Steve Houser Email & Phone Number

Toronto, On, Ca

San Francisco, Ca, Us

Senior contributor within DevOps team responsible for design, maintenance, and ongoing operational reliability of platform hosted in a mixed AWS and GCP environment.* Lead virtualization and modernization efforts across the platform including migrations of Ruby on Rails applications to GKE.* Helped to maintain core databases and BI systems.* Extended and maintained infrastructure as code and automation tooling in Terraform, Chef, Ansible, and other languages and tools suites.* Worked with wider corporation to improve developer agility by implementing better processes for CI/CD.* Lead initiatives to reduce costs by eliminating unused capacity and duplicated resources.* Acted as the principle SME and advocate for DevOps methodologies throughout the org.

Toronto, Ontario, Ca

Senior member of SRE team responsible for secure and continuous operations of industry leading automated investment platform during extreme high growth period.* Maintained and expanded platform related Terraform tooling to maintain resources deployed to Nomad.* Built fully fault tolerant HA Windows Server environment on Azure Cloud with secure login backed by Okta to facilitate critical staff to work in highly secure, controlled Windows desktop environments over RDP for the purpose of performing regulated wealth management and fiduciary roles.* Oversaw implementation of new CI/CD pipeline.* Expanded and improved monitoring tools improving response time to production impacting downtime events by 70%.* Created standard operating procedures and wrote runbooks used to maintain critical platform resources.* Acted as senior SME for SRE within the org and team mentoring other developers across the org.

Toronto, Ontario, Ca

Acted in capacity of lead Site Reliability Engineer building the SRE team, mentoring the members of the team, advocating for SRE practices across the org, planning SRE related projects, and architecting new platform related initiatives.* Hired and mentored the four members of the SRE and DevSecOps teams.* Created monitoring and alerting processes for production platform using open source monitoring, GCP tooling, and PagerDuty.* Designed and implemented automated testing and deployment on GCP.* Managed migration from GitLab to GitHub* Lead iniative to dockerize and move platform to kubernetes base.

Carmel, Indiana, Us

Leader and architect of DevOps, SRE, and IT initiatives within rapidly growing late stage startup.* Built teams of DevOps and SRE engineers to support the rapidly expanding operations of a late stage startup starting with a team of three engineers and growing to a team of over thirty engineers across three teams.* Managed, mentored, and lead engineers from Junior to Staff level.* Acted as architect for all automation, devops, and SRE related initiatives creating fully automated AWS based pipelines to build and deploy full testing and production environments dynamically on demand.* Worked closely with senior management to align capabilities and resource capacities with business goals.

Toronto, On, Ca

Senior member of an operational team responsible for the performance, uptime, and efficiency of all backend related initiatives and systems. * Trained and mentored junior staff instilling techniques and operating procedures to ensure success in the performance of technical operational duties.* Acted as an system and network architect providing guidance across the enterprise on new and ongoing projects.* Lead the way toward implementing serverless architecture using AWS Lambda, Aurora, DynamoDB, and other AWS infrastructure.* Acted as primary advanced networking subject matter expert across enterprise leading projects such as implementing a point to point fibre link between AWS resources and resources hosted in a traditional data centre outside the AWS networks.* Successfully lead many initiatives to reduce costs by reducing infrastructure behind key data stores while continuing to deliver the same level of service.* Passionately advocated for the use of DevOps tools and automation best practices.

