- Implemented the Service Readiness Framework, introducing an objective scoring system for product release decisions. This improved evaluation standards and enabled data-driven prioritization of improvements.- Partnered with Engineering and Product leadership to develop and enhance business strategy during periods of rapid organizational evolution.- Identified engineering skill gaps aligned with long-term business objectives. Collaborated with leaders and L&D owners to offer specialized training opportunities, enhancing team capabilities.Led the revision of career progression criteria for senior engineering roles (Staff, Senior Staff, and Principal). Mentored high-potential Staff+ Engineers to succeed in their evolving roles.- Acted as a subject matter expert and experienced advisor for the evaluation of observability tools. Guided the definition of requirements and advised teams on assessment methodologies to ensure alignment with organizational needs.

Rapid was looking to add seasoned leadership and experience to the team. I was brought on as a Senior Architect to help the company scale and grow reliably.Architecture was a new discipline to Rapid, and I was responsible for bringing it to the company. This included defining the role of Architecture, the processes and procedures for Architecture that Product and Engineering would follow, and building trust with the teams so that they would understand the value and want to adopt an Architecture practice.As a Senior Architect at RapidAPI, I was responsible for - Partnering with Product and other business leaders to ensure that our technical strategy complemented and supported our Product and Business strategies.- The overall Architecture of the system and its evolution over time. This included accelerating and finishing a migration of RapidAPI's infrastructure from Autoscaling groups to Kubernetes that was stalled when I joined. Created a comprehensive checklist to define the completion criteria, collaborated with DevOps and Product teams to transform it into a roadmap, and coordinated the implementation efforts across multiple teams.- Designing and implementing an Architecture review process focused on just-in-time and just-enough upfront planning to keep velocity high while making sure we shipped the right thing at the right time with appropriate safeguards along the way.- Educated and guided Product and Engineering teams in the identification and implementation of SLOs (Service Level Objectives) and SLIs (Service Level Indicators), improving observability and data-based prioritization. I implemented the first SLOs and SLIs using OpenTelemetry and Honeycomb.- Mentoring and teaching DevOps and Software Engineers and other Architects in subjects like distributed systems, system design, observability, software best practices, troubleshooting methodologies, incident response, and more.

• Created the Twilio Platform Lighthouse – a vision of the future and principles to get there - after analyzing Platform’s past, present, and future needs. Built alignment within Platform Engineering and with R&D leaders on future direction for platform services. Worked with teams to identify concrete future designs and roadmaps to realize them.• Lead Architect for Voltron, a program for managing and modernizing Twilio’s portfolio of infrastructure platforms, focused on reduction of duplicate effort and accelerating acquisition integration. Chief Architect referred to this as an extension of the Platform Lighthouse, applying to all of Twilio and its acquisitions.• Led a team of 4 Platform Architects, each responsible for a portion of Platform Engineering’s 1–3-year technical vision. Coached and mentored Architects, Principal Engineers and Tech Leads on distributed systems, working with Product partners, organization design, etc.

I've had a lot of titles at SendGrid. That's maybe to be expected when you're at a company for that long. I got to be involved in a lot of things during my time there. I started as an L2 Engineer and ended as an L6 architect. I even got to manage a few times!I gained experience that some people might not ever: completely rebuilding the core of the business: a complete rewrite of almost everything in a new language, and a re-architecture of it at the same time to make it "cloud-native", even though it runs in hardware datacenters. Adding a complete new business line to a company, and then rebuilding it in AWS. I got to experience updating everything to make the company IPO-ready; Partnering with infosec and GRC to update everything to be SoC2 and SOX ready, participating in audits, updating everything again for GDPR compliance, the whole shebang. I even got to experience being acquired by a much larger company and moving into a new role in that company, helping them adopt practices that made SendGrid successful.Some of the things I did during my time as an Architect:• Created & maintained a rolling 3-year roadmap for SendGrid Operations aligned with our Technology Strategy and Product Strategy.• Identified distributed systems issues, reliability concerns, product requirement misses, cost calculations,observability methods, etc. by reviewing hundreds of design documents from teams outside of Operations. Designs included multiple geographic regions in both first party datacenters and AWS-hosted services.• Architecture team given SendGrid’s “Ghost Tiger” award for “largest impact with the least fuss”• Responsible for planning and successful initial migrations to Kubernetes in hardware datacenters. Worked with Principal Engineers/Tech Leads, Managers, and Product Managers to plan and deliver a platform including CI/CD, observability tooling, and cost management using Kubernetes in hardware datacenters.

When the team's previous manager left, I stepped in to manage the team until we found them a long-term manager.

