Mike Surma Email and Phone Number

As Director I directly manage four managers and a 32-member organization segmented into SRE for Core Network Engineering, Server Load Balancing, Data Center Operations, Server Provisioning, Account Management, and Cloud Services. I am responsible for our multi-datacenter strategy which includes leading vendor selection through the RFP process, contract negotiations, network architecture, and pod design. While in this role our accomplishments have included scaling of server infrastructure from 400 servers in a single data center to 5000 servers across four facilities in the Chicago metro region and a cloud spend optimization project that significantly reduced annual AWS S3 and EC2 on-demand costs. I also served as interim Senior VP of Site Engineering during a three-month leave of absence.

In my initial role at New Relic I managed a 14-member SRE organization and multi-million dollar budget, with the organization split into two teams - one managing New Relic data centers and cloud infrastructures, and a second team of embedded SREs providing expertise to various product development teams. My projects included leading the evaluation and implementation of CloudHealth Technologies SaaS platform for cloud cost management and development of scaling strategies to support data center infrastructure growth of 40% quarter over quarter.

I was initially hired in DevOps and received two quick promotions to manage a high-performing, distributed, six-member operations engineering group that used a DevOps-centric approach to supporting multiple development teams. My responsibilities included definition of infrastructure standards (hypervisor, OS, configuration management monitoring, centralized logging) and planning quarterly ops tech summits to collaborate with internal teams and partners on standards and tools. During this time I also led development of a server provisioning tool that parallelized new environment building processes and enabled teams to install hundreds of machines simultaneously and build new environments in days rather than weeks.

As a Platform Engineer I developed infrastructure and platforms for new business initiatives within the HP Print division using cloud-based technologies from AWS and HP Cloud. I engaged with development teams throughout the product development life cycle to ensure operational requirements were well-defined as an integral part of overall systems architecture, and I architected an end-to-end configuration management workflow using Puppet enterprise as a core component of the infrastructure for managing ~600 AWS instances.I also drove a transition from a traditional web/site ops model to a DevOps focus and managed tools selection to enable the transition.

In this role I defined architectural standards inclusive of deployment automation methodologies, hardware components, network integration approaches and software development for HP's Ultra Smartstream Print Solution. I also performed on-site installation and customization of solutions to address customer specific digital press workflows.

I was hired by HP to serve as lead infrastructure architect for multiple DES business ventures including Warner Bros Digital End to End (DETE) solution, Manufacture-on-Demand (MOD) DVD factory, and Video-Merchant-System (VMS). This role included operational leadership for the initial VMS launch, which required coordination with HP teams and CapGemini to ensure production systems were running and secured per SLAs.

At Yahoo! I provided technical leadership in development of highly-scalable web-based architectures, and I was a member of the technical team responsible for the architecture, development, deployment, and launch of tech.yahoo.com (the first new site launched by Yahoo in ten years). I also served as primary operations engineer for various media properties and infrastructure components with responsibilities including architectural reviews, custom monitoring tools, database schema design, query optimization, traffic analysis, and capacity planning.

I returned to AvantGo to manage a four-member web ops team of sysadmins and network admins. My role was a hybrid project management and individual contributor role on projects, which included a colocation facility consolidation, graphing and monitoring re-architecture, and development of database snapshot tools. Other work included definition of a MySQL database architecture using RedHat Linux ES 3.0, MySQL 4.0.18, Veritas Foundation Suite HA (Cluster Server and File System), and NetBackup providing infrastructure to support over 12M unique user accounts. I also evaluated and defined systems architecture for a hardware replacement project, which involved platform selection, business justification, and vendor management.

At NASA I managed the ODIN Desktop Engineering Department consisting of four engineers, with responsibility for staff evaluation, mentoring, defining ISO 9000 compliant policies and procedures for a mixed Intel and Mac environment (backup services, asset management, software deployment, security). Other work included development of a multi – tier LDAP directory architecture providing central account management and user authentication and leading a Mac OS X deployment.

At AvantGo I defined the architecture of systems and processes and oversaw operational support of a 24/7 production environment with ~4M users, which included oversight for administration and maintenance of MySQL databases (segmentation, performance tuning, data warehousing).Other work included creating system tools to streamline content updates/code pushes, writing custom Perl scripts to automate log harvesting/analysis, and managing an environment of ~50 FreeBSD servers running Apache with modPerl, modSSL, MASON, and in-house modules.

In this role I managed integration of data transfers between Windows, Mac, and Linux desktops and archival servers. This work included development of web-based and command line tools to provide a consistent desktop UI for data storage, developing migration plans for movement of legacy data (30M+ files/15 TB), and devising methods for benchmarking of IBM 3494-tape library consisting of 8 3590/e-tape drives, and 720 slots for replacement of existing STK tape libraries.

At JP Morgan I managed team of six desktop systems engineers providing third-tier support to support personnel in multiple locations and defining Mac desktop standards for hardware, asset management tools, peripherals, desktop productivity applications, vendor support contracts, and software license agreements.