Toronto, Ontario, Ca

Integral member of a small, agile, operations team designing systems, implementing cutting edge tools, automating, monitoring, and ensuring the security of highly complex, PCI DSS Level 1 compliant, environments both in the AWS cloud and elsewhere.* Designed and deployed highly scalable, redundant, environments in the AWS cloud using open source projects, such as Terraform, Ansible, Packer, Boto, Troposphere, CloudFormation, Route53, EC2, S3, EFS, Jenkins, CircleCI, Python, Bash, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, and numerous other open source tools and platforms.* Created a fully automated machine image build pipeline using Jenkins, groovy, and workflow plugin to create both base AMIs and derivative AMIs from git maintained ansible roles and playbooks.* Designed tooling and Jenkins jobs to manage disparate environments using pre-built AMIs while conforming to immutable architecture principles as much as possible.* Helped to implemented tooling to automate firewall and setting reviews as required for PCI compliance.* Efficiently leveraged many different AWS tools, such as EC2, ELBs, Auto-Scaling Groups, Route53, VPCs, IAM roles and policies, S3, CloudFront, ECS, and EBS to implement a fully PCI DSS Level 1 compliant environment on time and within budget to corporate and partner vendor specifications.* Acted as primary network administrator resource within team carrying out projects, such as replacing office network with a redundant, highly secure, highly available network, VPN, and wireless solution including specification of providers & equipment, negotiating contracts and equipment pricing with vendors, configuration & implementation, documentation, and phased deployment followed by turndown of outmoded solution.* Acted as key resource on team for advanced networking and systems administration tasks such as automating seamless rolls of mongodb clusters, and implementing custom built NAT/PAT servers, with all the requisite network configuration, within our AWS VPCs.

Provided enterprise infrastructure consulting, digital asset management technologies, software development, and team/employee vetting.* Designed, deployed, and documented enterprise SANs.* Deployed server infrastructures to manage medium to large mixed environments using Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux* Managed implementation of automated systems for digital archiving of data* Deployed enterprise backup systems* Documented existing environments and offered input in the areas of risk assessment and resource needs for a variety of enterprises

Broomfield, Colorado, Us

Key contributor to team-based development of leading-edge software solutions that install, maintain, monitor, and repair 30,000+ servers comprising the global CDN network, part of the largest internet network in the world. * Expanded functionality of a CentOS-based network management operations board used by the CDN network operations center, written in ruby/rails using a MariaDB database and a CouchBase system for protocol rendezvous, running on redundant servers. Wrote enhancements to data processing and feed alerts in Ruby, optimizing a syslog-ng server and processing software suite, and a SNMP collector and processor.* Developed new front-end for the operational board using Ruby on Rails 3.x and jQuery.* Designed and deployed a distributed network monitoring system using Sensu, enabling monitoring of ~50,000 end-points for statistics on NFS, Aspera, SCP, FTP, HTTP, ICMP, and other protocols used to test the network. Statistics generated by the system, gathered in time series database for reporting and analysis. Coded adapters to push alerts to our operational board and to send emails based on alert conditions.* Turned up OpenTSDB for storage of all time series data throughout my corporate group running on a clustered HBase backend.* Managed 80+ boxes directly that run a combination of CentOS 5/6, Ubuntu, SuSe, FreeBSD, and Solaris* Initiated design for an OpenStack deployment to move to a simpler infrastructure* Built kickstart server configs for automated bare metal system deployments* Administered multiple Nagios monitoring boxes. * Assisted in admistration of Hadoop/HBase that analyzes all network data to provide billing and network optimization* Managed puppet server and configs to automate server config management* Managed VMs across multiple platforms in KVM, LXC, Sun Zones, Qemu, etc.* Worked with quagga bgp configs and routing* Deployed and managed corporate git servers