Voluntarily moved back to an individual contributor roleContinue to provide technical leadership to Product Operations team, ranging from pairing with engineers inside and outside the team, designing processes and services, and championing new paradigms and technologies to improve SendGrid’s performance, reliability and visibility.Take ownership of fragile provisioning system. Extend, troubleshoot, and write new functionality for a suite of Go, Rails, and Ruby services used to provide one-stop provisioning of virtual machines in SendGrid datacenters. Work with team members to provide and execute roadmap including adding API to service, features needed for new datacenters, and InfoSec requirements.

Reporting to the VP of Operations, was promoted to provide technical leadership to Product Operations and other delivery teams at SendGrid. Lead a team of 8 engineers focusing on working with developers to write, test and deploy highly reliable, performant, and efficient services. Responsible for developing and implementing strategies, processes and technologies to improve SendGrid’s reliability and performance while guiding delivery teams to embrace methodologies to do the same.Lead migration from leased datacenter to self-hosted datacenter, a multi-million dollar project that resulted in a 3% margin increase in the first 12 months of the datacenter being live. Selected servers and network hardware, approved network designs, and created standards to increase efficiency. Worked with the team, project manager, and vendors to provide an on-time, under budget project delivery.Introduced “Datacenter as Computer” paradigm and tooling to SendGrid, focusing on tools such as Mesos, Chronos, Marathon, and Kubernetes. Submitted a workflow comparison between current systems and possible systems, which would reduce dev/ops process friction by more than 50%. An entire team was created to explore that workflow with a goal of increasing developer productivity by 30% by 2016. Led organization to deploy first production service using these tools.

Hired to support Technical Operations of SendGrid. Responsible for day-to-day operations of service, service architecture design, site performance, and developer support. Environment includes more than 3000 nodes in two self-hosted datacenters running on SendGrid-owned hardware. Reduced local development environment provision time by 97.5%, from 40 minutes to 2 minutes by using new technologies including Docker, Consul, confd, et al. as part of an internal hackathon. Received “Most Technical” award.Played key role in deploying SSL clicktracking by writing new load balancer provisioning Chef recipes, investigating new options in HAProxy, building new packages, and automating the provisioning of SSL certificates. Walked feature through testing, staging, and into production.

Hired to support Technical Operations of Call of Duty: Elite, one of the top 3 interactive subscription services together with World of Warcraft and Xbox LIVE. Responsible for day-to-day operations of site, service architecture design, site performance, developer support, and mentoring junior Operations team members.Implemented Chef Configuration Management and Automation tool, reducing configuration, orchestration, and deployment complexity. Caused reduction in failed deploys, enabling the studio to roll out new features more quickly. Most prolific contributor to company cookbooks. Contributed to community cookbooks, and was viewed as the company “chef guy.”Worked closely with technical directors and developers to support, re-architect, and solve issues with Clan Operations, Elite’s most popular feature. Reduced issues with Clan Operations, leading to increased user participation in feature, peaking at 2 Million active players per weekend for Modern Warfare 3. Took lead responsibility for Clan Operations, working with producers and developers to continue feature improvements and reduce fragility of this complex feature.Deployed Complete DR site in under 8 hours during the approach of hurricane Sandy, allowing site to be used without interruption during East Coast network outages.

Provided support to approximately 3,500 employees in Irvine along with 1,000+ international users in 5 different countries. Member of team that managed multiple internal services and systems including VMware, firewalls, datacenter, hardware deployment and build environments. Strong focus on Linux services, including revision control systems, global monitoring, MediaWiki services, et al. Provided escalation support for global personnel and worked with international teams to plan and execute global projects.Worked with developers and engineers to deploy and transition to Git and Github Enterprise revision control systems.Developed process and application that automated the global deployment of games for internal testing, cutting time-to-deploy from 24 hours to 2.

Oversee all network management and user service activities for all employees and students, reporting to the Director of Technology. Ensure 24x7 availability for servers hosting online school, working closely with the Director of Academic Technology. Hold full responsibility for Level 2 support. Implement design and engineering decisions for projects large and small.

Managed technology infrastructure that included 4 computers, office network, all peripherals and components, web site, and email program, as well as AutoCAD drawings submitted to customers, partners, and state/local governments. Brought on board to update aging computer systems and improve overall workflow.

Assigned to assist 2 network technicians in broad range of activities, including setting up Windows Active Directory domains, replacing server hardware, and installing computer labs and network components.

Assisted Technical Marketing department in hardware and software vendor testing/certification, lab cabling, installation of server, storage, and network hardware, and other functions.