongst developers, specced out and approved new projects, and of course programmed quite a bit.
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Developer And Server Administrator, CofounderSoluna Enterprises Dec 2005 - Jan 2008Founded in the basement of a friend's house, Soluna Enterprise was the first web development and hosting firm I every worked for. As cofounder and principal technologist my responsibilities included leading all of the development and systems work, from system administration and development to project proposals and leading subcontracting.As the primary server administrator I managed shared hosting servers and dedicated servers for a variety of clients, ultimately hosting over six hundred websites. Specialized projects including mass migration (including a few emergency situations), custom system architecture, and server hardening.Primarily the work done here was web development based. Over the years there were dozens of projects for an assortment of companies, ranging from small bug fixes to large scale, multiple developer projects. I was the only on staff developer and lead every project, hiring subcontractors when necessary or occasionally working with in house teams.
Robert Hafner Skills
Security
Web Development
Linux
Javascript
Software Development
Cloud Computing
System Architecture
Programming
Enterprise Software
Bash
System Administration
Databases
Network Security
Python
Servers
Software Engineering
Mysql
Ruby On Rails
Distributed Systems
Php
Project Management
Server Architecture
Os X
Malware Analysis
Nagios
Web Applications
Dns
Git
Open Source
Perl
Start Ups
Saas
Vendor Relationships
Java
C
Cat Herding
Internet Security
Computer Security
Devops
Scalable Web Applications
Distributed Architecture
Open Source Development
Nosql
Web Caching
Data Caching
Distributed Caching
Mac Os X
Storage
Apache
Amazon Web Services
Robert Hafner Education Details
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Worcester Polytechnic InstituteComputer Science
Frequently Asked Questions about Robert Hafner
What company does Robert Hafner work for?
Robert Hafner works for Comcast
What is Robert Hafner's role at the current company?
Robert Hafner's current role is Distinguished Engineer.
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What schools did Robert Hafner attend?
Robert Hafner attended Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
What are some of Robert Hafner's interests?
Robert Hafner has interest in From Systems To Companies, Building Things.
What skills is Robert Hafner known for?
Robert Hafner has skills like Security, Web Development, Linux, Javascript, Software Development, Cloud Computing, System Architecture, Programming, Enterprise Software, Bash, System Administration, Databases.
Who are Robert Hafner's colleagues?
Robert Hafner's colleagues are Sravani Lankipalli, Owen Brown, Ryan Samuel, Jeremiah Xiong, Patricia Adams, Alyssa B., Pamela Tholan.
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