Stephanie Williams Email & Phone Number

San Francisco, California, Us

Supporting the Splunk Cloud Engineering organization as their Director of Strategy and Operations (chief of staff). Making the big data ship go vroom for techies & non-techies alike!

San Francisco, California, Us

I jumped at the chance to transition from front-line management into this broader position. I was responsible for the day-to-day (non-technical) operations for Dropbox's Infrastructure organization comprised of 300 engineers and leaders across 25 distinct teams, including headcount, recruiting, operational reviews, and organizational communication. My key partners included HR, Recruiting, Finance and software/product engineering. In 5 months, I * Restructured and rationalized leadership meetings for both senior staff and all management.* Worked closely with all Director, Senior Manager, and Manager-level direct reports to clarify headcount spending to target across all resource categories.* Partnered with Finance and Infrastructure leadership to provide CEO-mandated clarity and transparency on the organization's budget, including creating the org's Opex budget. Led analysis of all spend categories and expenditures including travel, contracting, and 3rd-party software costs for two previous quarters. Identified approximately $30M in "cruft" through simple process and accountability models. * Implemented management training for recruiting best practices.* Worked closely with mid-level Data Center leadership to provide 365 degree visibility to team activities "on the ground" (versus transparency only on major initiatives).* Created format and structure for regular metrics reviews across 25 disparate teams supporting at least 75 different services. Partnered with engineers and management to determine most critical KPIs to demonstrate team needs, achievements, and requirements.

San Francisco, California, Us

I moved from an Individual Contributor role into front-line management of the Systems Engineering and Infrastructure Automation teams, both with ill-defined (or non-existent) charters and road maps. I was responsible for direct management of 9 engineers across these two teams, including establishing personal development plans and goal sets as well as creating 18-month road maps in conjunction with partners across the organization. These documents, processes, and conversations were a first for both teams. * Created a complete list of services and customers for both teams. Out of this came the realization that the Systems Engineering team had outlived its assumed mandate. Over the course of 2 months, we found the correct owners for the 50+ services the team owned, and new roles for the 5 engineers on the team. * Created a comprehensive road map for Physical Infrastructure Automation team. Made some difficult decisions to pare the number of supported services from more than 20 to 4 core systems, and prioritized and staffed outstanding work for MVP. * Worked with a low-performing employee to create an aggressive and successful performance improvement plan. Provided structured delivery goals for an endangered key project as well as guidance on improving teamwork and collaboration.

San Francisco, California, Us

I began my time at Dropbox as an Individual Contributor, focused on Data Center deployment and scaling. The brunt of my day-to-day over these 6 months involved breaking down barriers & building relationships between teams within the Infrastructure organization through 1:1s, project planning sessions and 'discovery' exercises regarding current processes and tools. * Created a metrics deck for Datacenter operations, extracting the top 10 metrics and KPI out of a set of more than 1600. I expanded that regular Datacenter-focused team review to all physical Infrastructure teams (Network, Supply Chain, Hardware Engineering). * Worked with multiple Infrastructure and Software Engineering teams to clarify and prioritize services supporting rack and stack of 55K total servers across 3 new Datacenter regions. Built comprehensive, 120-step process documentation for turning up a new Datacenter region, from ordering through configuration to final hand off to service owners. This slashed the time to bring up new a Datacenter region from 3 weeks to 4 days through elimination of time-consuming, error-prone tools and processes. Delivered final turn-up 2 weeks ahead of schedule.

San Francisco, Ca, Us

Made a move back to the Bay Area to find my 'home' in Twitter SRE, a diverse, challenging and high-growth team. * Front-line management of Core Storage, Application Services and SWAT SRE teams; de-facto ‘chief of staff’ for SRE management team.* Hired and onboarded 11 engineers of varying levels. Created team-specific onboarding processes, forged new partnerships with multiple engineering managers, and defined & managed rules of engagement across myriad teams and services. Of those 11 engineers, 4 were promoted within 18 months, with 3 others on target within 24 months.* Performance management: managed out 2 long-tenured low performers through rigorous communication, documentation and close partnership with HR business partners.* Created SRE Education program for an org of 90 ICs including identification of technical and soft skill courses, creation of an SRE org learning path, partnering with the Twitter @University learning team on metrics and driving better coverage for courses for remote team members.* Author of a documentation suite for SRE Management including templates and/or education information for hiring, headcount justifications and planning, 1:1 discussions, new hire onboarding processes and monthly status updates.* Owner of the overall SRE Hiring process, IC and manager education, and a recent successful transition to the Eng-wide hiring committee.

Dublin, Ie

* Responsible for Service Reliability (SRE), NOC, Capacity Planning, Network Engineering & Systems Engineering * Teams distributed across Dublin, Ireland, Vancouver, BC, and Shanghai, China. * Focus on organizational and process development for a high-growth team in a deadline-driven environment.* Successfully negotiated contractual operational SLAs with a major gaming partner in Shenzhen, China, for Call of Duty Online* Directed the smoothest launch of middleware services for the largest entertainment release in history (Modern Warfare 3)

* Established a weekly Operational Metrics deck; reported on outliers to senior management and lead developers for prioritization of performance fixes.* Hired three systems engineers to replace recently-disbanded team which also allowed the company to terminate an agreement with overpriced third-party contracting firm* Built a relationship and process with Customer Service for more timely feedback regarding technical site issues* Reduced the amount of operational time spent managing business-critical Lockerz Redemptions stack by approximately 50% through process and tooling improvements

* Hired 10 shifted team members in Palo Alto, CA and 4 members in Dublin, Ireland, including a technical lead. * Refactored onboarding documentation and processes for both Site Reliability and Application Operations. Decreased the amount of training time necessary for new shifted team members by 2 weeks (25% improvement). * Decreased mean time to resolve systems provisioning requests from 33 days to 5 days through resource and process improvements. Partnered with multiple tools and automation teams to identify opportunities in the provisioning work flow and tool set.* Created and maintained a prioritized road map for front-line operations. Reappropriated resources to address large-scale automation framework with the result of automating approximately 20% of low-hanging operational interrupts to the team. * Created Operational Acceptance criteria and process for Site Reliability support of new and existing Facebook services. Drove acceptance of 11 major services into standardized support model in 3 months.

Seattle, Wa, Us

* Directed Seattle and Dublin teams of 22 engineers in 1st line systems and network operations support for global infrastructure, network tools, and kernel and OS support for 100K+ machines, distributed networks with 200+ remote sites, and 10+ data centers* Spearheaded business critical restructuring of TechOps team, creating a global tiered support model encompassing multiple Infrastructure teams with only minimal headcount increases, to support global networks including website core, datacenter rings, remote sites and corporate systems, multiple Linux distributions, and commodity and specialized hardware.* Developed training plans and coordinated cross-team and cross-site handover process. Created full operational career path, from junior data centre operators to mid-level network engineers. Successfully retained all top-tier engineers within operations while top-grading low performers, and promoted two front-line managers through aggressive development plans.* Reduced tier 1 on call engagement time by more than 60% within 5 months for revenue- and developer-impacting events, with 92% success rate.* Slashed non-essential tickets/week from 250 to 70 through development of automated tools to address most common system issues, with 35% reduction in contact volume.* Reduced company-wide on call engagement time from tier-1 services for revenue-impacting events by approximately 60% within 5 months through process and tool * Reduced time required to transition tasks into new tiered support model by 50%+ through implementation of universal Operational Acceptance Criteria* Sole owner of company-wide Change Management policy and process, addressing 800 changes/day across 250+ disparate teams. Spearheaded first comprehensive change management policy from inception through implementation.