Supported development of I.T. infrastructure and software products for a fast-growing digital production and distribution company. Served key clients including AOL, Viacom, NASCAR, B4M, MediaSilo, Telestream, KPIX/College Sports (CBS Affiliates), Reuters, J Walker Thompson, and BBC US. * Built Ruby on Rails and CakePHP based web portals for use by clients as front end interfaces to the middleware software. * Spun up software automation to deploy cloud and VirtualBox servers in a fully automated manner to handle testing of software developed.* Consulted with clients at all stages of the relationship from assessing needs to planning and implementing maintenance agreements.* Collaborated with numerous vendors and partners within the digital asset management world. * Implemented integrations with numerous SDKs, REST/SOAP APIs, command line interfaces, databases, and other data and service endpoints.* Improved workflows for high volume, high availability, user-facing systems. Automated tasks: transcoding, asset ingestion, inventory, deduplication, archive and restoration to low cost storage, proxy delivery to automated proofing systems, scanning of extremely large asset libraries such as file systems for automated ingestion, and other client specific needs.* Deployed and managed server infrastructure for testing and development both in the Cloud, and in traditional data center space.* Built automated system preparation programs for Mac OS X, Windows, Ubuntu, and CentOS/RHEL using a combination of bash and Chef. Systems required extensive software package management and configuration management for deployment.* Created extensive software libraries within the language of Ruby for both backend middleware software and frontend web driven interfaces.

Denver, Co, Us

Acted as senior systems architect establishing a robust, standardized I.T. infrastructure.* Motivated a software development team of 5 along with 2 IT and various contractors. * Evaluated and forecasted company requirements, designed staffing, process, and technology solutions to meet business needs during rapid growth phase. Presented business cases to demonstrate return on investment for I.T. projects.* Led rapid acquisition and implementation of new infrastructure to assure timely ramp up of new multi-million dollar accounts, such as DEX, SuperPages, and newspaper conglomerates.* Developed full featured integration in PHP with SOAP and REST API interfaces to process client orders.* Created automated reporting and billing solutions for orders flowing through system using PHP and Ruby* Devised and implemented custom solution to handle building security (magnetic locks, RFID cards, cameras) using open source solutions and custom solutions developed in PHP.* Implemented a comprehensive workflow management solution using the open source BPM Process Maker enabling 10-fold gains in video production capacity with minimum addition to headcount.* Turned up Fibre Optic DS3 to manage bandwidth requirements; upgraded power and cooling systems to meet increased demands. Troubleshot and turned up a previously unutilized $500,000 battery backup generator, UPS, and RTT switch.* Designed a full digital and physical asset inventory, and created documentation of existing procedures within the corporation.* Created and executed phased resource acquisition strategy that culminated with a highly functional I.T. Operations and an IT Engineering group from the ground up.* Deployed expanded SAN resources to extend existing XSAN.* Deployed tape backup system: created backup scheme, tape rotation protocol, and disaster planning.

Evaluated requirements, developed and presented business cases, and managed I.T. project budgets.* Designed and implemented network of virtualized servers using VMWare ESX and VMWare Infrastructure.* Directed systems engineering, implementation, and administration, website development, and technical support services for manufacturer with sites in the U.S., China, and Mexico. * Devised and executed numerous business process automation, backup, and virtualization solutions. Managed full software development lifecycle. * Managed technology infrastructure for a blended Windows/Mac environment including Exchange Server, ERP, Web servers, and SMS Server. * Implemented ADP payroll and state-of-the-art biometric employee timekeeping systems, Macola manufacturing ERP systems, accounting and finance systems. Created custom Crystal Reports, end-of-year reports, and Access databases. * Spearheaded deployment of major telephony systems upgrades, running fiber and integrating hybrid analog/VoIP solutions.

Englewood, Co, Us

Provided 24/7 support to mission critical core middleware platform.* Served in 24/7 on-call rotation averaging around 200 pages per day.* Maintained and expanded monitoring for EAI WebMethods middleware layer that acted as the core communication layer between all systems in Fortune 500 corporation.* Lead root cause analysis and remediation investigations,meetings, and follow-ups.

Systems architect for ultra high traffic web cluster.* Designed and deployed fully automated web hosting environment on bare metal for the purpose of hosting gaming related community sites such as forums and game databases.* Architected and deployed monitoring and alerting for web cluster.* Built out fault tolerant, open source, database for web cluster.* Maintained cluster and grew capacity peaking at around a billion views in 24 hours.